Started my new Hollow Earth Expedition series “Thrilling Action Stories” last week with the new characters involved in tomb robbing and espionage in “the Pearl of the Orient”, Shanghai.  (I found some fantastic resources online, like Tales of Old Shanghai.)

The characters are a Steve mcQueen-esque tomb raiding scoundrel archeologist, a handsome, action oriented brick…with about that much in the brain trust adventurer, an 11 year old street urchin (think a female Short Round), and a half-Chinese Kuomintang-connected member of the Green Gang and nightclub owner.

The first issue of the series brought Dr. Hannibal Drake and Jack McMahon to Shanghai by way of Hong Kong.  Drake has discovered the body of the famed admiral Zheng He — not buried at sea, but instead on the Malabar coast.  He and Jack link up in Hong Kong, where a deal to sell the cadaver and his casket goes badly, so they take it to Shanghai to try and get the nationalist government to buy it.

Meanwhile, Roland Kessik — half-Chinese son of a Jardine, Matheson & Co. lawyer — has found a mole in the KMT structure that was getting his gun shipments intercepted by the Japanese squad of the Shanghai Municipal Police. Through the street urchin Shanghai Sally, Kessik stops Wen Wo — an archivist in the KMT offices in Nanjing — from selling more secrets, and an ancient book and court papers, to Japanese agents.

After Kessik has turned over the Japanese archeologist they nabbed and Wo to Du Yeushang, the Green Gang head and a KMT general, Kessik is back in the nationalist good graces.  But he keeps the book and papers, intrigued by what the Japs wanted.

Enter Drake and McMahon — they have Kessik’s name as a contact to try and move the admiral’s remains to the KMT.  He agrees to broker it, but aks Drake to have a look at the book.  It is an original copy of the Bencao Gangmu — a famed medical treatise from the 1500s.  More importantly, the court papers reveal that the Kangxi Emperor had used the techniques in the BG to punish a court official (or so they currently think) guilty of treason to the “Arabic process in the Bencao Gangmu“.  Drake realizes that this is the holy grail for his gradute advisor back at Columbia, for this can only mean that the Kangxi Emperor made this felon into a mellified man!