Vintage Pulp | Oct 5 2016 |
Above, seven covers from Editions Société d'Éditions Générales' series Le Maître de l'invisible, aka The Master of the Invisible, which was written by Edward Brooker from 1945 to 1947, relaunched in 1953, taken over by Sam Norwood, and finally shelved in 1956. Both Booker and Norwood were pseudonyms, neither conclusively identified at this point, although Booker may have been Austrian born Edward Ostermann. The title character of these books, Pao Tcheou, or Chao Pao, is a creation right out of the psycho-cultural Yellow Peril fever dreams of the era, a Chinese villain who can turn himself invisible, and in order to fulfill his dreams of global domination employs methods as diverse as giant monsters, killer robots, nuclear weapons, and general oriental cunning. He's of course opposed by a group of upstanding Westerners.