It is 1922. In the States, Prohibition is in. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks are America's sweethearts. The women's suffrage movement is full steam ahead and a thing called the "teddy" is shaping up their torsos. Abroad the "Great War" is over. Waikiki has one major hotel and sits on the edge of a salt marsh. Japan is a raising power in the East. China is ruled by warlords, occupied by Western powers and threatened by Japan. Shanghai is a "Treaty City" divided between the French and British with Americans and White Russians trying to get a piece of the action.
Battledore and Shuttlecock is a tongue in cheek adventure novel plotted in this same 1922. The work is written in the tradition of Talbot Mundy and H. Rider Haggard, albeit in modern form and at a quicker pace. The story spans across the Orient from San Francisco and Honolulu, to Yokohama and Shanghai. The protagonists are an American heir to the trading house and a Brit raised in East and son of a commercial attaché. They, while traveling for their trading house, encounter a bank robber, a shipboard con game, a shifty minister who heads a gang of gun runners, a secret society assassination plot, and a tong war.
The work accurately describes the locations, dress and mannerisms of the period. Many of the adventures in the novel are taken from the lore of the traveled area. Within these pages, and with some literary liberties, the eruption of Krakatau is retold; Charlie Chan is conceived; and the lore of 1922 Shanghai is revealed.
Our two heroes are cosmopolitan and, because of their trader backgrounds, enlighten for their time. The novel challenges some stereotypes, although others are appropriate. Too, the slang and attitudes of the period are reproduced in this novel. Please do not be offended - it is the way it was.
This is the first e-book publication of this novel. It was previously published by The Story Teller Press on a CD in HTML format in 1999. That publication included sound effects, music and automation as well as graphical illustrations. Because of device limitations those features have been removed from this edition. The Story Teller Group is the current publisher.
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