Manchu Blood

New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Near Fine in Good dj. 1927. 1st & 2nd Printings Before Publication. Hardcover. [nice tight copy, no significant wear, very minor soiling to fore-edge; jacket chipped and moderately soiled, paper loss at both ends of spine (slightly affecting last two letters in MANCHU at top of spine)]. Short stories set in San Francisco's Chinatown, "centering in the sympathetic figure of a crafty old Chinese butler" named Jim Sin. All but forgotten today, the author was a stalwart of the Saturday Evening Post and other popular fiction magazines, whose specialty (of which this book is a prime example) was ethnic fiction, in which he demonstrated (it sez here) his "extraordinary ability to enter into and report the racial consciousness of an alien group, [while] at the same time spinning an entertaining yarn." His Chinatown stories included those featuring a detective character, "Mr. Wong," which spawned a short-lived (1938-1940) B-movie series, and he also worked his alien-ethnic-insight magic on African-Americans, particularly in the "Wildcat" stories, which also made it onto the movie screens of America -- but just barely -- serving as the basis for an obscure 1929 short comedy and a segment of the 1946 all-black-cast film LAUGH JUBILEE. .