Friday, April 01, 2011

Forgotten Books: Attack! - Leland Jamieson

ATTACK! is one of only three novels that I know of by Leland Jamieson. I read a bunch of Jamieson's pulp stories a while back and enjoyed all of them. He specialized in stories about aviation and was published often in BLUE BOOK, one of the classiest of the pulp magazines. It's possible that ATTACK! was originally published in BLUE BOOK. I know it had hardcover editions from two different publishers, Morrow and Grosset & Dunlap. I read the G&D, which was probably the "cheap" reprint edition.


Read now 71 years after it was published in 1940, this would have to be considered an alternate history novel. It centers around a U.S. aircraft carrier in the South Atlantic when war breaks out between the United States and Germany over Germany's attempt to invade and take over Brazil so that the Nazis can use it as a base for an invasion of North America. The pilots on the American carrier Scarab have to stop the German invasion fleet almost singlehandedly.


There's not much characterization other than the one pilot who functions as the book's protagonist, but Jamieson writes very well about air and naval combat. The battle scenes are extremely well-done, and his portrayal of life aboard an aircraft carrier is vivid and convincing. I'm no expert on such things, but I did quite a bit of research on the subject while I was writing my World War II series and have also visited the U.S.S. Lexington several times where it's now docked in Corpus Christi, Texas, and everything about ATTACK! rings true to me. Personally, I would have liked a little more detail about the planes -- were those dive bombers Dauntlesses, and were those fighters Avengers? -- but that's pretty minor. Jamieson probably kept things deliberately generic and vague because he was writing about something that, from his perspective, hadn't happened yet. That's very different from writing historical fiction.  This is a very entertaining yarn.

5 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Weird that the cover illo thought to emphasize biplanes...that's the G&D edition? Wonder if the art was what happened to be at hand, somehow...

Was Jameison's short fiction ever collected? Would you rank it ahead of this novel?...the novel being an early predecessor of the technothriller, when one thinks about it...

James Reasoner said...

The edition I read was coverless, but based on ABE listings, I think that's the G&D edition pictured. Jamieson's short fiction hasn't been collected, as far as I know, but somebody could put together a fine book of his BLUE BOOK stories. The ones I've read were better than ATTACK! A lot of them were crime stories with aviation backgrounds.

Charles Gramlich said...

Hey, I picked up two books today by Dana Fuller Ross. Wagons West California and Wagons west Texas. This is you right?

James Reasoner said...

Charles,
No, in this case those two books are by the original Dana Fuller Ross, Noel Gerson. I wrote six books under that name, The Frontier Trilogy and The Empire Trilogy, both of which are prequels to the original Wagons West series although they were written years later.

Charles Gramlich said...

Ahh, gotcha.