Doomed Demons -- Eustace L. Adams

There’s a story behind my reading of this one. When I was a kid, the elementary school I attended had no school library. Instead, each teacher had a shelf of books in her room that the students could check out. I was in either third or fourth grade, I don’t remember which, when I found a book called DOOMED DEMONS on the library shelf in my classroom. Now, to my nine- or ten-year-old mind, DOOMED DEMONS was just about the coolest title ever, so of course I had to read it. All I remembered as time passed was that it was about World War I pilots, but that fact and the title stayed with me for more than forty years.

So recently I was poking around ABE and decided to search and see if I’d recalled the title correctly. It took only a moment to discover that I had. Cheap copies of DOOMED DEMONS are plentiful. The author is Eustace L. Adams (which I had totally forgotten) and the publisher is Grosset & Dunlap (likewise). Those two items were enough to tell me that it’s what was referred to in those days as a “boy’s adventure book”, a juvenile novel with lots of action and derring-do and a relatively young hero. Grosset & Dunlap was a well-known publisher of such books, and Eustace L. Adams was the author of the long-running Andy Lane series in that genre, as well as writing numerous adult novelettes and serials for such pulps as ARGOSY.

Well, you know where this is leading. Of course I had to order a copy and read it again, more years than I like to think about after reading it for the first time. I’m happy to report that not only does it hold up well, I probably enjoyed it more now than I did back then. It’s the story of a group of young aviators, most of them college age, in France during World War I. The hero is dashing, redheaded Jimmy Deal, and his main sidekick is the chubby, happy-go-lucky Pooch Malloy. Yeah, they’re cliches and stereotypes, and they probably were even in 1935 when this book was published, but I don’t care. I had a great time reading about their adventures. Jimmy crash-lands behind enemy lines and has to steal a German plane to get back to his aerodrome. He carries out a daring rescue of some downed fliers in the English Channel and conducts a dangerous one-man bombing raid on some German submarine pens. He even winds up owning a French country inn that he converts into an officer’s club, until it winds up being the target of a German bombing run.

Adams spins this episodic yarn in a breezy, fast-paced style for the most part, including some excellent aerial combat scenes. When a lot of authors start describing dogfights, I have a hard time following the action, but not here. The images Adams creates are clear and quite striking. Since this is a boy’s book, there’s no sex or cussin’ but plenty of violence. It is a war novel, after all. Although it’s not dwelt on in detail, characters die right and left, including some sympathetic ones. Then the book’s tone takes a sharp, very effective turn toward bleak realism near the end.

I wouldn’t recommend DOOMED DEMONS to everyone, but if you remember reading books like this as a kid or if you’re a fan of World War I aviation yarns, I think you’d get a real kick out of it. I know I did, and this is one instance where I’m glad I revisited my childhood.