I don’t know about you, but when a story opens with a mortally wounded spy gasping out a warning to our heroes about how they should look out for the dwarf at Hoi Xiang’s, a gambling and opium den in Macao, I know right away that’s my kind of yarn! “The Devil’s Ray” is a novelette by Donald E. Keyhoe that appeared in the December 1931 issue of the iconic aviation pulp FLYING ACES.
Those heroes I mentioned are Dusty Rhoades, a huge Chief Petty Officer who’s
also an ace pilot despite appearing too big to fit in a plane’s cockpit, and
the much smaller, cold-eyed Mike Doyle, an accused killer who joined the
Marines under a fake name because the law was after him in the States. (It
should be noted that Keyhoe makes it clear right away Doyle was accused of
murder unjustly, but he’s still pretty hardboiled and ruthless in a fight.) The
two of them are serving on the aircraft carrier Lexington, which is cruising through the South China Sea on a
secret mission to locate a hidden base where a German scientist is working on a
deadly new weapon. It’s also worth mentioning that this story was published
several years before the Nazis rose to power in Germany, so making the villain
German is a holdover from the Great War.
Mike and Dusty are recruited to work undercover on this mission and parachute
into Macao. Up to this point there’s been a lot of aerial action, dogfights
over the Lexington, the bad guys
employing their deadly ray that turns pilots into mindless husks, etc. Mike and
Dusty penetrate the villains’ sanctum, of course, and much more running,
fighting, shooting, and flying action ensues. In fact, there aren’t many
paragraphs in this story where some sort of breakneck adventure isn’t going on.
Man, it moves!
When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Donald E. Keyhoe’s books about UFOs, but
that’s all I knew about him. Eventually, I discovered that he was a prolific pulp
writer long before he began writing about flying saucers. He turned out
hundreds of stories, mostly aviation and air-war yarns, but he also wrote
detective and non-aviation adventure stories. I haven’t read a lot of his pulp
work yet, but I’m becoming a big fan. I really like the terse, punchy,
action-packed style in which he writes, and since he was a Marine pilot at one
time, his stories have a definite ring of authenticity to them.
“The Devil’s Ray” reads like it ought to be the first of a series, but as far
as I know it’s the only appearance of Mike Doyle and Dusty Rhoades. I had a
great time reading it. It’s just pure pulp fun. You can read it, and many other
great stories, on the Age of Aces website, and Age of Aces has also published
many of Keyhoe’s stories in print collections, too, most of which I own and
will get to eventually.
On a side note, the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Lexington, which plays a major part in this story, was sunk by the Japanese
during the Battle of the Coral Sea during World War II. My friend, the late
Western writer Jack Ballas, was in the Navy and serving on the Lexington at the time. I spent some
wonderful hours talking to Jack and picking his brain about the experience when
I was writing my World War II series, and I owe him a lot for the help he gave
me. The Lexington was replaced with a
second carrier of that name, which sailed honorably for many years before being
docked permanently in Corpus Christi, Texas, where it now serves as a museum.
I’ve visited it several times and toured it from the engine rooms to the
bridge, and walking the flight deck and imagining what it must have been like
in those days was a profoundly moving experience. If you’re ever in the Corpus
Christi area, I highly recommend paying a visit to the Lexington.
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