A recent discussion on the WesternPulps email group about author T.W. Ford prompted speculation about whether he and Eric Rober, another prolific author of air war and sports stories for the pulps, were indeed the same person. According to pulp editor Robert A. Lowndes, they were, and Rober was the real name, although there’s some confusion whether it was Eric Rober or Ford Rober. There’s an Eric Rober buried in Newhall, California, but the Find-a-Grave website doesn’t give birth or death dates and you can’t read them on the photo of his tombstone. According to Lowndes, Ford died in 1952.
With no luck on that research, I decided to at least read some of Eric Rober’s stories and compare them to those of Ford’s. As it happens (which it would if they were the same person), both of them often had stories in the same issue, the first one of which I came across on-line being the April 1940 issue of the air war pulp SKY RAIDERS, which you can find here. The excellent cover is by A. Leslie Ross, an artist I don’t really associate with air war or aviation pulps, but it’s a good one. Ross is one of my favorite cover artists on Western pulps and paperbacks.
This issue leads off with “Slave of the Sky King”, a World War I novelette under the Eric Rober name. The Sky King is a German ace, an aristocrat with crippled legs who glories in soaring through the sky even though he’s hobbled on land. But when his son, also a pilot, is killed in a dogfight, the Sky King goes insane. Fate brings him into contact with a trio of American aces known as the Horsemen, and things take an even stranger turn when one of them becomes the Sky King’s prisoner. This is a terrific yarn full of angst and psychodrama and dogfights. The characters are excellent and the aerial action is vivid and well-written. A little over-the-top, maybe, with its melodramatic plot twists, but I really enjoyed this one.
Normally I read a pulp straight through, but in this case, I skipped right to “Screwball of the Skies”, a short story under the T.W. Ford byline. This is about a Canadian pilot serving with the R.A.F., a farmer in his pre-war life who cares only about playing his fiddle and will dare any danger to protect the instrument. It starts out like it’s going to be a fairly lightweight story but then turns pretty dark halfway through. It’s well-written and entertaining, but there’s not nearly as much to it as there is to “Slave of the Sky King”. But the real question I was trying to solve is whether those two stories are the work of the same writer. I feel pretty strongly that they are. The styles match up almost perfectly, and both stories contain references to planes “sledding” through the sky during dogfights. Maybe that’s a common term in air war pulp stories; I haven’t read nearly enough of them to be anywhere close to an expert. But I don’t recall encountering it before. Even so, that’s hardly definitive proof. I need to read more by Ford and Rober to get a better idea.
Now on to the other stories, since I downloaded this issue anyway. “The Rainbow Ace” is by prolific pulpster William J. O’Sullivan and is also set in the early days of World War II. An American pilot pretends to be British so he can join the R.A.F. and get revenge for his father, who was killed by the Nazis during a vacation in Germany several years earlier. This is a good story, and it’s also a good example of how American pulp writers struggled to find ways to have Yank protagonists in their stories when America’s official entry into the war was still a couple of years away.
I don’t know anything about Metteau Miles except that he published less than two dozen stories in his career, most of them aviation yarns. His story in this issue, “Wings of Clay”, is a World War I tale about a young American pilot, the brother of a downed ace, who wants to avenge his brother’s death. Unfortunately, he suffers from crippling fear every time he goes up in his crate. Miles does a good job with this plot and comes up with a satisfying resolution. This is another enjoyable story.
Jack Straley is another obscure pulp author who published eighteen aviation and detective stories between 1932 and 1940. His story in this issue, “Bullets Fly Faster”, is about the Germans disrupting an espionage scheme to smuggle vital information across the lines. It’s reasonably entertaining, although it’s very easy to figure out what’s really going on.
“Quiet on the Maginot” is the only credit in the Fictionmags Index for Casey Sumfer (as he’s listed on the table of contents)/Sumter (as he’s by-lined on the story itself). Was that a pseudonym or simply a writer who sold only one story? No telling. The story itself isn’t bad. It’s another “Yank in the R.A.F.” yarn set in the early days of World War II. In this case, the Yank is actually a Southerner from Mississippi who writes letters to his pappy back home, the Cunnel, bemoaning the lack of action along the Maginot Line. Which, of course, then erupts in a huge battle. That’s all there is to it, but the writing is decent even if the story doesn’t really amount to much.
The final story in this issue is “Paper-Made Ace”, by David C. Cooke, a forgotten pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, detective, and sports yarns for various pulps. This is another R.A.F. story in which a newspaper reporter hypes up a British flyer in an attempt to encourage enlistment. The pilot doesn’t know what’s going on, though, which leads to complications when he finds out. This is a decent tale helped by the fact that the reporter has a secret Cooke doesn’t reveal until late in the story.
This is the only issue of SKY RAIDERS I’ve ever read and quite possibly the only one I ever will read, but I enjoyed it. The Eric Rober novella is definitely the best story in the issue, but all of them were entertaining. I consider this a good beginning to my efforts to figure out if Rober and T.W. Ford were the same person.
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