Review: Men's Adventure Quarterly #11: Invasion: UFO - Robert Deis and Bob Cunningham, eds.

When I was a kid, I happened to read Donald E. Keyhoe’s book THE FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL, and that sparked a huge interest in UFOs. I quickly went on to read other books about the subject by authors such as Frank Edwards and George Adamski, and my fifth grade buddies probably got tired of me yammering about flying saucers. But I was always yammering about something or other, so it might not have made any difference.

Keyhoe, Edwards, and Adamski are all to be found in the latest issue of the always excellent MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY, the INVASION: UFO issue. As you might expect, this volume is right up my alley. Keyhoe, who I’ve really come to admire and enjoy as an author of aviation pulp fiction in the past few years, is on hand with the lengthy article “The Flying Saucers Are Real”, from the January 1950 issue of TRUE, which he expanded into the book I read almost 60 years ago and have never forgotten. Edwards, whose book FLYING SAUCERS—SERIOUS BUSINESS was another favorite of mine, is mentioned. There’s an enjoyable article about Adamski, who I took as a serious researcher and author at the time when I read his book INSIDE THE FLYING SAUCERS. Turns out he was a bit of a charlatan and/or nutjob, but hey, I had a good time reading his book back then and a good time reading about him now, so it's a win as far as I’m concerned.

Gary Lovisi contributes a fine article about vintage paperbacks that exploited the flying saucer craze, and when you have photo galleries that spotlight Anne Francis and Mara Corday, you’ve got to love that, or at least I do. The final article in this issue, “Are UFOs Attacking Our Oil Fields?”, from the May 1975 issue of STAG, combines two of my interests, flying saucers and oil fields, and was written by the great Robert F. Dorr, so I’d say it’s tied for my favorite with Keyhoe’s iconic article. Bob Dorr was just such a fine writer it’s always a pleasure to read anything he wrote, and the same is true of Keyhoe.

Now, I have to make a confession: I’ve seen something strange in the sky myself, a number of years ago, and someone else was with me who saw the same thing. We’ve never been able to figure out exactly what it was, but it was sure puzzling. I’m not going to go into any more details, or you’d think that I’m a nutjob. (Well, some of you no doubt think that anyway, but why confirm it?) You can take my word for it, though, that the latest issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY is another beautiful piece of work from editors Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, and I give it my highest recommendation. You can order it on Amazon or directly from the publisher here or here.

Review: The Devil's Ray - Donald E. Keyhoe (Flying Aces, December 1931)

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.

Forgotten Books: The Sky Raider - Donald E. Keyhoe

One thing that most people have forgotten or never knew is that a lot of popular fiction used to be serialized in newspapers. This was true up into the 1940s and maybe beyond that. I don’t recall seeing any serials in newspapers when I was growing up, but it’s certainly possible that such things occurred elsewhere.

THE SKY RAIDER was serialized in The Ottawa Journal and other papers in 1929. It’s the first novel by young pilot Donald E. Keyhoe, who started writing while he was recuperating from injuries suffered in a crackup in 1922. As you might expect, he specialized in aviation stories. THE SKY RAIDER is an adventure yarn about air piracy, with some elements of the traditional mystery thrown in as well. The protagonist, Dick Trent, flies for the Air Mail, a relatively new operation at the time. Dick’s not exactly a daredevil, but he’ll run some risks while he’s flying if he has a good enough reason.

The owner of this particular Air Mail service has a beautiful daughter, a ne’er-do-well son, and a government contract to deliver a quarter of a million dollars for the Federal Reserve. Dick’s best friend takes the run carrying the money. When he doesn’t show up where he’s supposed to, Dick leads the search. He finds the wrecked and burned plane and the body of his friend. The pilot wasn’t killed in the wreck, though. Dick figures out that he actually landed the plane for some reason and then was murdered by someone who met him on the ground. The money, of course, is gone.

The owner of the Air Mail service, the father of the girl Dick loves, is soon arrested for the murder and robbery, convicted, and sent to prison to await execution. Dick believes he’s innocent, and the rest of the novel is concerned with our young hero’s efforts to ferret out the truth and uncover the real killer.

For a first novel, THE SKY RAIDER is decently plotted. You’ll think you have everything figured out more than once, but Keyhoe manages to put some nice twists on the story. It’s not very well-paced, though, lurching along with some stretches that drag. Most of the time the writing is serviceable at best, reminding me of the prose in a lot of those Stratemeyer Syndicate books from that era.

It really perks up, though, when Keyhoe is writing about flying itself. You can tell he really had a passion for it. There’s a nice scene where Dick is comparing flying to riding in a train, and train travel definitely comes off second best. (I have a feeling that if E.S. Dellinger had been writing that scene, it would have been the other way around. It’s interesting that enough people in those days had an affinity for one or the other that both aviation and railroads had millions of words of pulp fiction written about them.)

Keyhoe had a long career writing for the aviation and air-war pulps, mixing in a few detective stories along the way. He also wrote the short-lived Yellow Peril pulp series, DR. YEN SIN. Then he struck gold in the Fifties with his supposedly non-fiction books about UFOs. I gobbled up all those flying saucer books when I was a kid, and I remember reading and enjoying the ones by Keyhoe. I’d never read any of his aviation stories until THE SKY RAIDER, though.

And even though it’s very old-fashioned and has its flaws, I also found it pretty entertaining. The whole novel can be downloaded in PDF format from the Age of Aces website, with the first installment to be found here. Age of Aces also publishes a number of collections of Keyhoe’s aviation pulp stories, as well as collections by other stalwarts of that genre, and I have a feeling I’m going to be buying some of them. All three of Keyhoe’s DR. YEN SIN novels are available from Altus Press and I’ll probably spring for those as well. In the meantime, you can sample THE SKY RAIDER for free, and if you’re looking for a novel that will transport you back into another era, it’s a good one.