Herbert Morton Stoops painted all different sorts of covers for BLUE BOOK, including action-packed scenes like this one. While some are better than others, of course, he was a great cover artist and I've never seen one I didn't like. The fiction in BLUE BOOK was just as consistent as the covers. Of course, it helps when you have three stories by H. Bedford-Jones in an issue. In this case, there's one under his own name, one with his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Also on hand are adventure pulp stalwarts Fulton Grant, Leland Jamieson, Warren Hastings Miller, William J. Makin (with a Red Wolf of Arabia story), William L. Chester (with an installment of a Kioga serial), and lesser-known writers Carl Cole and C.M. Chapin. This is the only story by Carl Cole listed in the Fictionmags Index. Who knows, maybe he was H. Bedford-Jones, too. You can't rule it out.
I don't recall seeing many aviation-themed covers by Herbert Morton Stoops, but this is a good one. I really like the blend of colors on it. Not surprisingly for BLUE BOOK during this era, there are three H. Bedford-Jones stories in this issue--one under his own name, one under his name as well as that of his fictional collaborator Captain L.B. Williams, and one as Gordon Keyne. Other notable writers on hand are Warren Hastings Miller, Leland Jamieson, Kenneth Perkins, William Chester (with a Kioga story), and Robert R. Mill (with a Tiny David story). As a blend of the pulp and slick sensibilities, nothing else came close to BLUE BOOK.
I had to look at this BLUE BOOK cover by the great Herbert Morton Stoops for a while before I figured out what was going on, because at first I thought the guy in the center at the bottom of the picture, in the middle of all these knights in armor, was firing a flintlock rifle. Well, that could make for an interesting story, I figured. But then I realized it's actually a crossbow he's shooting. Still a fine cover. And inside is the usual outstanding line-up of authors, including BLUE BOOK stalwarts H. Bedford-Jones (with a story in his Arms and Men series . . . and hey, it's called "The Conquering Crossbow" . . . well, that explains everything), William J. Makin with a Red Wolf of Arabia story, and Robert R. Mill with the first story in his Shock Troops of Justice series (I have the reprints of both those series published by Black Dog Books but haven't read them yet). Also on hand are the classic Western author Willliam MacLeod Raine, Leland Jamieson, William J. Makin again with his other series featuring gypsy sleuth Isaac Heron, Sidney Herschell Small, and William L. Chester with an installment of a Kioga of the Wilderness serial. That's a really impressive issue.
Yep, that's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg his own self appearing in a pulp magazine. Of course, BLUE BOOK wasn't really a typical pulp magazine, and not only because it reprinted a number of Sandburg's poems. This looks like a fine issue with an Arms and Men story by H. Bedford-Jones, part of a Kioga serial by William L. Chester, a Tiny David story by Robert R. Mill, and other stories by Leland Jamieson, Fulton Grant, Richard Howells Watkins, James Francis Dwyer, and others. It's generally hard to beat the line-up of authors in any issue of BLUE BOOK, and that's certainly true here. Plus a good Foreign Legion cover by Herbert Morton Stoops, who provided top-notch covers month after month.
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.
