Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Wings, Winter 1948/49

In the late Forties, WINGS got away from the usual aerial dogfights that most aviation/air war pulps used and started putting good-looking women on their covers, probably in a shameless attempt to boost sales. I have a hunch it would have worked on me, because I like this cover quite a bit. I have no idea who painted it. The authors inside are pretty darned good, too, starting with iconic aviation pulpster Arch Whitehouse, who in this issue brings back his characters the Casket Crew, the stars of a series going back to 1931. A volume of early Casket Crew stories has been published by Age of Aces Books, and of course I have a copy, but equally inevitably, I haven't read it yet. Also on hand in this issue are Walt Sheldon, a prolific pulp writer and a well-respected paperbacker, J.L. Bouma, best remembered for his Westerns, Alfred Coppel Jr., known for his science fiction and mainstream novels, and an assortment of names unfamiliar to me: Cornelius Morgan, Scott Sumner, Frank Harvey, and Joe James. Whitehouse, Sheldon, Coppell, and Bouma would make this issue worthwhile for me.

UPDATE: Eagle-eyed commenter b.t. not only identified this cover as probably being by Norman Saunders, he even provided the information that Saunders based it on an earlier cover from WINGS COMICS #93 by Bob Lubbers, which you can see below. Many thanks!

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, July 1937

Man, Frederick Blakeslee could really pack a lot into an air-war pulp cover! Nine planes (assuming I didn't miss any), plus a bunch of ack-ack bursts in the air and bombs going off on the ground. I think this scene does a great job of conveying the controlled chaos of aerial combat in World War I. Inside, this issue features three authors I associate more with Westerns: Orlando Rigoni, Claude Rister, and William O'Sullivan. Also on hand are aviation pulp stalwarts Robert Sidney Bowen and Darrell Jordan, house-names William Hartley and Larry Jones, and Fred Flabb, which I suspect is this little-published author's real name, because it doesn't sound like what you'd come up with as a pseudonym.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: 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.

(This post originally appeared on a somewhat different form on December 24, 2007. When I reread DOOMED DEMONS back then, I discovered there are several more books featuring Jimmy Deal and Pooch Malloy. I found and ordered copies of all of them. I also ordered all of Adams' Andy Lane books. And in the nearly two decades since then, I have not read a blasted one of them. What is wrong with me?)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Raiders, April 1940

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.

Review: Sneeze That Off (Flying Aces, November 1930)/The Hardware Ace (Flying Aces, February 1931) - Joe Archibald

Regular readers of this blog know that with a few exceptions, I’m not a big fan of comedy in pulp stories. For that reason, I’ve avoided Joe Archibald’s work for the most part, since he specialized in comedy stories in several different genres, although he did some serious yarns as well. One of his most popular series appeared in the air war pulp FLYING ACES and starred Lt. Phineas “Carbuncle” Pinkham, an American pilot from Boonetown, Iowa, who’s assigned to the Ninth Pursuit Squadron in France during World War I. Between 1930 and 1943, Archibald wrote more 150 stories chronicling Pinkham’s adventures. Since I’d read a few other stories by Archibald recently and enjoyed them more than I expected to, I decided to give this series a try by reading the first two stories, “Sneeze That Off” (from the November 1930 issue of FLYING ACES) and “The Hardware Ace” (February 1931).

In “Sneeze That Off”, Pinkham arrives for the first time at the aerodrome where the Ninth Pursuit Squadron is based. He makes a lot of enemies almost right away, including the commanding officer, Major Rufus Garrity (“the old man”), and fellow pilots Howell, Wilson, and Bump Gillis. You see, Pinkham is a prankster, a practical joker, a would-be funnyman addicted to exploding cigars, rubber snakes, dribble glasses, and sneezing powder. His antics rub everybody the wrong way, especially since the squadron has been plagued lately by the German ace von Kohl. Despite his annoying habits, however, Pinkham is a talented flyer and a deadly fighter, even when he’s armed only with some of his tricky gimmicks.

By the time of the second story in the series, “The Hardware Ace”, Pinkham is maybe a little more accepted by his fellow pilots, although they still get annoyed with him most of the time. But most of the squadron’s ire in this yarn is directed toward the stuck-up pilots and officers of a French squadron also operating in the area. Pinkham’s antics just make the situation worse when the two units need to be teaming up to take on a new aerial threat from the Germans. But of course, it’s Pinkham who comes up with a unique way to resolve the situation and defeat the enemy.

These stories are slightly more serious and less silly than I expected them to be, probably because it’s hard to get too wacky when men are fighting and dying all the time. Archibald writes well, too, and manages to make Pinkham a sympathetic character despite his abrasive nature. I surprised myself again by liking these stories considerably more than I expected to, and I can see how Pinkham’s adventures could be kind of addictive. These two, and many more, are available to download as PDF files from the Age of Aces website. I’m sure I’ll never read the whole series, but I definitely plan to continue making the acquaintance of Phineas Pinkham.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Devils, March 1938

SKY DEVILS was a short-lived (7 issues) air war pulp from the Red Circle group. This is the first issue, and it has a nice cover by J.W. Scott. Inside are some of the usual suspects--Robert Sidney Bowen, John Scott Douglas, and Anatole Feldman writing as Anthony Field--plus some names that may well be pseudonyms and/or house-names: Terry Dell, John Loring, John Carlisle, and "Ace" Denver (the by-line has the quotes in it). It wouldn't surprise me at all if all of those were either Bowen or Feldman.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, July 1937

I said a while back that I ought to read some issues of the air war pulp SKY FIGHTERS. Well, I don’t actually own any. But I do own the Adventure House reprint of the July 1937 issue, so I read it. The cover is by Eugene Frandzen, who painted a bunch of them for SKY FIGHTERS.

This issue leads off with the novella “North Sea Nightmare” by George Bruce. I read another novella by Bruce last year and really enjoyed it. This one is set during World War I and centers around two young Navy pilots known as Goldilocks (because he’s small and blond) and the Bear (because he’s big and burly). Goldilocks is the pilot and the Bear is the observer/gunner in a flying boat that does reconnaissance patrols over the North Sea, looking for German ships and submarines. They come up with a daring plan for a raid on the bay where most of the German navy is based. That raid provokes an even more epic battle that may change the course of the war. I like the way Bruce writes, and there’s plenty of good action in this one. Goldilocks and the Bear are good characters, too. But I never found the plot as compelling as in the other story by Bruce that I read, and I didn’t like the ending. So while I still consider this a good story, I found it somewhat disappointing. I definitely want to read more by George Bruce, though.

Over the years, I’ve read quite a few of the pulp novels featuring the Lone Eagle, an American pilot/intelligence agent named John Masters whose adventures appeared in the pulp THE LONE EAGLE (later renamed THE AMERICAN EAGLE and AMERICAN EAGLES). The stories appeared under the house-name Lt. Scott Morgan but were written by several different authors, most notably F.E. Rechnitzer, who created the series. I always enjoyed the Lone Eagle stories because Masters was just as much of a spy as he was a pilot, and most of the novels had him operating extensively behind enemy lines as well as engaging in aerial dogfights. He often crossed paths with the mysterious and dangerous R-47, a seductive female German agent who became a recurring villainess. The first two novels in the series are reprinted in a very nice double volume from Black Dog Books called WINGS OF WAR, which is still available on Amazon in e-book and trade paperback editions.

I said all that to say this: this issue of SKY FIGHTERS features a Lone Eagle novelette, also called “Wings of War”, and it’s the only time a story about the character appeared anywhere other than in his own pulp. I don’t know what brought that about. It’s possible one of the Lone Eagle authors turned in a manuscript that was too short and the editors at the Thrilling Group just decided to run it in SKY FIGHTERS rather than asking the author to expand it. Or maybe the story was written to order at novelette length in order to publicize the Lone Eagle’s own pulp—although that seems an odd thing to do several years into a magazine’s run. (THE LONE EAGLE debuted in 1933.) Regardless of its origins, “Wings of War” is a good story, with Masters going undercover as a German soldier returned in a prisoner exchange so that he try to find out why the Germans seemingly have abandoned a vital area along the front. Masters suspects the wily Huns are just setting a trap for the Allies. He’s right, of course, but he discovers what’s really going on only after another encounter with R-47, and as usual, their meeting almost proves fatal for Masters. There’s plenty of action, a plausible if far-fetched scheme by the Germans, and a smashing climax. I enjoyed this story, and it reminded me that it’s been too long since I read one of the full-length Lone Eagle novels.

“Luck of the Damned” is John Scott Douglas, a versatile and prolific pulpster who wrote scores of aviation, adventure, Western, and sports stories in a career that lasted from the mid-Twenties to the early Fifties. It’s about a young pilot who’s convinced he’s jinxed, especially on his birthday. So when his commanding officer orders him to fly a dangerous mission on that particular day, he has to battle not only the enemy but also his own superstition. This is an entertaining story that I thought wasn’t quite as strong as it might have been with a different twist, but it’s still worth reading.

Robert Sidney Bowen is one of the big names in aviation and air war pulp. He wrote a lot of other things, too, including boy’s adventure novels and mystery and detective yarns. I’ve been reading his work for close to 60 years now and always enjoy it. Just a very solid, dependably entertaining writer. His story in this issue, “Fledgling’s Finish”, is no exception. A young pilot volunteers for a suicidal bombing run on a castle that’s the center of the German communications network. When his commander refuses to let him, he takes it on himself to make the effort anyway. Most of the story is written from the point of view of the commanding officer, which proves to be an effective and suspenseful tactic. I really enjoyed this story.

Joe Archibald’s specialty was humorous stories. He didn’t just write them for the air war pulps (although he did a bunch of them), he turned out humorous yarns for the Western, detective, and sports pulps, too. I’m not a big fan of his work, but sometimes I find his stories mildly amusing. That’s a pretty good description of “A Flyer in Cauliflowers”. This is part of a series featuring two American pilots named Ambrose Hooley and Muley Spink (the narrator). The plot concerns a prizefight between an American flier and a British pilot to determine who deserves credit for shooting down a couple of German planes. There’s also a captured German ace who escapes and has to be hunted down. As I said above, it’s mildly amusing and moves along fairly well, so it’s a readable story. Not much more than that, mind you, but I did finish it, which is more than I can say for some of Archibald’s yarns.

Hal White wrote dozens of Western, detective, and aviation stories for the pulps between the mid-Twenties and the early Fifties, but that’s all I know about him. His story “Fly High and Die” wraps up this issue. It’s about a squadron of fighter pilots who believe they’ve been cursed by a dead German ace. Anytime they fly higher than 8000 feet, something terrible happens to them. Of course, there’s more to it than that. The actual solution to the mystery struck me as a little bland, but overall the story is okay.

And okay is a good description of this issue as a whole. The Lone Eagle story is excellent, the Robert Sidney Bowen story is very good, and even though I found the George Bruce story a little disappointing, it’s still a good story and makes me want to read more by him. The other stories are mildly entertaining but forgettable. I probably won’t go hunting for more issues of SKY FIGHTERS, but if I come across any, I won’t hesitate to grab them, either.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Sky Fighters, January 1940

I don't have any issues of SKY FIGHTERS. Maybe I should try to get my hands on some. They have good covers, well-respected authors, and hey, it's a Thrilling Publication, right? Says so right on the cover. I generally like all the other Thrilling Group pulps I've read. I don't know who did the cover on this issue, but I like it. Inside are stories by top aviation/air war pulpsters Robert Sidney Bowen, Arch Whitehouse, and Harold F. Cruickshank, plus Captain J. Winchcombe-Taylor, David Brandt, and house-name Lt. Scott Morgan. I have plenty of other things to read, of course, but one of these days . . .

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Battle Birds, February 1940

I don’t own this pulp, but I do own an e-book reprint of it which I read recently because it contains one of David Goodis’s early aviation yarns, and after reading Cullen Gallagher’s excellent books about Goodis’s pulp fiction, I wanted to sample one of them. I figured I might as well go ahead and read the other stories while I was at it.

This is actually the first issue of BATTLE BIRDS’ third incarnation as a pulp. It started out as a regular aviation/air war pulp under the name BATTLE BIRDS in December 1932 and continued for 19 issues through the June 1934 issue. Then with the July 1934 issue, it became a character pulp with science fiction elements as DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, with the title character leading an air war against a future invader of the United States. I read one of those many, many years ago and probably ought to check out that series again. That lasted for 12 issues until July/August 1935. The title was dormant for a few years until BATTLE BIRDS made a comeback with this issue from February 1940.

Robert Sidney Bowen, who wrote all those earlier Dusty Ayres novels as well as scores of other aviation and air war yarns, leads off this issue with the novella “The Last Flight of the Damned”. Bowen was a solid pro who knew how to keep a story perking along with action and drama, but the plot of this one, involving a German mad scientist who comes up with a super-scientific weapon (powered by handwavium, no doubt) with which to destroy Allied planes during World War I, had been done an awful lot, even by 1940. Despite it being well-written, I had a little trouble working up much excitement about this one—which is absolutely unfair of me because I’ll read Western pulp stories with plots that had been used even more and still love them. I know that the stalwart cowboy falling in love with the rancher’s beautiful daughter and saving the ranch is even more of a stereotype than the German mad scientist and his super weapon. But I guess as readers we like what we like, and “The Last Flight of the Damned”, while mildly entertaining, is nothing special.

David Goodis is up next with “Bullets For the Brave”, published under his own name instead of one of the numerous house-names under which he also worked, and it’s about as different as you can get from Bowen’s tale and have both of them still be World War I aviation yarns. There are no super-weapons in this one, just raw human emotion and suffering as an American pilot loses his nerve after surviving being shot down and gets a reputation among his squadron for being yellow. His efforts to live with that and finally redeem himself are pretty powerful stuff, and Goodis’s prose is unrelentingly bleak. This is a really good story and just makes me want to read more of Goodis’s pulp fiction.

I don’t know anything about Moran Tudury except that he wrote hundreds of stories for various aviation, sports, Western, and romance pulps beginning in the mid-Twenties and then finally cracked the slicks in the mid-Forties. His short story in this issue, “The Ghost Rides West”, is about a German ace who is shot down again and again, only to rise from the grave and continue fighting. An American pilot who flies for the Lafayette Escadrille eventually figures out the secret behind this seemingly unkillable ace. It’s a decent story. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by Tudury, but based on this yarn, I would again.

Despite his name, Orlando Rigoni was a Westerner born and raised, born in Utah and spending most of his life in northern California. He was a railroader, a miner, and worked for the Forest Service in addition to being a very prolific pulpster who wrote hundreds of stories, mostly for the Western pulps, but he started out in the aviation pulps and contributed quite a few stories to them. He also wrote dozens of Western novels and is best remembered for those today. I knew his name as a Western writer long before I found out he wrote aviation stories, too. His story in this issue, “Eagles Fly Alone”, is an excellent yarn about the Horde of Hellions, a group of pilots who are mavericks and have trouble adjusting to a more disciplined style of flying and fighting when a new commander comes in. This is the first thing by Rigoni that I recall reading, although I have several of his Western novels on my shelves. I really ought to get around to reading them one of these days.

Harold F. Cruickshank is another author I knew as a Western writer long before I realized he got his start in the war and aviation pulps in the late Twenties. I haven’t really liked the Western stories I’ve read by him. I don’t know what it is, but something about them just rubs me the wrong way. He did a long series in RANGE RIDERS WESTERN about a group of settlers in Sun Bear Valley, a series that’s sometimes referred to as the Pioneer Folk series. I got to the point that I just skipped those because I knew I wouldn’t enjoy them. “The Valley of the Green Death” in this issue is the first air war yarn I’ve read by him, and I wanted to give it a fair chance. One problem that crops up right away and isn’t Cruickshank's fault is that the group of pilots in this story is also called the Hellions. This is something the editor should have addressed by asking either Cruickshank or Rigoni to change the name of their group or at least not running the stories back-to-back in the same issue. But again, this isn’t Cruickshank's fault, so I pressed on. Sure enough, the villain of this story is a mad German scientist who’s invented a superscientific weapon to kill American pilots. But wait! This time the mad German scientist isn’t a wizened little gnome or a disfigured giant. No, he’s actually a pilot himself and an ace, to boot. This is a very nice twist, and I’ll give Cruickshank credit for it. The story itself isn’t bad. I thought the writing was a little clunky in places, but it moves right along and wound up being enjoyable. I’d read more of Cruickshank's aviation stories, which is good because I have some of them.

“Passport to the Grave” is the only story by Rupert B. Chandler listed in the Fictionmags Index. That always makes me suspicious that the name is a pseudonym. This story has an interesting idea—a group of fliers known as Squadron Ex that’s made up of pilots from different countries—but the writing is clumsy enough that I had to reread several passages just to figure out what was going on. One of the squadron’s members is shot down and believed to be dead, and another pilot goes on a one-man mission to avenge him and uncover a traitor in the group. There are definitely things to like in this one if the writing was better. Maybe Rupert B. Chandler was a real guy and that’s the best he could do. Kind of a shame if he didn’t get a chance to develop, for whatever reason.

The final story in the issue is “The All-American Ace” by Metteau Miles, evidently the author’s real name, who published a dozen and a half stories in a brief career between 1937 and 1941. It’s a pretty good yarn about a former All-American college football player who’s now a pilot flying alongside a former teammate. When the teammate gets shot down, the protagonist sets out to avenge him (a lot of that going around). This is a pretty well-written tale with good characters. I enjoyed it.

Overall, I enjoyed the whole issue, but the more aviation stories I read, the more I realize I need to space them out. As I said above, I’m really being unfair to the genre since I’m a lot more tolerant of stereotypical plots in Westerns—and in detective and science fiction pulps, too, to be honest—than I am of these. Still, I’ve become more of an aviation pulp fan than I’ve been in the past and look forward to reading more of them.

Looking For Lost Streets/High Fliers, Middleweights, and Lowlifes - Cullen Gallagher

I haven’t read a great deal by David Goodis, but everything I’ve read has been very good. He’s one of those authors I need to read more. I’ve never read any of the scores of stories Goodis wrote for the aviation and air war pulps, mostly under his own name but a good number of them under house-names, as well. However, Cullen Gallagher has read those aviation yarns, as well as the sports, mystery, and Western stories Goodis sold to the pulps. In fact, there’s a good chance Gallagher has read more of Goodis’s short fiction than anyone else, since there are less than a handful of stories he hasn’t read.

Gallagher puts the knowledge gained from all this reading to superb use in two recent non-fiction books about Goodis’s pulp fiction. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC INVESTIGATION OF DAVID GOODIS’S PULP FICTION lays the groundwork, and then HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES: DAVID GOODIS IN THE PULPS delivers in spectacular fashion as Gallagher provides summaries and critical commentary on nearly 200 stories, as well as developing a well-researched case that the themes and characterizations that made Goodis’s later hardboiled crime and noir novels modern-day classics actually grew out of his work for the aviation pulps, not his early efforts in the detective pulps.

Along the way, Gallagher adds considerable insight to the use of house-names in the pulps, and LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS contains an invaluable section that identifies not just the stories Goodis wrote for Popular Publications that were published under house-names but also identifies the actual authors of dozens of other house-name stories. I’ve never seen this information before, and it’s great to know which well-known Western pulpsters actually wrote stories under the names Lance Kermit, David Crewe, Ray P. Shotwell, and others. Gallagher dug most of this out of Popular Publications pay records that are part of a collection at the New York Public Library. This is research and scholarship well beyond the call of duty and is a real boon to fans of pulps and popular fiction.

If you’re a David Goodis fan, you really need to read these books. If you’re interested in pulp fiction in general, I give them my highest recommendation. LOOKING FOR LOST STREETS is available in e-book and paperback editions. HIGH FLIERS, MIDDLEWEIGHTS, AND LOWLIFES is available in e-book, paperback, and hardcover editions. They’re two of the best books I’ve read this year.

Now, we need to get more of Goodis’s aviation yarns back in print . . .

Review: Killer Tarmac - T.W. Ford (Sky Birds, September 1934)

I read a Western pulp story by T.W. Ford a while back and enjoyed it, as I nearly always do with his Westerns, but being in the mood for something different, I decided to try one of his air war stories. I’d never read anything but Westerns and the occasional detective yarn by Ford.

In “Killer Tarmac”, originally published in the September 1934 issue of SKY BIRDS, stalwart young replacement pilot Art Crain arrives at an aerodrome in France with two things in mind: fighting the Boche, and getting revenge on the two men he blames for the death of his best friend, who was shot down battling the deadly German ace von Kunnel, also known as the Black Tiger. In addition to wanting vengeance on von Kunnel, Art also blames the squadron commander, Major “Bloody” Doll, who accused Art’s friend of cowardice and shamed him into facing von Kunnel alone.

However, once Art finds out more about what happened to his friend, he discovers that not everything is as it seems. While mixing in some top-notch dogfight action, Ford creates some memorable characters who don’t turn out at all like I expected. He does a masterful job of yanking the reader’s sympathies back and forth with each new plot twist. Art Crain is our protagonist, no mistake about that, but as for everyone else in this novella, we’re not sure who to root for, and as Ford leads up to a very suspenseful climax, I had no idea what was going to happen.

“Killer Tarmac” is a fabulous story, just a tad melodramatic and over-the-top now and then but in a good way, and told in terse, hardboiled prose that races along like a Nieuport in the middle of a dogfight. A PDF of it can be downloaded from the Age of Aces website. If you’ve never read an aviation/air war pulp story before, this would be a great place to start.

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.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: The Lone Eagle, April 1934

Years ago I read quite a few of the lead novels from this World War I air war pulp published by the Thrilling Group when a friend of mine reprinted them in chapbooks. I always enjoyed them quite a bit. It's a good series authored by various writers under the house-name Lieutenant Scott Morgan. The protagonist is pilot/spy John Masters who battles the Germans both in the air and behind the lines. The cover on this issue is by Eugene M. Frandzen, and it's a good one. In addition to the Lone Eagle story, there are back-up yarns by the ubiquitous Arthur J. Burks and an author I'm not familiar with, Seymour G. Pond. A few of the novels are still available in reprint editions, and they're worth seeking out if you're a fan of air war fiction.

Spicy Zeppelin Stories - Will Murray

SPICY ZEPPELIN STORIES is a pulp reprint of a pulp that never existed. As author Will Murray explains in his introduction, the concept began as a joke in the early days of Odyssey Publications, one of the first of the pulp reprinters back in the Eighties. Under a variety of pseudonyms, some of them anagrams of his real name, Murray set out to write stories in various pulp genres, basing his style in them on actual pulp authors, but adding in the spicy elements common to the genre (most often, beautiful young women losing some or all of their clothes by accident). The stories remained in his files for years but were finally gathered together and published by Tattered Pages Press. Now, in a real full circle move, Odyssey Publications has just brought out a new edition, using the never-before-seen original cover by Mike Symes and art from the Tattered Pages Press edition by Bobb Cotter.

That background is fun for pulp fans, but here’s where it gets really interesting: this book may have had its origins in a joke, but that doesn’t mean Murray failed to take writing the stories seriously. It may have been early in his career when he produced these yarns, but his storytelling ability was already there, along with a keen grasp of pulp history and what makes such stories work.

The collection leads off with “Gondola Girl”, a novella featuring tycoon King “Steel” Chane, whose efforts to establish an airship line are being sabotaged. The battle between Chane and his rival leads to a South Seas island where an important secret is waiting to be discovered. Murray’s inspiration in this story is Lester Dent, and as he continued to do for decades afterward, he does a great job of capturing the breakneck pace of Dent’s work.

“Gasbag Buckaroo” (great title) finds a stalwart young cowboy trying to solve the mystery of who’s rustling cattle from the ranch belong to the young woman he loves. “Hydrogen Horror” is a World War I spy yarn with a lot of flying action. In “Zeps of the Void”, two-fisted adventurer Solar Smith fights space pirates. G-Man Jeff Holt tries to discover who murdered all the passengers on a train speeding through the Kentucky hills in “Rail Lair”. No pulp collection would be complete without a Weird Menace story, and “Catwalk Creeper” fills the bill in this volume with a tale of passengers on a trans-Atlantic zeppelin flight turned to stone by a mysterious killer. The book wraps up with “Chane”, another appearance by King “Steel” Chane, the hero of “Gondola Girl”. This enigmatic tale brings up more questions than it answers.

While Murray’s writing may not be as polished in these stories than it is later on, the sense of fun and enthusiasm in them is highly infectious. I had a great time reading them. His command of the various genres is top-notch and all the stories race along, taking the reader with them on a thrilling ride. I really enjoyed SPICY ZEPPELIN STORIES. It’s available in paperback and hardcover editions, and I give it a high recommendation for all pulp fans.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Air Trails, July 1931

Frank Tinsley provides a dramatic cover on this issue of AIR TRAILS, Street & Smith's entry into the aviation pulp market. There are some top-notch writers in this issue, too: Raoul Whitfield, George Bruce, Arthur J. Burks, Robert J. Hogan, and the lesser-known Kirkland Stone, Warren Elliot Carleton, Kent Sagendorph, and Barry Thompson. I've read only sparingly in the aviation and air war pulps, but I've enjoyed what I've read.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: War Birds, April 1933

I was in the mood for an aviation pulp cover this morning, and I picked this one by George Rozen from WAR BIRDS because I don't recall seeing many observation balloons on pulp covers. Also there are some good writers in this issue, including William E. Barrett, Robert J. Hogan, Robert H. Leitfred, and one better remembered for his excellent Westerns, Allan R. Bosworth.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Fighting Aces, January 1943

I believe those are Dauntless dive bombers featured on the cover of this issue of FIGHTING ACES, but I could be wrong about that. I wrote about a Dauntless pilot in one of my World War II novels and had a great time researching it, but that was more than a decade ago. What I'm sure of is that the author of the lead story in this issue is David Goodis, remembered as the author of a number of bleak crime novels, but before that he was a prolific contributor to the air war pulps. Also in this issue are Western author Orlando Rigoni, house-name Ray P. Shotwell, and several other authors whose names aren't familiar to me. I don't know who did this cover, but I like the action on it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: War Birds, January 1932

You just don't run across stories with titles like "Fokker Dust" anymore. Thomson Burtis was a well-known writer of aviation and air-war stories, but I don't believe I've ever read anything by him. Also in this issue of WAR BIRDS are stories by O.B. Myers, another prolific and well-regarded aviation pulpster, Allan R. Bosworth, an excellent Western author who wrote a little bit of everything for the pulps, William E. Barrett, best remembered for the novel THE LILIES OF THE FIELD, and several authors whose names are unfamiliar to me. I've never really read much from the aviation pulps compared to some of the other genres, but I've generally enjoyed what I've read.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Battle Stories, February 1929

A mid-air shootout. I like this cover by Jerome Rozen. There are some good authors in this issue of BATTLE STORIES, too: Raoul Whitfield, Frederick C. Painton, J.R. Johnston, Harold F. Cruickshank, and Arthur Guy Empey, among others.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Dare-Devil Aces, April 1937

Hmm, I don't remember ever reading anything in the history books about an aerial dogfight like this over Manhattan, but that sure looks like the Empire State Building. There's a lot going on in this cover by Frederick Blakeslee, and I like it! Inside are stories by air-war pulp stalwarts Robert J. Hogan, Robert Sidney Bowen, William O'Sullivan, and others, plus a letters column known as the Hot Air Club, conducted by Nosedive Ginsberg (no doubt some assistant editor hiding behind that colorful moniker). I have to be in the right mood for aviation and air-war pulps, but when I am, I really like 'em.