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.

Review: Above the Fog - Erle Stanley Gardner (Flyers, February 1930)

I suspect I’ve been reading Erle Stanley Gardner longer than any other author. It would have been 1963 or ’64 when I checked out my first Gardner novel from the bookmobile. It was one of the Donald Lam/Bertha Cool series published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair, and the bookmobile clerk probably shouldn’t have let a ten-year-old check it out, but he knew I was already reading above my grade level, so to speak. And I’ve continued to read Gardner’s work, at least two or three books a year, sometimes more, ever since. I’ve never read anything by him that I didn’t enjoy, either.

That trend continues with “Above the Fog”, a novelette published in the February 1930 issue of the little-remembered aviation pulp FLYERS. Dave Flint is a pilot who flew in the Great War, but as the story opens on a foggy dawn, he’s working at the Oakland airport with a buddy from the war who laments that they don’t have any action or excitement in their lives anymore.

Then a beautiful woman comes flying out of the fog, accidentally drops her purse before she flies off again when she realizes she’s being pursued, and Dave sets out to track her down, return her bag, and help her with whatever trouble she’s in. This lands him in a day-long whirlwind of fistfights, shootouts, and high-flying dogfights as he attempts not only to locate the girl but also to solve a murder and find a missing millionaire.

Gardner never lets the pace slow down for more than a moment or two as he heaps trouble and danger on Dave Flint’s head. The characterization may not be very deep, but who cares? This novelette moves. And Dave is a likable and fairly smart guy. Gardner’s descriptions of flying and the weather achieve a sort of rough-hewn poetry in places. He was a great storyteller and a better writer than he often got credit for.

I enjoyed “Above the Fog”. It’s available to download as a PDF on the Age of Aces website, along with a lot of other great aviation pulp fiction. If you’re a Gardner fan, you’ll probably want to read this rarity.

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: Hero Stuff - Frederick C. Davis (WINGS, February 1928)

The Age of Aces website recently posted the short story “Hero Stuff” by Frederick C. Davis. Since Davis is one of my favorite pulp authors, I went ahead and read it. This is from the February 1928 issue of the aviation pulp WINGS. According to the Fictionmags Index, it’s the first of 20 stories featuring high-flying, two-fisted newsreel cameraman/pilot Nick Royce. In reading the story, it seemed to me like there might have been another one that came before it, and since this was in the second issue of WINGS, I suspect that Davis may have created Nick Royce specifically for the magazine’s debut issue and continued with him for a while. But lacking a copy of the January 1928 issue, there’s no way for me to confirm that, of course. Pure speculation on my part.

At any rate, “Hero Stuff” is narrated by Art Buckley, the head of the aerial unit for the World News Reel Company, an outfit that flies out of an airfield located on Long Island. As this story opens, the head of the company arrives with an unexpected guest: a matinee idol from Hollywood who’s starring in a new flying picture set during the Great War. The movie is all in the can except for one stunt, and the World News Reel’s pilots are going to help the star and the picture’s director pull it off. It involves the plane being flown by the star going into a tailspin, causing him to have to bail out over No Man’s Land. There’s considerable risk to the parachute stunt, which the star is going to perform himself. But he needs somebody to actually fly the plane, and that’s the job Nick Royce gets.

Unfortunately, Nick’s vixenish girlfriend is also on hand, and the Hollywood star makes a play for her. This leads to considerable friction and even some fisticuffs between the two men whose lives will be entwined once they’re thousands of feet in the air in a canvas-and-wood crate.

“Hero Stuff” is well-written, as you’d expect from Davis, and he keeps things moving along briskly with touches of humor and action and danger. I really enjoyed this yarn. It’s no lost classic, but I found it very entertaining, enough so that I’d love to see somebody do a complete collection of the Nick Royce stories. I’d be happy to read more of them.

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.

Above the Line - Raoul Whitfield

Raoul Whitfield's short story "Above the Line" appeared in the November 1928 issue of AIR TRAILS, only the second issue of that aviation pulp. It features pilot Buck Kent and is probably the second of approximately 20 stories about Buck. There's a Whitfield story in the first issue of AIR TRAILS and I suspect it's the one that introduced the character. In this one, Buck is flying to meet a friend at an isolated cabin on the border between California and Mexico (or possibly Arizona and Mexico; Whitfield is a little vague about that). Instead, he runs into a dangerous mystery involving gangsters and stolen loot.

I read this story on a whim. I was kind of in the mood for an aviation yarn, and I've really enjoyed everything I've read by Whitfield, so I gave it a try and I'm glad I did. There's plenty of violent, well-written action both in the air and on the ground. I had a very good time reading it, and if you're a Whitfield fan, it's worth checking out. You can read it, and a bunch of other pulp aviation stories, on the Age of Aces website, which gets a high recommendation from me.

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.

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.

Forgotten Books: Thrilling Sky Stories - Frederick C. Davis

 

Over the past few years, Frederick C. Davis has become one of my favorite pulp authors. I’ve always liked his work ever since reading those Corinth paperback reprints of some of his Operator 5 pulp novels, back in the Sixties. I hadn’t really realized how many different genres Davis wrote in, though, until recent years.

THRILLING SKY STORIES is a 2005 small press collection of aviation yarns Davis wrote, including two novellas and a short story. I’ve had it for years but just got around to reading it. The volume opens with the novella “The Sky Pirate”, from the April 1929 issue of AIR STORIES. A mysterious, all-black plane is involved with a series of daring robberies. The thieves strike at a ship at sea, a gold mine in the mountains, and a bank in a San Francisco skyscraper. It’s up to a pair of stalwart, two-fisted Border Patrol pilots to track down the mastermind behind these bizarre crimes, but their investigation has barely started when one of them finds himself framed for a crime he didn’t commit, a twist of fate that turns him against the law, too.

The prose in this yarn from fairly early in Davis’s career isn’t as polished as it would be later, and his plotting is a little weak and driven by too many coincidences . . . but man, the action scenes are great. Also, he was a master at coming up with slam-bang endings where the action continues to the very last paragraph, and he provides a fantastic one here that would have called for some great flying and stunt work if Hollywood had ever made a movie out of this tale. I was really flipping the pages in the last chapter, and any time an author can make me do that, I’ll forgive a lot of other weaknesses. “The Sky Pirate” is a mixed bag, but overall I enjoyed it quite a bit.

“Sky Racketeers”, a novella from the May 1930 issue of WINGS, is exactly what it sounds like, a tale of how gangsters work the ol’ protection racket on an airline. Also as you’d expect, a stalwart, two-fisted pilot gets the job of stopping them, with help from his mechanic sidekick. The plot is a little better in this one, but some of the coincidences still stretch credibility too far. Again, however, the slam-bang ending is great.

This volume wraps up with “Patrol of the Dead”, a short story from the Spring 1937 issue of AIR STORIES. It’s a sequel of sorts to “The Sky Pirate”, featuring the same Border Patrol base and one of the same supporting characters from the earlier story. It’s about the conflict between the Border Patrol and an organization of Mexican drug smugglers (an early day drug cartel, in other words) and is better written and plotted than the other two stories in this book. It lacks the huge climax, but there’s still some good action.

I enjoyed THRILLING SKY STORIES. It’s not a book I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read Davis’s work before, since it’s not as good as some of his other work, but anyone who’s already a fan, or who just really likes aviation pulp, will get some good entertainment out of it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Aces, October 1930

There's a nice dynamic cover by Rudolph Belarski on this issue of ACES. I haven't read a great deal from the aviation pulps, and I'm not sure why not. I always enjoy them when I do. This issue has just three stories, all of them novella length, by George Bruce, Joel Townsley Rogers, and Robert H. Leitfred, all well-regarded pulpsters, so I'm sure it was a pretty entertaining issue.

Forgotten Books: Night Flight - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I’ve read a lot of aviation fiction over the years, even though I don’t fly, but most of it has been from the pulps. NIGHT FLIGHT by Antoine de Saint-Exupery is definitely not pulpish, but in a way, it is.

I thought I had read this short novel 50-some-odd years ago when I was in college, but I had no memory of it now. It’s a very simple story, set mostly on one night in Buenos Aires and in the air above the Andes, as three mail planes try to get through on their routes as a storm moves in and the people on the ground back in Buenos Aires try to help the pilots as much as they can.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery was a French aristocrat who gained fame as an aviator during the early days of air travel and the mail service. Later, he attained a high literary reputation for his poetry, memoirs, novels, and the children’s book THE LITTLE PRINCE. During World War II, he flew for the Free French Air Force as a reconnaissance pilot and disappeared while flying on a mission in 1944, presumed lost at sea somewhere in the Mediterranean.

With that background, it’s not surprising that NIGHT FLIGHT is written in a lyrical, highly descriptive style, and I’m sure that accounts for its literary reputation. At the same time, the whole “man against nature” theme is something that would have been quite at home in a pulp like ADVENTURE, and there are bits of fine, terse, hardboiled writing throughout the book. That’s why I say NIGHT FLIGHT can almost be considered pulpish. Its subject matter certainly is.

I enjoyed this book, and I’m thinking now that maybe it was WIND, SAND AND STARS, Saint-Exupery’s other famous aviation book, that I read in college. Maybe I’ll read it and see. In the meantime, while I wouldn’t want a steady diet of literary novels like this, it made a very nice change of pace and I enjoyed it. It’s still in print, and the copy in the scan above is the one I read (complete with Half Price Books sticker showing the two bucks I paid for it), published by Signet in 1956.

And I feel like I should point out that this may well be the only blog on the Internet where you can read reviews of novels by both Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Ed Earl Repp.

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.

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.

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.