BookCove › Aviation
Flying stories took off in the pulps in the late 1920s. The war had left a generation of trained pilots and surplus airplanes, barnstormers and air circuses toured the country, and Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing in 1927 set off a craze. General fiction magazines like Adventure, Argosy, and The Blue Book Magazine ran air stories alongside their Westerns and sea tales.
This collection gathers eight of them from 1926 to 1930. Five are by Raoul F. Whitfield, who flew for the Army in the First World War before he became one of the original hard-boiled crime writers for Black Mask.
On this page: Air Circuses and Barnstormers · Military Pilots · Long Flights and the Air Mail
Stories are listed in order of publication. Each year is the date of the magazine issue transcribed. Longer works are marked nv novelette; all others are short stories.
Stunt flying, rivalries, and worn-out Jennies
Traveling flying shows, where pilots and parachute jumpers risk their necks for a crowd and a paycheck. Expect feuds between flyers, romance on the side, and airplanes held together by nerve. The last one is pure comedy: two cowboys on the run from a rodeo town catch a ride in a doubtful airplane with even more doubtful fuel.
Grudges settled in the air, from France to the Philippines
Army flyers on the Western Front and with the air patrol in the Philippines, where the heat and the jungle are as dangerous as the flying. Each story turns on a conflict between two men, an old grudge or a bitter rivalry, that only the sky can settle.
Forced down, far from home
Both begin with a pilot coming down where he shouldn’t. One goes into the sea on a transatlantic attempt and is picked up by a yacht with secrets of its own. The other, an air mail pilot, crashes in the Sierra backcountry and learns something about fame on the long walk out.