“Haw-w-w-w-w!” That sound can only mean one thing—it’s time to ring out the old year and ring in the new with that Bachelor of Artifice, Knight of Calamity and an alumnus of Doctor Merlin’s Camelot College for Conjurors—Phineas Pinkham.

For the past week von Speiler’s circus has been right over Allied heads—strafing doughs that we’re trying to get up to the front. The bridge near Framerville had has so many Pfalz crates in the air every day that the engineers haven’t got any further with the job than to look at the blueprints. When the Boonetown marvel is downed near Souilly, a chance meeting with a Yankee dough, two poilus, and a Senegambian give him an idea to how he can get von Speiler out of the way! From the pages of the November 1936 issue of Flying Aces, it’s Phineas Pinkham in “C’est La Ear!”

“The first hundred ears are the hardest!” So quoth Carbuncle when he met Sambo Jambo, razor-welding pride of the Senegambians. But though a pair of galloping dominoes threatened to put poor Sambo on the Five Ear Plan, it was the No Ear Plan that had Herr Hauptmann von Speiler worried.

• Download “C’est La Ear!” (November 1936, Flying Aces)

Editor’s Note: Joe Archibald’s Phineas Pinkham stories are a product of their times, reflecting attitudes toward certain races and cultures commonly held in America in the 1930’s. As such, these tales can sometimes be rife with derogatory or racially insensitive words or stereotypes which would scarcely make it into print today. We have chosen to present the stories as they were written some 80 years ago in the interests of authentically preserving this bit of Pulp history. Age of Aces Books means no disrespect by including this potentially offensive material. Quite the contrary. It is the respect we have for our discerning readers that demands we present Archibald’s fiction unexpurgated.