AFTER a year-long Covid delay, Age of Aces Books has returned with two new books. We’ll be premiering them at PulpFest 2021 this week.

First up is The Black Falcon by Arthur J. Burks.

Selected by Black Jack Pershing himself for an impossible assignment, Lt. Evan Post was volunteered to drive Germany’s top five aces out of the sky. Orders were sent ahead to see that he was given every cooperation by any allied post of command he would work out of. With the biggest, blackest, ugliest bird painted on his red plane’s fuselage, Post worked the list. And with every German Ace he downed, Evan Post became known as The Black Falcon!

Arthur J. Burks never met a story he couldn’t write. Although he was known to be able to craft a story about anything suggested to him, he was probably best known for his weird menace and detective stories. He wrote six stories with The Black Falcon for Sky Fighters magazine, with a nice continuity running through them. So much so, when he published the sixth story, two years after the initial five, The Black Falcon was a mythic character the young recruits had only heard of.

Stories Include: The Black Falcon (Oct 33), The Balloon Buster (Feb 34), Falcon Fury (Mar 34), The Falcon Flies High (Apr 34), Claws of the Falcon (Jun 34), and Black Falcon’s Return (Jul 36).

Our second book is the ninth and final volume of Donald E. Keyhoe’s Captain Philip Strange Adventures—Strange Rivals.

Captain Philip Strange is back in nine more weird WWI stories! A mental marvel from birth, who used his talents on stage as a boy, Philip Strange is now known as “The Phantom Ace of G-2″ by the Allies during WWI and the verdamnt Brain-Devil by the Boche. In these stories from the end of the series run, The Brain-Devil’s arch nemesis, Karl von Zenden, the quick-change Man of a Thousand Faces resurfaces to wreak havoc and cause more trouble—from aerodromes peopled with corpses to pirate staffels to German Officials dropped over Paris to gases of forgetfulness to all of England disappearing! Von Zenden does his worst! Thankfully, we have have Captain Philip Strange on our side to stop them in some of his strangest cases yet from the pages of Flying Aces magazine!

Stories Include: Dead Man’s Drone (Jun 37), Skeletons From the Sky (Dec 37), Scourge of Oblivion (Apr 38), Pirate Squadron (Jun 38), The Gray Face Ace (Oct 28), Strafe of the Skull (Dec 38), Raid of the Wraith (Mar 39), Flight of the Phantoms (Aug 39), and When England Vanished (Nov 39).

In addition to our two new titles, we’ll have all of our previous titles that are still in print as well as some fun extras include an 11″ x 14″ art print of all 64 splash opens for the Philip Strange stories in order from “A Squadron Shall Perish” to “When England Vanished”. If you’re at the show, stop by, say “Hi” and pick up a copy. (Quantities are limited.)

FREQUENT visitors to this site know that we’ve been featuring Terry Gilkison’s Famous Sky Fighters feature from the pages of Sky Fighters. Gilkison had a number of these features in various pulp magazines—Clues, Thrilling Adventures, Texas Rangers, Thrilling Mystery, Thrilling Western, and Popular Western. Starting in the February 1936 issue of Lone Eagle, Gilkison started the war-air quiz feature Sky Writers. Each month there would be four questions based on the Aces and events of The Great War. If you’ve been following his Famous Sky Fighters, these questions should be a snap!

Here’s the quiz from the December 1937 issue of Lone Eagle.

If you get stumped or just want to check your answers, click here!

CAPTAIN PHILIP STRANGE returns to face off against the Man of 1000 Faces, Karl Von Zenden in the final volume of the series, Strange Rivals!