THIS week we have another story from one of the new flight of authors on the site this year—Andrew A. Caffrey. Caffrey, who was in the American Air Service in France during The Great War and worked for the air mail service upon his return, was a prolific author of aviation and adventure stories for both the pulps and slicks from the 1920’s through 1950. Here Caffrey tells the tale of Lieutenant Harry Pond.

To hear the Fight commander tell it, “Look at the luck Pond’s having. Seven Hun planes in less than two weeks. Two in one day. And before each take-off, Harry’s down on his prayer bones in the cockpit; the while, if a mechanic comes alongside, Harry makes him think that he’s adjusting the toe straps on the rudder bar. Crafty boy, Harry; he’s just making a gang of two with God and licking the world. So I’d advise you fellows to go into partnership too.”

Thing was, Pond was messing with his rudder-bar strap. Lieutenant Pond didn’t really like killing. The killing thing, to him, was merely a part of war. He was at war, so he killed. But he killed strictly according to the book, with the true standards of sportsmanship always in mind. Even if it meant allowing an enemy pilot to return home. From the December 1928 number of Flying Aces, it’s Andrew A. Caffrey’s “The Poisoned Pup Squadron!”

When the enemy shot down Pond’s buddy in an orange-black plume of flame, doing this hellish thing against certain unwritten rules of air warfare, trouble started for fair—and then some!

• Download “The Poisoned Pup Squadron” (December 1928, Flying Aces)

THROUGH the dark night sky, streaking swiftly with their Hisso engines thundering, is the greatest trio of aces on the Western Front—the famous and inseparable “Three Mosquitoes,” the mightiest flying combination that had ever blazed its way through overwhelming odds and laughed to tell of it! Flying in a V formation—at point was Captain Kirby, impetuous young leader of the great trio; on his right was little Lieutenant “Shorty” Carn, the mild-eyed, corpulent little Mosquito and lanky Lieutenant Travis, eldest and wisest of the Mosquitoes on his left!

We’re back with the third and final of three Ralph Oppenheim’s Three Mosquitoes stories we’re featuring this March for Mosquito Month! And this one’s a doozy! In a dogfight to the death, Kirby and the German Ace known as “The Killer” both end up going down—unfortunately, their fight had taken them off course and they have cashed in neutral Holland where both are taken into custody and are sentenced to remain in the country until the war’s end. The two bitter enemies in the air, build a fast friendship on the ground and must rely on one another if they are to escape and get back to their own squadrons! Read this incredible story in Ralph Oppenheim’s “Two Aces—in Dutch” from the December 6th, 1928 issue of War Stories!

Kirby bad sworn to get Von Sterner, “The Killer.” Now they had met in fair combat, and the leader of the “Three Mosquitoes” was plunging to earth in a plane riddled by the Killer’s bullets. But he was not alone. The Killer’s Albatross was falling beside the crippled Spad. Then face to face on the ground, these two men, the Yank and the German, found themselves the victims of one of war’s strange tricks!

• Download “Two Aces—in Dutch” (December 6th, 1928, War Stories)

TODAY we have a story from the pen of a prolific pulp author James Perley Hughes! Hughes was managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle before turning his hand towards fiction and becoming a frequent contributor to various adventure pulps—but he seemed to gravitate toward the air-war spy type stories.

A spy was loose on the base, but Zoom Hale had bigger problems—his childhood buddy and wing-man Charlie Spellman was in a bad way with a sudden attack of nerves. He had been through and seen enough and Zoom thought his pal was ready to end it all. So when Charlie takes his plane out early the next morning, Zoom dashes off to keep him from doing just that and try to bring him down without killing his best friend in the process!

The whirring air yarn of a man who felt he had to chase his own buddy—who had to sit on his soul to shoot down his pal. Then—a zooming finish but unexpected and thrilling!

• Download “Luck in the Blue” (December 1928, Flying Aces)

THIS week we have another Buck Manley story by Lloyd Leonard Howard from the pages of Street & Smith’s short lived Over The Top magazine. Over The Top was a magazine featuring war stories by the likes of Arthur Guy Empey, George Bruce, Raoul Whitfield among others. One of those others being Lloyd Leonard Howard who had stories in about a dozen of the 21 issues. Several of them featured a pilot by the name of Lieutenant Buck Manley and his pal Lieutenant “Stubby” Davis. For some reason or other, enemy craft were scarce since the St. Mihiel drive and although Boche crates were few and far between there were still Boche observation Balloons to down! From the December 1928 issue of Over The Top, it’s Lloyd Leonard Howard’s “Buck Manley, Balloon Buster!”

There are certain things you can’t explain to G.H.Q.—sometimes you just have to show ’em!

• Download “Buck Manley Balloon Buster” (December 1928, Over The Top)

Frank Richardson Pierce is probably best remembered for his prolific career in the Western Pulps. Writing under his own name as well as two pen names—Erle Stanly Pierce and Seth Ranger—Pierce’s career spanned fifty years and produced over 1,500 short stories, with over a thousand of these appearing in the pages of Argosy and the Saturday Evening Post.

Pierce was born in 1881 in Greenfield, Massachusetts but raised on the west coast. A graduate of the University of Washington, he served for a year and a half in the US Navy as a boatswain’s mate and worked for the city of Seattle as a clerk stenographer. He began writing travel articles about the northwest for various motorcycle trade journals and later progressed to short story writing.

Pierce draws upon his knowledge of the Pacific Northwest from his reported fourteen different motorcycle trips to and through the Alaska territory for his story of rival news-reels services covering the first woman to fly over the North Pole. The story features Rusty Wade, Pierce’s rough and tumble red-headed pilot for hire looking for his big financial break.

A story of daring pilots and news-reel men on the far sky trails of the Northland.

• Download “The Sky Fool” (December 1928, Air Trails)

And as a bonus, here’s an article from Mr. Pierce’s former home town paper, The San Bernardino Daily Sun, about his successful career in the pulps!

Graduate of Redlands School 25 Years Ago Now Writes Scores of Stories Yearly for Magazines

Thousands of Readers Know Frank Richardson Pierce Under Two Names; Spends Week-End Visiting Foothill City Home
By MAURICE S. SULLIVAN
San Bernardino Daily Sun, San Bernardino, CA • 10 May 1932

When Frank Richardson Pierce graduated from Redlands’ old Kingsbury school, about 25 years ago, he didn’t know that some day he should have two names.

Thousands of readers of the so-called pulps—magazines printed on rough paper—know a writer named Seth Ranger, and eagerly follow his stories of the frontier days, the logging country, Alaska and the Orient. Some of them also know a writer named Frank Richardson Pierce, but the latter has his own distinct following, who watch for his stories Just as do the devotees of Seth Ranger.

Frank Richardson Pierce and Seth Ranger are the same writer. He lives now in Seattle, but he spent his boyhood in Redlands. Whenever—in one of his stories—he needs a small city setting, or a town just over the mountains from the desert, his mind goes back to the Redlands of his youth and under another name Redlands goes into the story.

He spent the last week-end here, at the home of his father, Martin F. Pierce, 24 East Fern avenue. He was taking a brief vacation after having completed “Timber War.”

Frank Pierce is one of those talented persons who turn out stories for the pulps In a seemingly endless stream, while at the same time producing an occasional yarn for the slicks—smooth paper magazines. Howard Marsh, a Redlands resident; Fred McIsaac and H. Redford Jones are others who have the faculty.

To those persons who spend months trying to fashion a readable story, revising and rewriting, the skill of Mr. Pierce and his co-workers is amazing. In one year this writer sold 121 stories, at the rate of about 10 each month: short stories, novelettes and serials of novel length.

Conversing with Mr. Pierce one learns that this extraordinary success, as in the case of most writers, has a basis of hard work and study. He had to learn his trade by practice and by examining the technique of those who were publishing their output.

“The first nine or 10 stories I wrote didn’t click,” said Mr. Pierce. “Then I received a lucky break.

“I had been in the naval reserve during the war, so that I know a good deal of naval procedure and the language of the navy. One day I picked up a magazine In which there was a sea story with the navy as a setting.

“As I read it, I said to myself that here was something right down my alley, and if that was the kind of thing the editors of that particular magazine wanted, I could write it. I turned out a story and sent It to New York.

“It happened that as the editor of the magazine was reading my manuscript a naval officer, a friend of his, came into the office. The editor tossed the script to this officer and asked him his opinion.

“Men in certain trades and professions are very critical of stories dealing with their crafts, and the writer who tries to draw on his imagination for facts and atmosphere is likely to bring down on his head a storm of derisive letters. But when the naval officer read this story of mine he was pleased.

“It might not have been a particularly good story, but he was reading it with an eye for flaws in detail. When he found the language of the characters was authentic navy talk, and the method of abandoning ship, which I had described, was accurately detailed, he thought It was a great yarn. He told the editor so. The story sold, and I was able to turn out a series of them along the same lines.”

Seattle is a very advantageous place in which to live, for one who writes. To that city come the ships of the Orient, men from far places in the North, returning to civilization. There is a cattle country and a mountain country nearby. Fisheries, canneries, logging camps and timber locales all are available. The city is the home of persons who have lived through the Klondike days of Alaska.

When the writer is balked by some perilous piece of detail or atmosphere, he knows where he can get assistance, if he had made friends with the old-timers.

Mr. Pierce wrote a story in which a character was found frozen stiff squatting on his haunches in front of a fireplace, with his hands extended as if warming them at a blaze.

This scene brought a flood of letters, starting with one from a man who sarcastically averred that a freezing man would relax and fall over; that it was sheer impossibility that he should be frozen in the squatting position.

A loyal fan of Seth Ranger came to his rescue with an even more sarcastic letter. He enclosed a photograph of a man frozen while standing upright, and suggested to the writer that he “show this to that so-and-so who thinks he knows so much.” A Seattle friend of Mr. Pierce settled the matter for him. Jake the Musher, veteran of many trails, not only vouched for the accuracy of the frozen man detail, but also related similar instances out of his vast fund of experiences in the North.

The stumbling writer who fashions a line, then pauses to improve it, would be amazed to see Mr. Pierce at work. He usually makes but one draft of a story, turning it out at high speed, and shooting it, without revision, at the magazine for which it was “slanted.” There was a time, during an illness, when he talked his stories into a dictating machine, and depended upon a typist to transcribe them. It was difficult and discouraging, but because he had to do it, he kept at it until he could dictate as well as he could write.

Writing for the pulps is Mr. Pierce’s livelihood, but he is not content only to do that. He studies meanwhile, constantly striving for improvement; not trying to write literature, because the boundaries of literature are very vague and nobody living can say certainly what of the present day writing shall be called literature 100 years from now; but so long as folk are entertained by what he writes, striving to give them the best in the field.

• Download “Graduate of Redlands School 25 Years Ago Now Writes Scores of Stories Yearly for Magazines”
  (10 May 1932, San Bernardino Daily Sun)

THIS week we have another of Raoul Whitfield’s ‘Buck’ Kent stories from the pages of Air Trails magazine. Whitfield is primarily known for his hardboiled crime fiction published in the pages of Black Mask, but he was equally adept at lighter fair that might run in the pages of Breezy Stories. ‘Buck’ Kent, along with his pal Lou Parrish, is an adventurous pilot for hire. These stories, although more in the juvenile fiction vein, do feature some elements of his harder prose.

In the December 1928 issue of Air Trails, ‘Buck’ and his pal Lou find themselves in Mississippi down along the Gulf of Mexico low on fuel and looking for a place to land in their two-place plane. Before long they find themselves embroiled in local carnival politics and trying to rescue a girl doing a trapeze act from a hot air balloon that is about to be ripped apart by an approaching tornado!

A balloon broken loose—a Mississippi tornado! Buck Kent and Lou Parrish find perilous action.

• Download “Sky Lines” (December 1928, Air Trails)

MARCH is Mosquito Month! We’re celebrating Ralph Oppenheim and his greatest creation—The Three Mosquitoes! We’ll be featuring three early tales of the Mosquitoes over the next few Fridays as well as looking at Mr. Oppenheim’s pre-pulp writings. So, let’s get things rolling, as the Mosquitoes like to say as they get into action—“Let’s Go!”

The greatest fighting war-birds on the Western Front are once again roaring into action. The three Spads flying in a V formation so precise that they seemed as one. On their trim khaki fuselages, were three identical insignias—each a huge, black-painted picture of a grim-looking mosquito. In the cockpits sat the reckless, inseparable trio known as the “Three Mosquitoes.” Captain Kirby, their impetuous young leader, always flying point. On his right, “Shorty” Carn, the mild-eyed, corpulent little Mosquito, who loved his sleep. And on Kirby’s left, completing the V, the eldest and wisest of the trio—long-faced and taciturn Travis.

Let’s get things rolling with a tale from the pages of the December 24th, 1928 issue of War Birds.
London is being mercilessly bombed night after night by some unseen craft. The Three Mosquitoes are called in to find out what is bombing London and how they have managed to do this without being seen. It’s a puzzling mystery that Kirby manages to unravel when he finds unwittingly finds himself a stowaway on “The Phantom Zeppelin.”

London was being mysteriously bombed by this “Phantom.” Forty miles within the German lines winged the famous Kirby. He was on the trail of the invisible raider.

• Download “The Phantom Zeppelin” (December 24, 1928, War Birds)

And check back next Friday when the inseparable trio will be back with another exciting adventure!

In this early Three Mosquitoes story, Kirby, Shorty, and Travis take on a German staffel who ambush helpless Allied observation flights, but run when confronted by any fighter craft. The Mosquitoes’ C.O. comes up with a wild solution to trap the cowardly Boche.

• Download “Q-Boat of the Air” (December 1928, War Birds)