Anyone intrested in WWI fighter-ace pulp fiction?

[von Hammer]

After spending waaay too much time drooling over all the old pulp fiction magazine covers posted on the 'book cover' thread I wondered were I could get a hold of the actual stories themselves...and then I found a publishing group that is dedicated to collecting and publishing WWI fighter-ace fiction by famous pulp authors - what a treat:

Age of Aces Books

These are high quality books and they can all be found on Amazon starting at 16.99 USD

You can also download pdfs of various stories for free, and stories told by real-life aces (such as Albert Ball) themselves. There are also lots of Archie Whitehouse adventure tales as well.

I've bought about five books so far and my personal favorites are The Iron Ace, Satan's Playmates: The Adventures of Molloy and MacNamara and the Squadron of the Dead

And guess what: these stories are great - the aces are fictional so no-one's character gets assassinated (well, maybe MvR's does, via proxy, but we're used to that), no shoe-horned romance plots and in the five books I own the word 'canvas' does not appear once to describe whatever-the-hell is supposed to cover the fuselage of a Spad. Action, adventure, intrigue, loads of dogfights - it's all there and I am very happy....

[It should be noted that all these stories are about Allied fighters and 95% of the German aces are secretly cowards and/or evil scheming bastards with hardly any redeeming value - German and Germanophile forumites be forewarned. Also, hardly any female characters to be found; not that I mind].

PS. And please, someone, tell the Forum Boss to include this publisher in the 'links' section.

[Gregvan]

Hello Von Hammer,
Thanks for that post! Yes, I've visited the "Age of Aces" site quite often, and it's been referenced occasionally on this forum before.

Obviously, I've become a huge fan of the old WWI pulp cover art - especially when it's by such artists as Rudolph Belarski who did their research and tried to portray the aircraft accurately, or accurately according to the standards of the day. I've never acquired any of the "Age of Aces" reprints because I have other priorities and am not that interested in fiction. However, I have acquired a few examples of the actual old WWI pulps, when I can obtain them for less than a king's ransom.

Occasionally, as you noted, some of the pulp magazines contained interviews with WWI veterans or first-hand accounts by the pilots themselves; this material is of great interest to me. The stuff written by Edwin "Ted" Parsons of the Lafayette Escadrille is the best. I have a few examples of the issues of "Sky Fighters" which contain 'Ace' Williams' column "My Most Thrilling Sky Fight", which - supposedly - contain actual first-hand accounts by the pilots. Unfortunately, it seems that "Ace" Williams took it upon himself to paraphrase and add some "pulp" flavor to these accounts, and the ones I've read are very suspect. Just sayin', treat them with caution. A good example of this is the account "by" Albert Ball which you mention, and which is touted on the web page that you linked. It makes thrilling reading, but it sure doesn't sound like Albert Ball. "Slugs sieved my ship" ??? Ball would never have said anything like that, and he wouldn't have used the word "ship" for his aircraft. Only Americans did that.

Having said that, some of the stuff is very good. There's an interview with Udet which has been posted on this site from "Fawcett's Battle Stories" which (though highly paraphrased) yielded some very unique info. The same magazine published an interview with Fonck which is also very enlightening.
So enjoy the pulp stories for what they were, and have fun!

[von Hammer]

Gregvan - That's an interesting note you made about Ball. So an American would call his airplane a 'ship' but not an Englishman? I've read in both fiction and non-fiction accounts of planes being called 'crates,' 'boats,' 'ships' etc. Maybe you give a list of Country-specific slang terms used for airplanes. That would be cool. I'm still miffed about this site's madding image-posting policy, otherwise I'd be sharing more images myself. We really need to wean ourselves off Photobucket. That site has always annoyed me.

[To other readers]. If you are hard up for cash there are a lot of fictional and non-fictional stories (to be taken with a grain of salt) you can download for free. The site has brought me much enjoyment. If you enjoy WWI fiction I'd highly recommend it. The books themselves are not a King's ransom nor are they in danger of being old and crumbling; a lot of professional work went into their creation.