Hogan, Robert J. (pulp fiction writer)

 

(1897-1963)

Born in Buskirk, New York, the son of a minister, Robert Jasper Hogan grew up with the airplane: the flying machines came into their own as he came into manhood. On a summer trip to a Colorado ranch called the G-8, Hogan took his first flight. It was all he had imagined and more. With America’s entry into World War I, Hogan trained in the fledgling air corps, but never made it into combat overseas. Hogan remained in aviation, however, as a booster and demonstration pilot for some of the early airplane manufacturers. The stock market crash of 1929 sent the burgeoning aircraft industry into a tailspin, and Hogan began looking around for other ways of making a buck. He had read some stories in one of the aviation pulp magazines that had sprung up in the wake of Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the cultural craze for anything that flew. In the time-honored tradition which has inspired so many would-be writers through the years, Hogan reportedly threw down the magazine he was reading and declared, “I can do better than that.”

Not long after that, Hogan sent a story to Wings magazine and received in return a check for $65. Robert J. Hogan was now a writer. He turned out more air war stories and wrote cowboy stories and sports stories as well. Hogan became a favorite of Popular Publications’ head man Henry Steeger. After the publishing firm Street & Smith had such a great success with their single-hero pulp, The Shadow, Steeger wanted to publish some similar hero pulps of his own. The first two of these would be released with an October 1933 cover date. One was about another mysterious avenger, the Spider. The other was more original in concept, combining elements of the air war, horror, and superhero genres. The brainchild of Robert J. Hogan, it was to be called G-8 and His Battle Aces.

The first issue of G-8, with a stunning cover by Frederick Blakeslee, made it quite clear that this was not going to be ordinary air ace pulp. The cover showed a moonlit view of two war planes chasing a giant bat, the hero strapped to one of the rodent’s massive wings. Inside, Bob Hogan’s story, “The Bat Staffel,” began in the dungeon of Freiburg Castle at the height of the bloody world war. About to be executed, superspy G-8 wangles a meeting with the man who would become his most frequent adversary in the issues ahead, the evil Herr Doktor Krueger. The doctor, like all arrogant villains, feels compelled to reveal his top secret plans to G-8 before killing him. The Germans, it seems, are about to unleash the “poison breath” of the great bats of the Jura caves, a breath so deadly that a few canned drops—as Krueger demon-strates—shrink a guinea pig to dust. Now, with this intelligence to relay, G-8 must escape, using the doctor as a shield and heaving the canister of bat breath at the guards.

Aided in his escape by two passing fliers—future Battle Aces Nippy Weston and Bull Martin— G-8 returns to Paris headquarters, where General Pershing gives him a mandate to destroy the doctor’s fiendish plan. In Hogan’s account of World War I, America and her allies were ever on the verge of being destroyed by the enemy’s terrifying experimental weaponry: that giant bat with the deadly bad breath, a skeleton ray, a dragon, a lightning machine, a chemical that turns humans into mummies, zombies, robots, wolf-men, hawk-men, tiger-men, and Martians. Each month in the pages of G-8, the fearless superspy and his devil-may-care flying buddies, Nippy and Bull, fought and defeated whatever the Kaiser could come up with from his bizarre arsenal.

G-8 was a hit with young readers, and Hogan had himself a regular assignment for a full-length G-8 adventure every month. He was paid $700 for each story, and earned as much as $1,000 when the series was at its peak of sales. Hogan wrote pulp fiction for other magazines as well, and briefly he was given another novel-length assignment with a different single-character pulp, The Mysterious Wu Fang, concerning the misdeeds of an Asian villain. For a time Hogan’s pulp output was thought to exceed 2 million words a year, more than any other writer in the business. Hogan made enough from this tremendous amount of prose to afford two houses, one in New Jersey, the other in Florida, where he worked six days a week from nine a.m. to six p.m., sometimes dictating his words to the two secretaries he employed. It was a credit to Hogan’s readable prose and great imagination that G-8 managed to last right through a new, second world war, by which time the background and aircraft in the pulp were hopelessly outdated. The final issue, featuring the story “Wings of the Death Tigers,” was dated June 1944.

With G-8′s demise, Hogan turned to writing western novels and had some success in selling fiction and nonfiction to the high-paying slick magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. Although he had intended the G-8 work as a way to pay the bills until he could write more serious works, Hogan’s “flying spy” turned out to be his great contribution after all. until his death, Hogan would hear from people, especially pilots and air force veterans, eager to tell him how reading the adventures of G-8 as children had inspired the course of their lives.

Works

  • Apache Landing (1965);
  • Challenge of Smoke Wade, The (1952);
  • Hanging Fever (1965);
  • Night Riders’ Moon (1971);
  • Renegade Guns (1953);
  • Roaring Guns at Apache Landing (1952);
  • Stampede Canyon (1958);
  • Wanted: Smoke Wade (1958)

G-8 NOVELS

  • Ace of the White Death (1933);
  • Aces of the Damned (1938);
  • Bat Staffel, The (1933);
  • Black Aces of Doom, The (1938);
  • Black Buzzard Flies to Hell, The (1939);
  • Black Wings of the Rave, The (1939);
  • Blizzard Staffel, The (1934);
  • Blood Bat Staffel, The (1936);
  • Bloody Wings for a Sky Hawk (1940);
  • Bloody Wings of the Vampire, The (1938);
  • Bombs from the Murder Wolves (1943);
  • Cave Man Patrol, The (1935);
  • Claws of the Sky Monster (1935);
  • Condor Rides with Death, The (1938);
  • Curse of the Sky Wolves (1936);
  • Damned Will Fly Again, The (1940);
  • Death Is My Destiny (1941);
  • Death Monsters, The (1935);
  • Death of the Hawks of War (1941);
  • Death Rides the Ceiling (1936);
  • Death Rides the Last Patrol (1939);
  • Death Rides the Midnight Patrol (1940);
  • Devil’s Sky Trap, The (1944);
  • Dragon Patrol, The (1934);
  • Drome of the Damned, The (1937);
  • Dynamite Squadron, The (1934);
  • Falcon Flies with the Damned, The (1939);
  • Fangs of the Serpent (1938);
  • Fangs of the Sky Leopard (1937);
  • Fangs of the Winged Cobra (1941);
  • Flames of Hell, The (1938);
  • Flight from the Grave (1937);
  • Flight of the Death Battalion (1939) Flight of the Dragon (1937);
  • Flight of the Green Assassin (1937);
  • Flight of the Hell Hawks (1937);
  • Flying Coffins of the
  • Damned (1938);
  • Gorilla Staffel, The (1935);
  • Green Scourge of the Sky Raiders, The (1940);
  • Hand of Steel, The (1937);
  • Headless Staffel, The (1935);
  • Here Flies the Hawk of Hell (1940);
  • Horde of the Black Eagle (1941);
  • Horde of the Wingless Death (1941);
  • Hurricane Patrol, The (1934);
  • Invisible Staffel, The (1934);
  • Mad Dog Squadron, The (1934);
  • Midnight Eagle, The (1934);
  • Panther Squadron, The (1934);
  • Patrol of the Cloud Crusher (1936);
  • Patrol of the Dead, The (1936);
  • Patrol of the Iron Hand (1938);
  • Patrol of the Iron Scourge (1939);
  • Patrol of the Mad (1936);
  • Patrol of the Murder Masters (1937);
  • Patrol of the Phantom (1938);
  • Patrol of the Purple Clan (1937);
  • Patrol of the Sky Vulture (1938);
  • Patrol to End the World (1943);
  • Purple Aces (1933);
  • Raiders of the Red Death (1941);
  • Raiders of the Silent Death (1939);
  • Red Fangs of the Sky Emperor (1939);
  • Red Skies for the Squadron of Satan (1940);
  • Red Wings for the Death Patrol (1940);
  • Satan Paints the Sky (1938);
  • Scourge of the Sky Beast (1936);
  • Scourge of the Sky Monster (1943);
  • Scourge of the Steel Mask (1937);
  • Skeleton Patrol, The (1934);
  • Skeletons of the Black Cross (1936);
  • Skies of Yellow Death (1936);
  • Sky Coffins for Satan (1940);
  • Sky Guns for the Murder Master (1940);
  • Sky Serpent Flies Again, The (1939);
  • Spider Staffel, The (1934);
  • Squadron of Corpses (1934);
  • Squadron of the Damned (1940);
  • Squadron of the Flying Dead (1941);
  • Squadron of the Scorpion (1935);
  • Staffel of Beasts, The (1935);
  • Staffel of Floating Heads (1935);
  • Staffel of Invisible Men, The (1935);
  • Sword Staffel, The (1935);
  • Three Fly with Satan (1939);
  • Vampire Staffel, The (1934);
  • Vengeance of the Vikings (1937);
  • Vultures of the Purple Death (1936);
  • Vultures of the White Death (1937);
  • White Wings for the Dead (1940);
  • Winds of the Juggernaut (1935);
  • Winged Beasts of Death (1943);
  • Wings for the Dead (1938);
  • Wings of Invisible Doom (1936);
  • Wings of Satan, The (1936);
  • Wings of the Black Terror (1939);
  • Wings of the Death Monster (1944);
  • Wings of the Death Tigers (1944);
  • Wings of the Doomed (1941);
  • Wings of the Dragon Lord (1940);
  • Wings of the Hawks of Death (1943);
  • Wings of the Iron Claw (1943);
  • Wings of the White Death (1939);
  • X Ray Eye, The (1935)

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