s own stories.
Back home with Polly and the baby, Ron continued writing for 'the pulps' at a ferocious rate, turning out endless variations on a hairy-chested theme. His protagonists thrashed through jungle
5. Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle, 1967
thickets pursued by slavering head-hunters, soared across smoke-smudged skies in aerial dog-fights, wrestled giant octopi twenty fathoms beneath storm-tossed seas, duelled with cutlasses on blood-soaked decks strewn with splintered timbers and held dervish hordes at bay by dispensing steel-jacketed death from the barrel of a machine-gun. Women rarely made an appearance except to be rescued from the occasional man-eating lion or grizzly bear. The titles he gave to his stories vividly attested to their genus - 'The Phantom Patrol', 'Destiny's Drum', 'Man-Killers of the Air', 'Hostage to Death' and 'Hell's Legionnaire'.
Interspersed between these gripping sagas, Ron still wrote occasional features for the Sportsman Pilot in his capacity as aerial hell-raiser. 'There are few men in the United States - nay, the world - as well qualified as I to write upon the subject of cross-country flying,' he began a piece in the September 1934 issue. 'It so happens I hold the world's record in dead reckoning. I just have to marvel about it. Probably no other pilot in the world could do it. Probably no other pilot in the world actually has done it so well.'
The braggadocio was a tease, as he soon made clear. On a fifty-mile flight from New London to Mansfield, Ohio, navigating by the sun, he claimed to have missed his destination by a record margin. 'The ship bumped to a beautiful landing. But, and but again, Mansfield was nowhere in sight. We grabbed a farmer's suspender and snapped it for attention. We asked, disdainfully, where we might be. Well, there's no use dragging this out. We were 37 miles off . . . That, I maintain, is a world record.'
In December he was offering readers tips about flying to the West Indies: 'With the long, long shores of Cuba behind you, you hit Port au Prince. Right now we start assuming definitely that your plane has floats on it, though we've been assuming it vaguely all along. Otherwise, you'll get your wheels wet. Port au Prince isn't favoured unless you can wangle the Gendarmerie du Haiti into letting you use their fields. You'd have to be a better wangler than we are . . .'
Two months after this feature was published, on 25 February 1935 Ron again applied for a student pilot's licence. He never got round to taking the test to become a qualified pilot and never actually applied for another licence, but he blithely continued writing for the Sportsman Pilot, offering advice to fellow aviators and filling many pages of the magazine with dashing accounts of his aerial exploits.
Ron's published work in 1935 included ten pulp novels, three 'novelettes', twelve short stories and three non-fiction articles. In October, Adventure magazine invited him to introduce himself to readers in their 'Camp Fire' feature, 'where readers, writers and adventurers meet'. Ron began in jocular fashion - 'When I was a year
6. Certified airman's file
old, they say I showed some signs of settling down, but I think this is merely rumour . . .' - and touched on all the familiar highspots of his dazzling career, his 'Asiatic wanderings', his expeditions, his 'barn-storming trip through the Mid-West', and so on.
Perhaps because the same issue of Adventure also published one of his 'leatherneck yarns', Ron chose to elaborate on his experiences as a 'top-kicker' in the Marines. 'I've known the Corps from Quantico to Peiping, from the South Pacific to the West Indies,' he wrote. 'To me the Marine Corps is a more go-to-hell outfit than the much lauded French Foreign Legion ever could be . . .' Expressing the hope that his thumbnail sketch would be a passport to the readers' interest, he ended with the promise: 'When I get back from Central America, where I'm going soon, I'll have another yarn to tell.'
Ron did not go to Central America but to Hollywood, where one of his stories, 'The Secret of Treas