Donald Keyhoe - Writing For The Pulps and Glossies

Writing For The Pulps and Glossies

By the time his UFO books appeared, Keyhoe was already a well-established author, with numerous appearances in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Four of his short stories were printed in Weird Tales, one of the most prestigious of the pulps: "The Grim Passenger" (1925), "The Mystery Under the Sea" (1926), "Through the Vortex" (1926) and "The Master of Doom" (1927). He also produced the lead novel for all three issues of a short-lived magazine called Dr. Yen Sin: "The Mystery of the Dragon's Shadow" (May/June 1936), "The Mystery of the Golden Skull" (July/August 1936) and "The Mystery of the Singing Mummies" (September/October 1936).

Keyhoe wrote a number of air adventure stories for Flying Aces, and other magazines, and created two larger-than-life superheroes in this genre. The first of these was Captain Philip Strange, referred to as "the Brain Devil" and "the Phantom Ace of G-2." Captain Strange was an American intelligence officer during World War I who was gifted with ESP and other mental powers. His existence has been perpetuated beyond Keyhoe's stories as a minor member of the Wold Newton universe.

Keyhoe's other "superpowered" flying ace was Richard Knight, a World War I veteran who was blinded in combat but gained a supernatural ability to see in the dark. Knight featured in a number of adventure stories set in the 1930s (when the stories were written).

Many of Keyhoe's stories for the pulps were science fiction or weird fantasy, or contained a significant measure of these elements — a fact that was not lost on later critics of his UFO books.

He was also a freelancer for Saturday Evening Post, The Nation, and Reader's Digest.