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    The Dive Bomber: A High-flying Adventure of Love and Danger
    The Dive Bomber: A High-flying Adventure of Love and Danger
    The Dive Bomber: A High-flying Adventure of Love and Danger
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    The Dive Bomber: A High-flying Adventure of Love and Danger

    By L. Ron Hubbard

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Lucky Martin is a daredevil of the skies—a test pilot who lives to break the rules and push the envelope. Sound like a perfect role for Errol Flynn? It did to Hollywood, as Flynn was cast in the movie of the same name.

    Lucky’s a trailblazer—flying higher and faster than any pilot out there. His latest invention could change the face of air warfare and alter the balance of world power.

    It’s The Dive Bomber—a perfectly designed aircraft for the U.S. Navy. There’s only one problem—up to now every test flight has ended in disaster. The reason: sabotage.

    America’s enemies will go to any length to get their hands on his design—from savage attacks to kidnapping his fiancée. Lucky’ll have to push his luck to the very limit to save his plane, save his girl . . . and save his country.

    As a barnstorming pilot in the early days of aviation, Hubbard was dubbed “Flash” Hubbard by the aviation magazines of the day. Expanding his knowledge even more, he visited Boeing in Seattle where the president and chief engineer gave him an inside look at their test pilot program. His unique and pioneering insight of flight streaks across the page in novels like The Dive Bomber.

    “Hubbard grounds his cliffhanger adventure firmly in aeronautical details that make it thrilling.” —Publishers Weekly

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGalaxy Press
    Release dateMar 21, 2013
    ISBN9781592125555
    The Dive Bomber: A High-flying Adventure of Love and Danger
    Author

    L. Ron Hubbard

    With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.

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    Reviews for The Dive Bomber

    4/5

    37 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
       I received "The Dive Bomber" by L. Ron Hubbard from Library Thing early reviewers and member giveaways. The Dive Bomber is about daredevil test pilot Lucky Martin. He has perfected the design for a new bomber plain the Navy is sure to buy. Unfortunately for Lucky, hostile foreign powers are determined to see him fail so they can scoop up the planes design for their own use.The Dive Bomber is an audio book from the golden age stories series by Galaxy Press. Actually it is much more than just a plain old audio book. The Dive Bomber is more like an audio play, a multicast performance with music and sound effects. Very much like the radio shows back in the 1930's This story and other stories are part of the pulp fiction golden age. I enjoy hearing these audio books and love reading them. I enjoy the writings of the master story teller L. Ron Hubbard. If you want action and adventure, read stories from the golden age and join the pulp revival!
    • 4/5
      Reviewed for LibraryThing as an early reviewer.This is simply a well told story. Tension is balanced with shots of comic relief, sound effects underpin the plot, and the sound quality is great. The acting is very good, especially considering that 16 characters are portrayed by five actors. It is interesting that when this was published in 1937 Great Britain was referred to as a ‘foreign power’ rather than an ally.
    • 5/5
      I received a set of L. Ron Hubbard audiobooks to review. This was one of them. The audiobook portion was very well-done and was more like a radio drama of old and less like a traditional audiobook. I did not care for the actual book though.
    • 1/5
      I do not recommend this book, because philosophy is always woven into a writers works, and this author's philosophy is strange. This is good production for an audio book, but it is the content that I dislike from a philosophical perspective.
    • 5/5
      Story about a struggling airline that could make it big by selling an aircraft design to a slimy fella who may be a part of an enemy government. Lucky knows that his design works and that it will create the fastest bombers in the business.

      But people keep dying and he nearly does (!) when he tries his design out. The wings fold up and there's quite an explosion on the fields!

      Bad luck gets worse when the military bows out of financing this boondoggle. Could it be someone is tampering with his plane to make him look bad? And what of the girl who now has taken over the business? Will she falter and tell Lucky to take the money and run? Five million is nothing to sneeze at, especially in 1940!

      Interesting pulp tale, written before Pearl Harbor (1941); I thought the mix of airplane master designer, some corny love tale, and sprinkled with some espionage makes for a tasty pulpy dish.

      Check it out.

    • 4/5
      This is one of L. Ron Hubbard’s “stories from the golden age” of fiction. The story was originally published in 1937 in a pulp monthly. Now this short story is told on two CDs by a cast of talented actors, musicians and sound effects technicians. I found the story of the Dive Bomber to be interesting and the performance well worth the time. I am looking forward to listening to more of these performances. The two CD set comes with an attractive 38 page booklet on the history of L. Ron Hubbard and his role in pulp fiction.
    • 5/5
      This was cool to listen to. Hearing the planes and Lucky. I could picture the plane going straight down. I also liked the idea of the Navy having better equipment than the enemy. I have built plastic model planes before, Ju-87's, as well as Line Control Planes that really flew in the air, by using a motor. The thought that this plane stresses the wings at nine times the plane's weight, is amazing. The dynamics used to make this work are amazing. No wonder why foreign powers want the plane for themselves. This would be a cool cd to listen to on surround sound. I was worried when Lucky was almost killed, and I liked the puns around his name. This was also made into a movie and there was some drama concerning Hubbard's credit. This is one of my favorites by Hubbard. I am giving this Audiobook a 5/5 and will be renting the movie! I was given a copy to review, however all opinions are my own!
    • 3/5
      Received from Member Giveaways.I had heard a bit here and there about L. Ron Hubbard over the years, but ahd not read (or listened to) any of his works.Quite honestly, I was not expecting much.Reading the promotional materials that came included with the CDs, I came away with the feeling that the copywriter tried to, well, oversell the author. While I don't disagree with the sentiments, I am one of those "less is more" kind of people in this regard.Listening to the audiofiles, the story fits into what I know of the genre, if a little bit overdramatic for my tastes.While it certainly kept me listening, if only to find out how it ended, The Dive Bomber is better suited for different tastes than mine.
    • 4/5
      I have received several of these Hubbard audio books from librarything.com. The Dive Bomber tells the tale of "Lucky" Martin and the development of a new plane for the US Navy pre-World War Two. The story and performances are terrific. The sounds effects, as in all of the stories in this series, are wonderful.The story begins with Tom O'Neal, owner of O'Neal Motors, arguing with his daughter Dixie, demanding to test pilot the new dive bomber himself. The plane is strong enough, he argues, and at 48 he is not too old (How times have changed!) and he will not let Lucky Martin, Dixie's fiancé and the company's regular test pilot take the glory. A short time later, though, Tom dies in a fiery crash when the plane's wings rip away and he is trapped inside the cockpit. In the weeks following the disaster, the Navy tells Dixie and Lucky that the plane has not been certified for military use and that the new wing design is best for sports planes. Without the anticipated military contract, O'Neal Motors is bankrupt. Lucky takes some test pilot assignments and Dixie mortgages her house, and the company builds a second test plane which also crashes. Lucky narrowly avoids being killed and gains a new nickname – UnLucky! Then Mr. Joe Bullard slithers onto the scene. A Sydney Greenstreet character, in public Mr. Bullard purports to have clients overseas for a big order of sport planes but he brags to Lucky and Dixie that he sabotaged the test plane and can frame Lucky for the murder of Tom O'Neal. He blackmails Lucky and Dixie into building the "sport" planes and prepares to export them to some unnamed country where they will be fitted with powerful engines and bombing harnesses and used in the European war theatre. Lucky and Dixie are helpless.At the last thrilling moment Lucky uses one of the new planes to turns the tables on Bullard. He saves the day and, at the same time, wins Navy approval for the new planes.The multi-cast audiobook is one of the best in the series. It is well performed, the narrator R. F. Dailey is super. The sound effects are worthy of a Hollywood movie.We can imagine that Galaxy Press, publishers of these audiobooks, is a Scientologist outfit, but there is nothing that points directly to a link.You need to save the cast list that comes in the mailer because there seems to be no other list online or in the main packaging of these Galaxy Press audio books.
    • 4/5
      I received this as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.Despite my misgivings about L.Ron Hubbard and Scientology, I love his pulp fiction.This story is fast paced and had enough twists and turns to keep you turning the page.
    • 5/5
      Like all the other stories from the golden age by L Ron Hubbard these audio book's were good to listen to every time music came on you felt chilis run though you and waiting to see what happens next it is so much different to listen to book's than to read them in word print these are the first audio book's I have ever had and after listing to these book's on them I will look for more in the furture to listen to great author.
    • 5/5
      Another fun read/ listen! Like the others in this series I really enjoy how the sound affects take you right back to when they were written. It transports me back before tv, to the radio dramas. I look forward to others in this series!

    Book preview

    The Dive Bomber - L. Ron Hubbard

    The Dive Bomber book cover

    SELECTED FICTION WORKS

    BY L. RON HUBBARD

    FANTASY

    The Case of the Friendly Corpse

    Death’s Deputy

    Fear

    The Ghoul

    The Indigestible Triton

    Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep

    Typewriter in the Sky

    The Ultimate Adventure

    SCIENCE FICTION

    Battlefield Earth

    The Conquest of Space

    The End Is Not Yet

    Final Blackout

    The Kilkenny Cats

    The Kingslayer

    The Mission Earth Dekalogy*

    Ole Doc Methuselah

    To the Stars

    ADVENTURE

    The Hell Job series

    WESTERN

    Buckskin Brigades

    Empty Saddles

    Guns of Mark Jardine

    Hot Lead Payoff

    A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s

    novellas and short stories is provided at the back.

    *Dekalogy: a group of ten volumes

    Title page for the book

    Published by

    Galaxy Press, LLC

    7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200

    Hollywood, CA 90028

    Copyright © 2012 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.

    Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.

    Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.

    Cover art and Story Preview illustration: Argosy Magazine is © 1935, 1936 Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission from Argosy Communications, Inc. Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Penny Publications, LLC.

    ISBN 978-1-59212-555-5 ePub version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-311-7 print version

    ISBN 978-1-59212-230-1 audiobook version

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2007903607

    Contents

    FOREWORD

    THE DIVE BOMBER

    CHAPTER ONE

    CHAPTER TWO

    CHAPTER THREE

    CHAPTER FOUR

    CHAPTER FIVE

    CHAPTER SIX

    CHAPTER SEVEN

    CHAPTER EIGHT

    CHAPTER NINE

    CHAPTER TEN

    CHAPTER ELEVEN

    CHAPTER TWELVE

    STORY PREVIEW:

    THE LIEUTENANT TAKES THE SKY

    L. RON HUBBARD

    IN THE GOLDEN AGE

    OF PULP FICTION

    THE STORIES FROM THE

    GOLDEN AGE

    GLOSSARY

    FOREWORD

    Stories from

    Pulp Fiction’s

    Golden Age

    AND it was a golden age.

    The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.

    Pulp magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class slick magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the rest of us, adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.

    The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.

    In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.

    Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.

    Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.

    In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.

    Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called Hell Job, in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.

    Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.

    This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.

    Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.

    L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most fun a kid could have on a rainy afternoon or the best thing an adult could enjoy after a long day at work.

    Pick up a

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