Having read all the Captain Hawklin novels by Charles F. Millhouse, as well as a few short stories, I have been looking forward to the next novel: Captain Hawklin and the Invisible Enemy.
Published in 2021, it is set in 1931, making it one of the earliest novels so far. It is also set after the disaster of the Osiris Project, an event we’ve heard of in several works, but have only gotten hints about it. I had thought this novel would deal with the project itself, but instead it deals with how Hawklin handled what happened there, and we learn of it through that.
As noted, Captain Steven Hawklin is a former World War I fighter pilot, now an inventor and adventurer, rich from his inventions. He lives and works in Crown City, located on the west coast of the United States. Thus he is more like the aviation pulp adventurers like Bill Barnes than Doc Savage. He is assisted by Hardy Regan Miller and Oscar (Oz) Lyman.
This time, Hawklin has gone missing after what happened at Osiris. Hardy and Oz are worried, and as they don’t know what happened there, they are stumped. Then Hardy is approached by Alla Sokol, a Russian scientist that he and Hawklin had met in the 1920s in Kurdistan. She is in trouble, being sought by Russian agents. They find Hawklin in a speakeasy, trying to drown his sorrows, when they are attacked by those Russian agents.
Escaping, they head to Oz’s boarding house where they are picked up by the U.S. Army led by a Gen. Knox. Knox and Hawklin have a history, as Knox was head of the Osiris Project, and Hawklin blames him for what happened. Taking them back to an army base while Hardy is left at the boarding house due to his injuries, they are interrogated. They want to know what Sokol was working on. What was the Russian project about?
But the Russians then show up at the boarding house, forcing Hardy to lead them to the army base. They break in, and the Russians make use of a secret weapon, which is tied to what Sokol was working on in Siberia. In the confusion, Hawklin and friends get out, and after speaking with Sokol, decide to head to Siberia and put an end to the project and deal with a threat created by it. What was being worked on there released something dangerous and that needs to be stopped.
Along the way, we learn more about what happend at Osiris, and who was responsible, as well as a connection to what happened in Siberia.
It’s another great adventure. Will Gen. Knox return to plague Hawklin? I don’t recall him from subsequent novels, though a certain senator mentioned does appear.
With this volume, we also get a Zane Carrington short story. Zane has showed up in a few Hawklin stories, and has had another short story in an issue of Pulp Reality. This one is set in 1935, as he and his men deal with a stowaway pursued by the Japanese. Zane and his men deal with the Kibo Brotherhood, who has appeared before in these stories, and we met an interesting lady in Lady Lynx. Will she return? We also learn more about The Major, one of Carrington’s men, though not everything about him. Maybe we’ll get his full story in time.
Next year is the 10th anniversary of Captain Hawklin, and we will see the 10th novel, The Anubis Curse set in 1939. It’s to be the last book in the 1930s series, so I don’t know if this is the end of the Hawklin series, or just the end of novels set in the 1930s. I hope we’ll see more.
