‘The Lost Adventures of Captain Hawklin,’ Vol. 2

Captain Hawklin is a New Pulp hero written by Charles F. Millhouse. He is a former World War I fighter pilot, later becoming an adventurer and inventor, and is rich from those inventions. He is based in Crown City, a large fictional city located on the west coast of the United States. There he built his headquarters as well as a private air corps.

To me, he is more like the aviation pulp adventurers like Bill Barnes than Doc Savage. Hawklin is assisted by Hardy Regan Miller and later Oscar (Oz) Lyman. Hardy appears in two stories and is mentioned in a couple of others here.

So far, we’ve got a series of 10 novels set in the 1930s, one for each year, as well as several short stories. More recently we got a volume of stories by other authors, collected as The Lost Adventures of Captain Hawklin, Vol. 1. And now we get The Lost Adventures of Captain Hawklin, Vol. 2, of five stories by Millhouse along with Brian K. Morris, Clyde Hall, Bobby Nash, and Robert J. Mendenhall. All stories are set between 1921-25, before he moved to Crown City.

First up is Millhouse’s “The Devil’s in the Details,” set in 1921. Here we find Hawklin in Turkey where he is contacted by his father, who is in England and apparently needs his help. If you’ve read the Hawklin stories you’ll know that Hawklin is somewhat estranged from his father over his life choices. But he does head there and is pulled into the problems of his father, and more so his father’s associate Orman Wintergreen. And Hawklin meets for the first time his wife, Desa, who will play a bigger part in future stories. Apparently, Orman is involved in opium smuggling, and Desa interfered in it, and Hawklin gets pulled into things. And you know it would be a simple matter.

Next is Bobby Nash’s “Magnapor Nights,” or is that “MAGNAPOR NIGHTS”? We find Hawklin working on a tramp steamer and now at a small island called Mangapor. He and a friend, John “Cannonball” Canton, run afoul of the man who runs the island because of a girl. Will they get out of it?

In Clyde Hall’s “The Archimedes Affair,” we find Hawklin working for a flying circus, this time performing in St. Augustine, Fla. He is approached by a British scientist that he met during the war who needs Hawklin’s help. He has a new invention, dealing with radio waves, and he needs to get to New York City ASAP to present it at a radio fair to get backers for it. It seems like a simple job, with Hawklin and a female pilot of the circus taking the inventor and his invention in a pair of Jennies. But after getting waylaid by a pair of Germans at their first refueling stop, it seems there is more to this invention such that others are after it. Will they get to NYC safely, and if so, will things go well?

With “The Fisherman’s Daughter” by Robert Mendenhall, we find Hawklin and Hardy in France. They run into the head of a museum trying to recover a painting taken by the Germans at the end of WWI: The Fisherman’s Daughter. Hawklin and Hardy agree to help him, and head to Munich where the painting is apparently held, though someone seems to want to stop them. There they team up with a childhood friend of Hawklin’s. Along the way they run in a certain toothbrush-mustached man and a beerhall pusch. There is more about the painting than they know. Can they succeed?

Finally, we get “Captain Hawklin and the Flight of Blood” from Brian K. Morris, with our two friends now in Egypt. Hawklin is hired to fly a mysterious Romanian count back to Europe, along with a few others. But they find that someone has sinister plans for the future of the world, making use of vampires and a certain rising leader in Germany. We know the supernatural happens in this world, so we shouldn’t be surprised that vampires are real. Will Hawklin and Hardy be able to throw a wrench in these plans? In the end, they may have a possible future ally.

A first in this volume is a chronology of Captain Hawklin, showing where all the stories fit in, both the novels and the short stories. Most of the short stories appeared in Stormgate Press’s Pulp Reality magazine. If you haven’t gotten into the Captain Hawklin series, be aware that the 10 original novels, covering the 1930s, have recently been collected into three omnibus volumes. And the third volume contains five of the previously published short stories, along with a new one. Strangely though one is left out.

The next planned work is the novel Captain Hawklin at War, which is promised for the summer of 2024. From the chronology, this one will cover 1940 through 1945, which I’m surprised about, as in the past we got novels set in separate years. I look forward to it. We’ve gotten hints of future events, so I hope we will see further stories set after 1945.