Vintage Terry and the Pirates comic featuring Captain Terry Lee, his co-pilot Hotshot and the Dragon Lady. She served as an inspiration for the Madam Zhang character in THE LAST RAJAH. I had to age her a bit and move her from Shanghai to Borneo. Terry and the Pirates was created as a comic strip by Milton Caniff. It was subsequently adapted into a radio serial, a movie serial, and a TV show. The retro feel of the series was what I was going for in CHASING DRAGONS and THE LAST RAJAH

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 The new Lou Rizzo mystery is now available on Amazon here . For fans of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and the noir genre, here is a good old-fashioned, hard-boiled detective yarn. It’s the second installment in the Lou Rizzo detective series. Lou Rizzo is a streetwise private eye who makes a living off philandering spouses. It wasn’t his first career choice but losing an eye while flying a B-25 raid in World War II put an end to his childhood dream of becoming a commercial aviator. It also drove him to depression and the bottle. He’s begun to make peace with his fate, allowing him to take his first small steps on the long journey out of alcoholism. One day a seductive redhead, with danger written all over her, slinks into his office and turns his world upside down. Her request…find the man who murdered her brother. He doesn’t take homicide cases; that’s police business and career suicide for a private dick. He knows better, but the lady is very persuasive…very. Against hi...
Read more
Image
In CHASING DRAGONS , Duke Kellogg explains to his co-pilot Edwina “Eddie” Watt the legend of Mag Check Charlie. This legend was born on Wake Island (where I initially heard the story in 1971.) During WWII, pilots transiting Wake were told of a 15-foot tiger shark named Mag Check Charlie. Before I tell you how the story goes, I need to give you a little background. An aircraft piston engine differs from an automobile engine primarily in its ignition system. An automobile has one spark plug per piston, an aircraft engine has two…a left and a right. This is done for redundancy.  As long as either is working, the engine runs fine. All the left spark plugs are run off the left magneto and all the right spark plugs off the right. Magnetos are electric generating devices that are mounted on the engine. As long as the engine is turning they work. This is unlike a generator on a car. If the belt breaks or the generator fails, the engine stops. That won’t do in an airplane. Prior to...
Read more
Image
In CHASING DRAGONS ( http://tiny.cc/oy7ply ) and THE LAST RAJAH ( http://tiny.cc/3berly ), co-pilot Edwina "Eddie" Watt is a former WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). Their mission was to free male pilots for combat roles by employing qualified female pilots to ferry aircraft from factories to military bases and to tow drones and aerial targets. Each WASP candidate already had a pilot's license. They were trained to fly "the Army way" by the U.S. Army Air Forces at Avenger Fie ... ld in Sweetwater, Texas. More than 25,000 women applied for the WASP, and fewer than 1,900 were accepted. After completing four months of military flight training, 1,074 of them earned their wings and became the first women to fly American military aircraft. WASP were stationed at 122 air bases across the U.S., assuming numerous flight-related missions, and relieving male pilots for combat duty. They flew sixty million miles of operational flights from aircraft factories to port...
Read more