Mr. Bill Cunningham who has a blog called Pulp 2.0, read
The Iron Duke by L. Ron Hubbard and compares it to
The Prince and the Pauper and
The Man in the Iron Mask. He then goes on to say:
"....and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Hubbard were inspired by these classics. This was after all the pulp era, where you were expected to churn out quantity as well as quality. The thing is IRON DUKE is such a classic charmer of a story that I really don't mind if he did take the story and twist it to his purposes. It was well worth it.
In the short space of a few pages, Hubbard gives us a fun, adventuresome character in Blacky Lee and if you are a fan of the sort of hijinx that occur in the OCEAN'S ELEVEN movies or Hitchcock's TO CATCH A THIEF then you're going to feel right at home with your feet curled right next to the fire with this story. Long on wit, short on fat, IRON DUKE is a movie that hasn't happened yet -- but should. I would cast George Clooney in the lead with the Coen Bros. as the directing - producing team. This is a story that plays into all their sensibilities and period piece excellence.
I urge all my readers to pick this one up and give it a try. If I were to find fault with any of it, it would be that the story is too short. A small nit to pick to be sure in a story that features con games, sword fights, train escapes, royal politics, humor and romance."
Mr. Cunningham's blog can be found here:
http://d2dvd.blogspot.com/2008/11/pulp-review-iron-duke.html
For the full plot description of
The Iron Duke go here:
http://www.goldenagestories.com/html/farflungadventure/the-iron-duke
I would like to add a few historical notes to this particular story to fill in some background information about what was going on in the life of L. Ron Hubbard when he penned this yarn.
It was March 23, 1940. He was writing
The Iron Duke and he mentions in a letter:
"It is cold and dull gray but I am all bottled up with the venetian blind cocked shut and the steam heat sizzling and I'm back in the corner with artificial light, and as I know that the wind is from the water, I don't care a whit about it for wind is power and I can hear in it the swish and simmer of a clean keel plowing the deep."
The keel he heard in the wind belonged to
Maggie, a small thirty-two-foot vessel he was planning to sail up the dangerous British Colombian and Alaskan coasts. Dubbed the Alaskan Radio Experimental Expedition, this voyage would verify charts, tide tables and piloting books for the region and contribute further to navigation by testing a new revolutionary radio direction finding device which Ron developed with the help of a mathematics professor. And--no small honor--Ron would carry the flag of the Explorers Club for the first time.
And there we come to the primary reason for his voluminous writing output. He had to finance the complete refit of the vessel and the cost of the expedition itself.
So every word he was producing so quickly, counted.
But meeting his deadlines proved no small feat, especially in the face of mechanical failures such as the breakdown of his electric typewriter on Saturday afternoon, right after the IBM office had closed. He wrote:
"The tape which carries back the carriage return broke right in the middle of
The Iron Duke. Anyway I sewed it up with needle and thread and it worked for a time until I finally tried to adjust it. Then it broke in another place. I must have spent five or six hours over the weekend fixing that tape."
He did end up meeting his deadlines and he financed the expedition he had planned charting previously unrecorded hazards and coastline for the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, experimenting on radio directional finding, and examining local native cultures.
Later that year in December 1940 he is awarded the "Master of Steam and Motor Vessels" license by the U.S. Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation.
