This is a great one! Very sharp and confident! Ingenious plot and hero. ( )

The Falcon Killer, an enjoyable adventure story, deals with intrigue following the Japanese invasion of China in the late 1930s. L. Ron Hubbard had a solid grasp of the politics of that area of the world prior to America's involvement in World War II, when many Americans were paying little attention to events there. The Chinese characters in particular had a greater depth than I had been expecting from a story written around the time of the events depicted. ( )

With The Falcon Killer and others, Galaxy Press has created a marvelous package for a completely unremarkable collection of L. Ron Hubbard pulp stories. If only the works of other, more deserving, pulp stalwarts such as Howard, Hammett, Heinlein, and Williamson could be given this same treatment; but then they didn’t have the chutzpah to form their own religion, which then created its own publishing company to keep every last word of its beloved founder’s canon in print long after the expiration date had lapsed.

The afterword following the story is a bald-faced attempt to rewrite pulp history with Hubbard as the centerpiece. Assertions that Hubbard was “leading pulp fiction’s elite,” or that he produced “the genre’s first truly character-driven works” are baseless. The claim that he alone “launched the golden age of science fiction” is so far removed from reality as to be ludicrous. The assertions that his story “Fear” became “the foundation of every modern tale of horror,” and was “one of the very few works to genuinely warrant that overworked term ‘classic’” mightily stretch the truth. And while Hubbard did indeed contribute many stories to editor John W. Campbell’s classic weird pulp, the claim that Unknown was inaugurated “to accommodate the greater body of [his] fantasies” does disservice to the many other wonderful authors, such as Leiber and Sturgeon and Eric Frank Russell, associated with the magazine.

Hubbard’s story of the Falcon Killer is standard pulp age stuff, with prose that veers towards the purple occasionally. Stereotypical Asian slang of the time is used, playing up the confusion between the usage of “l”s and “r”s, for instance. Barely more than cardboard characters move the action along adequately, but it’s difficult to value this as anything more than a way to pass a couple of hours while trying to get to sleep on a dark and stormy night. ( )

I found this to be a fairly interesting story. It's a little slow in parts (and considering how short it is, I was a bit surprised by this!) but it's kind of fun. I did kind of like the glimpses of world views that I found in the book. It's very dated and as such very un-PC, but that seems to be part of the overall charm. All in all, a pretty good story. I would read more of these older L. Ron Hubbard stories if I came across them. ( )

This story is a trite and disposable little novel, though sufficient in its ambitions to provide a simple and thrilling adventure yarn. The story is definitely dated with a jingoist attitude towards all of the Chinese, Japanese and the Russian characters being crude stereotypes. The hero is the archtypical swashbuckler, damsel in distress, close calls and double crosses, are check, check and double check on the pulp adventure stock list. ( )