G-8 and His Battle Aces was a pulp magazine popular in the 1930s, the heyday of pulp fiction. My memory about G-8 is at this remove dim, but my recollection is he was a fighter pilot who had downed innumerable Germans during World War I, and who later was transplanted, more or less, into the present when his author came up with a new war.

In this conflict a mysterious force led by somebody from Asia not unlike Genghis Khan invaded Canada and threatened the United States. G-8 and his leftover sidekicks from World War I undertook almost single-handedly to defend the country by flying propeller-driven fighters against the enemy along the Canadian-American border. They won, of course, although not without difficulty.

G-8 was one of a string of fictional flying heroes of World War I that engaged me as a boy. These pilots each had their own pulp magazine. It appeared each month on the newsstands of Miller's Drugstore. Each volume in the seemingly never-ending series of heroic events cost a dime, or perhaps with inflation a quarter. The trick, however, was to sidle up to the newsstand--out on the street during regular business hours--and manage to read at least one story before Mr. Miller came out of the store to tell one to move on or pay up.

I got so I could read rapidly and get through at least one story at a sidle, as it were. Now and then if I had enough money I bought a magazine, but wages being what they were then for teenagers, this was not often.

Pulp flying heroes were only one small phase of the pulp fiction market, however.

Girlie magazines, that is magazines with racy stories that hinted at sex but never really described it, also were displayed on the drugstore racks, as were many detective pulp stories. The latter, such as Black Mask, helped make the reputations of such latter-day detective storywriters as Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett and gave us a whole new genre of fiction.

Hammett, for instance, wrote what was probably the greatest detective story in modern American fiction The Maltese Falcon, as a result of pulp magazines. It bred a cult following that persists to this day.

Reading pulp fiction had two effects on me. First, it kept me out of trouble. Not that there was much trouble to get into in my small hometown, but what there was didn't interest me as much as reading.

Secondly, it made me want to be a writer.

There was, as a matter of fact, a pulp fiction writer in town who only added fuel to my fire. His name was Lew Holmes, although that, romantically enough, was not the name under which he wrote. Instead he used a string of pseudonyms to sell Western stories, yet another genre that flourished in the pulp days of yore.

Moreover, his son was my contemporary.

The Holmeses lived outside of town on what we called a ranch, but what was more properly a place in the oaks, a comfortable house with some trees and brush around it, a good place in which to find inspiration for Western stories.

Now and then when I got to visit his son I managed to peek into his office, the room where he did his writing. It was lined with books, had a desk and a typewriter and piles of papers. I thought it wonderful and I vowed then and there that one day I would be a writer.

I suppose my vow meant I would attempt to be a writer of pulp fiction. Unfortunately, several things intervened to make this impossible.

First, the pulp fiction market disappeared. About the time World War II came along, pulps no longer graced the newsstands of local drugstores in any abundance. Radio had replaced them and soon television would drive them even farther into the past.

Then the war itself occupied my attention--not to mention the attention of others, including editors--and so I never became a pulp fiction writer.

More's the pity. It's always seemed to be a pretty good life. Of course, I've never really been a freelance writer so perhaps my dream of having a place in the country at which to write is just that.

Others tell me writing for the pulps was no big deal. Pulp writers got paid a cent a word as I recall--not a lot, and certainly not a lot to live on--and they had a lot of competition.

It's easy to think you're a writer, I've found, but it is not so easy to make a living at it. There are a lot of would be writers in the country, but very few of them make a living at what they do. Like actors, they need a second job, or maybe even a third.

But there is always that dream: the place out in the wooded hills, the office that looks out on this placid landscape, the books, the papers, the typewriter (or now the computer) and, one would suppose, the checks that keep dropping through the mail slot.

I guess the checks are probably the most important part of the dream. And the most difficult part to achieve.