Hostage to Death
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About this ebook
Running off to join the French Foreign Legion used to be every boy's dream of action and adventure. But for Lieutenant Bill Reilly—half Irish, half American, and like Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, a Westerner at war in the desert—the dream has turned into a nightmare. And it all begins with the gruesome delivery of a severed hand. . . .
The dead, gnarled fingers hold a message from the Berber chief Abd el-Ulad. He challenges the courage of the Legion soldiers and says he holds an American woman captive—who, if Reilly doesn't come to her rescue, is next up for dismemberment. Reilly abandons his post guarding the trains and goes after her.
But it's all a trick. In his absence, the railroad falls victim to a terrorist attack. But who set the trap and engineered the sabotage? Reilly is caught in a triangle of treachery as the French, Spanish and native Berbers vie for control. His fate—as well as that of the American woman—rests on his ability to escape a spider's web of double- and triple-crosses and uncover the truth in a desert of deception.
Hubbard's knowledge of the Berber raiders as well as of the Arab culture was comprehensive. As a young man he traveled extensively, following and studying numerous nomadic cultures and tribes. Combining those insights with his experience operating everything from machine guns to field telephones in the Montana National Guard and Marine Corps Reserves, Hubbard brought unique authenticity to his tales of the Foreign Legion. His stories were so exceptional, he was sought after by the premier writers' magazines of the time to write how-to articles—two of which appeared the same month that Hostage to Death was published.
* An International Book Awards Finalist
L. Ron Hubbard
With 19 New York Times bestsellers and more than 350 million copies of his works in circulation, L. Ron Hubbard is among the most enduring and widely read authors of our time. As a leading light of American Pulp Fiction through the 1930s and '40s, he is further among the most influential authors of the modern age. Indeed, from Ray Bradbury to Stephen King, there is scarcely a master of imaginative tales who has not paid tribute to L. Ron Hubbard. Then too, of course, there is all L. Ron Hubbard represents as the Founder of Dianetics and Scientology and thus the only major religion born in the 20th century.
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Reviews for Hostage to Death
7 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5In addition to the beautiful paperback editions of L. Ron Hubbard's Stories from the Golden Age, interested readers will also enjoy the audio books. Each audio book features a multicast performance with music and sound effects reminiscent of radio's golden age. "Hostage to Death" is a stunner in its own right, but the audio book highlights yet another level of Hubbard's narrative skills. Starring the voice talent of Kelly Ward, familiar to movie fans from "Grease," and "The Big Red One," Ward also directed this audio book version of "Hostage to Death." Additional voice talent is provided by R. F. Daley, Charles Fathy, Christina Huntington, Jim Meskimen, Phil Proctor and Josh R. Thompson. With Hubbard's action-packed pacing, "Hostage to Death" takes off like a bullet and the suspense never lets up. The voice acting is top-notch - indeed, this high quality is evident on ALL of Hubbard's Stories from the Golden Age audio books thanks to the attention-to-detail and loving care provided by Galaxy Press. This is the way audio books should be produced. Adventure stories have never sounded so good. Congratulations to all of the people responsible for producing this outstanding series of audio books.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fun, quick, easy read.
Book preview
Hostage to Death - L. Ron Hubbard
SELECTED FICTION WORKS
BY L. RON HUBBARD
FANTASY
The Case of the Friendly Corpse
Death’s Deputy
Fear
The Ghoul
The Indigestible Triton
Slaves of Sleep & The Masters of Sleep
Typewriter in the Sky
The Ultimate Adventure
SCIENCE FICTION
Battlefield Earth
The Conquest of Space
The End Is Not Yet
Final Blackout
The Kilkenny Cats
The Kingslayer
The Mission Earth Dekalogy*
Ole Doc Methuselah
To the Stars
ADVENTURE
The Hell Job series
WESTERN
Buckskin Brigades
Empty Saddles
Guns of Mark Jardine
Hot Lead Payoff
A full list of L. Ron Hubbard’s
novellas and short stories is provided at the back.
*Dekalogy—a group of ten volumes
TitlePgArt.jpgPublished by Galaxy Press, LLC
7051 Hollywood Boulevard, Suite 200
Hollywood, CA 90028
© 2008 L. Ron Hubbard Library. All Rights Reserved.
Any unauthorized copying, translation, duplication, importation or distribution, in whole or in part, by any means, including electronic copying, storage or transmission, is a violation of applicable laws.
Mission Earth is a trademark owned by L. Ron Hubbard Library and is used with permission. Battlefield Earth is a trademark owned by Author Services, Inc. and is used with permission.
Horsemen illustration from Western Story Magazine is © and ™ Condé Nast Publications and is used with their permission. Fantasy, Far-Flung Adventure and Science Fiction illustrations: Unknown and Astounding Science Fiction copyright © by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of
Penny Publications, LLC.
ISBN 978-1-59212-572-2 ePub version
ISBN 978-1-59212-763-4 Kindle version
ISBN 978-1-59212-282-0 print version
ISBN 978-1-59212-386-5 audiobook version
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007927539
Contents
FOREWORD
HOSTAGE TO DEATH
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
STORY PREVIEW:
YUKON MADNESS
GLOSSARY
L. RON HUBBARD
IN THE GOLDEN AGE
OF PULP FICTION
THE STORIES FROM THE
GOLDEN AGE
FOREWORD
Stories from Pulp Fiction’s Golden Age
AND it was a golden age.
The 1930s and 1940s were a vibrant, seminal time for a gigantic audience of eager readers, probably the largest per capita audience of readers in American history. The magazine racks were chock-full of publications with ragged trims, garish cover art, cheap brown pulp paper, low cover prices—and the most excitement you could hold in your hands.
Pulp
magazines, named for their rough-cut, pulpwood paper, were a vehicle for more amazing tales than Scheherazade could have told in a million and one nights. Set apart from higher-class slick
magazines, printed on fancy glossy paper with quality artwork and superior production values, the pulps were for the rest of us,
adventure story after adventure story for people who liked to read. Pulp fiction authors were no-holds-barred entertainers—real storytellers. They were more interested in a thrilling plot twist, a horrific villain or a white-knuckle adventure than they were in lavish prose or convoluted metaphors.
The sheer volume of tales released during this wondrous golden age remains unmatched in any other period of literary history—hundreds of thousands of published stories in over nine hundred different magazines. Some titles lasted only an issue or two; many magazines succumbed to paper shortages during World War II, while others endured for decades yet. Pulp fiction remains as a treasure trove of stories you can read, stories you can love, stories you can remember. The stories were driven by plot and character, with grand heroes, terrible villains, beautiful damsels (often in distress), diabolical plots, amazing places, breathless romances. The readers wanted to be taken beyond the mundane, to live adventures far removed from their ordinary lives—and the pulps rarely failed to deliver.
In that regard, pulp fiction stands in the tradition of all memorable literature. For as history has shown, good stories are much more than fancy prose. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas—many of the greatest literary figures wrote their fiction for the readers, not simply literary colleagues and academic admirers. And writers for pulp magazines were no exception. These publications reached an audience that dwarfed the circulations of today’s short story magazines. Issues of the pulps were scooped up and read by over thirty million avid readers each month.
Because pulp fiction writers were often paid no more than a cent a word, they had to become prolific or starve. They also had to write aggressively. As Richard Kyle, publisher and editor of Argosy, the first and most long-lived of the pulps, so pointedly explained: The pulp magazine writers, the best of them, worked for markets that did not write for critics or attempt to satisfy timid advertisers. Not having to answer to anyone other than their readers, they wrote about human beings on the edges of the unknown, in those new lands the future would explore. They wrote for what we would become, not for what we had already been.
Some of the more lasting names that graced the pulps include H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Max Brand, Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein—and, of course, L. Ron Hubbard.
In a word, he was among the most prolific and popular writers of the era. He was also the most enduring—hence this series—and certainly among the most legendary. It all began only months after he first tried his hand at fiction, with L. Ron Hubbard tales appearing in Thrilling Adventures, Argosy, Five-Novels Monthly, Detective Fiction Weekly, Top-Notch, Texas Ranger, War Birds, Western Stories, even Romantic Range. He could write on any subject, in any genre, from jungle explorers to deep-sea divers, from G-men and gangsters, cowboys and flying aces to mountain climbers, hard-boiled detectives and spies. But he really began to shine when he turned his talent to science fiction and fantasy of which he authored nearly fifty novels or novelettes to forever change the shape of those genres.
Following in the tradition of such famed authors as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, Ron Hubbard actually lived adventures that his own characters would have admired—as an ethnologist among primitive tribes, as prospector and engineer in hostile climes, as a captain of vessels on four oceans. He even wrote a series of articles for Argosy, called Hell Job,
in which he lived and told of the most dangerous professions a man could put his hand to.
Finally, and just for good measure, he was also an accomplished photographer, artist, filmmaker, musician and educator. But he was first and foremost a writer, and that’s the L. Ron Hubbard we come to know through the pages of this volume.
This library of Stories from the Golden Age presents the best of L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction from the heyday of storytelling, the Golden Age of the pulp magazines. In these eighty volumes, readers are treated to a full banquet of 153 stories, a kaleidoscope of tales representing every imaginable genre: science fiction, fantasy, western, mystery, thriller, horror, even romance—action of all kinds and in all places.
Because the pulps themselves were printed on such inexpensive paper with high acid content, issues were not meant to endure. As the years go by, the original issues of every pulp from Argosy through Zeppelin Stories continue crumbling into brittle, brown dust. This library preserves the L. Ron Hubbard tales from that era, presented with a distinctive look that brings back the nostalgic flavor of those times.
L. Ron Hubbard’s Stories from the Golden Age has something for every taste, every reader. These tales will return you to a time when fiction was good clean entertainment and the most