Or, the Monty Python of Boring
So when I was a kid, I read two and half books.
Well, I read a lot more books than that, but two and a half from a particular series: Jim Dunlop and the Wingless Plane.
Now these books were old when I got them. They must have been written in the Fifties. Set in a typical midwestern American town, these adventure novels chronicled the exploits of Jim Dunlop and the Wingless Plane.
Obviously.
The stories were arranged in the Hardy Boys way: Jim and his friend would run around solving crimes. But instead of a van, or Chet's jalopy, or whatever, they had--get this--a wingless plane.
I imagine in the Fifties, this would have been pure science fiction.
Anyway, in addition to Jim and his friend, there was the Professor. He was an inventor, who had apparently spent his family fortune on a lab out in the barn behind the family farmhouse. Jim and his friend would head over after school to help the Professor with his experiments and inventions.
His main invention, of course, being the Wingless Plane.
Most of Jim's adventures had to do with helping the Professor defeat his nemesis, an evil inventor who lusts after the Wingless Plane technology. As I recall, the evil inventor wanted to cash in on the sweet government contract for this plane.
And the contract would have been sweet indeed. Check out these features:
+ Vertical takeoff and landing.
+ Whisper-quiet.
+ No wings.
Apparently, the Professor had been vacationing in the South Seas in his youth, and had been struck by the aerodynamic properties of certain seed-pods. These pods drifted on the wind, sometimes for many leagues, from one island to another. Inspired, he returned home and devoted his life to inventing a seed pod-shaped plane that could fly without wings.
He called it a "wingless plane". I call it a "flying wing". Potayto, potahto. They were fun stories.
In the first one, Jim and his friend help the Professor guard his lab against the mysterious burglar who's trying to steal his designs for the plane (and/or a key component of the engine, I forget exactly which).
LaterJim and his friend help the Professor get the plane to The Big Air Show, where he hopes to win the top prize (for craziest plane, maybe), impress the government observers, and score that lucrative government contract. Naturally, the Evil Inventor tries to sabotage the Wingless Plane, so that his own new product, a big, loud, conventional jet fighter, will win the prize and the contract. But Jim and his friend put a stop to that.
A quick summary of the climactic moment of the first book:
WINGLESS PLANE is on the runway.
AIR SHOW TOWER: Wingless Plane, you are cleared to take off for your demonstration flight. Please taxi to the end of the runway.
PROFESSOR: Signals that he is ready to take off.
TOWER: Wingless Plane, your engines aren't on. Please start your engines and taxi to the end of the runway.
WINGLESS PLANE lifts silently a few feet off the ground, hovers to the other end of the runway, touches down.
TOWER: . . .
CROWD: OMGWTFBBQeleven!
WINGLESS PLANE lifts off, shoots straight up, outperforms Evil Inventor's jet, wins contracts.
In the second book, the Professor unveils his new-model plane. It's larger, and has a lot of nifty new accessories--a diving bell, for example. So naturally, the Professor takes Jim and his friend and their girlfirends to go diving for sunken pirate treasure. The plane hovers over the water, and lowers the diving bell (packed with strapping young lads) to the ocean floor to loot the wealth of antiquity and whatnot.
In the third book, the Jim and his friend take the Wingless Plane into space. According to the cover, anyway. I don't know if that's actually what happened, because half of this book was missing. Seriously. The cheap paperback edition had been ripped in half down the spine, and the second half was missing entirely.
And I'll probably never know what that third book was really about, because the books no longer exist. If they ever existed in the first place. My parents don't remember them, and have no idea where I might have gotten them. The Internet is totally unhelpful in this matter.
Amazon does not have it.
Ebay does not have it.
Froogle does not have it.
Google says it doesn't exist.