http://cowmanauction.com/wp-json/wp/v2/posts/257 John Keel was born March 25, 1930; he would have been 94 today.
Here he is with Mamie Caton and me, clowning around in a photo booth in Coney Island many years ago. Happy birthday, John! We’re still reading your books!
We have another story for Jadoo fans. John wrote “The Devil’s Knife” in Bagdad on March 17, 1955. He didn’t note any sale on the typescript, so it’s likely his agent Alex Jackinson couldn’t sell it. It’s a gripping tale in which John is accused of seducing an Izeide (that is, Yazidi) woman and must defend his life with a khanjer. Like many of his submissions to the men’s magazines at the time, it mixes fiction and fact, as the market demanded: a fictional story in a factual setting.
Here’s another puzzle from John’s files: the script for a children’s record about the history of aviation. Aviation was one of his favorite subjects; he learned to fly, but had to give it up when he was diagnosed with diabetes. For one of his birthdays, I gave him a “Spotter Deck,” a pack of playing cards with silhouettes of Allied and Axis aircraft, distributed to GIs in World War II. He said he could still identify most of them.
The script seems to be unfinished. There’s no indication of whether it was commissioned or was his own idea. It’s in a file with other material from 1964 and 1965, so I assume it was also written around then.
