Indiana Jones and the Lost Paperbacks

Fresh on the bookshelves are a series of ten Indiana Jones books, first issued in the mid 1990's, cashing in on the release of the new Indiana Jones movie. Here's a quick look of five of them that I banged through recently.

Quick summary: these are basically quick-reading potboilers by authors who do, in fact, contribute a lot of research for each. Each novel even provides an afterword which gives the background on the major elements of the story. Martin Caidin, for example, writes about a jet-propelled aircraft proposed in 1910 while Max McCoy writes about Roy Chapman Andrews' finding of dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.

The books tend to follow the formula of Indiana Jones battling bad guys, often Nazis, while on some fantastic quest for dinosaur eggs, a vast subterranean world, the defeat of world conquerors, and so on. Generally good, solid stories with a touch of science and general knowledge (which attracted me to science fiction years ago), and a lot of fun to read.

Quick look at the five I've read:

Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs. Max McCoy. Indy searches for a missing scientist who has discovered a recent dinosaur bone in the Gobi Desert, suggesting living dinosaurs exist..

Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates is by one of my favorite authors, the late Martin Caidin. Not surprisingly, it involves aviation. Indy and a crew of experts try to figure out how to defeat the sky pirates and what may be a highly advanced extraterrestrial aircraft.

Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth. Max McCoy. Indy and a female Danish spelunker find themselves allied in a polar expedition to find a piece of Icelandic stone, the key to the location of the legendary city of Ultima Thule located inside the earth, and a source of limitless power sought by the Nazis.

Indiana Jones and the White Witch is another book by Martin Caidin. A friend of the late English witch Sybil Leek who lived in New Forest, a community of Wiccans, Caidin uses a similar character and community as a starting point for a tale in which Jones and a young Witch armed with the sword of King Arthur hitch a ride aboard a zeppelin in search of a fabulous treasure which includes coins handled by Jesus and minted to spread the word of Christianity.

Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx. Max McCoy. Indy and a mother and daughter duo who working their way around Asia with magic shows, in a search for their missing husband and father who was on the trail of the Staff of Aaron, used to produce the plagues of Egypt and to part the Red Sea. They track the missing man from China to India to a satan-worshiping sect that exists to this day in Iraq to the Pyramids of Giza. But they are not alone, being pursued by a Japanese secret agent, a deadly female subordinate, and an Indian magician.