In a half-dozen previous novels, headed by "The High and the Mighty," Ernest Gann has at times effectively drawn upon his air and ground experience as a multimillion-mile pilot. The technical litany of a plane in flight. The diversely selected passengers bound by a taut situation to which they respond in diverse ways. The aloof and lonely skipper occupied with the terrible responsibility of craft and human lives. Add a bravura plot to hold dramatic material intact for passage in and out of the...

In such novels as "Blaze of Noon" and "The High and the Mighty," Ernest K. Gann struck some memorable chords in the orchestration of flight. Now, for the first time, he steps from behind the shield of fiction to stand autobiographically exposed in "Fate Is the Hunter."…. It is a tribute to Mr. Gann that in his review of his own stirring years in the skies, the reader is often quick to forget that this is not fiction. Mr. Gann's subtle technique of draw...

In "Island in the Sky," Ernest K. Gann, veteran airline transport pilot, tells a story that transmits the feelings, the thoughts, the impulses of men who come alive in the stratosphere. It possesses the understatement of individuals who need no words to explain actions, the poetry of airborne creatures who know the fulfillment of release from the earth. Mr. Gann's story is concerned with the flight of Dooley and the forced landing of his plane, the "Corsair," in the unchar...

Toward the middle of Ernest K. Gann's artful and satirical new novel one of his characters, a dissolute journalist, cries out: "My job is to write about the creation of the most vicious, insulting slap in the face that God has ever received from the hand of man!" In a sense, this is just what the author himself has done. For "The Trouble With Lazy Ethel," which is built around the preparations for a thermonuclear explosion at a remote atoll in the Pacific, is really a look...

Who is Ernest K. Gann? Critics of style will get the answer in one: a committee consisting of the ghost of Herman Melville and a North American kinswoman of Mrs Malaprop. Melville has contributed the folksy archaisms ('aloft or alow') and the whimsy: 'an aircraft waiting for the approach of its driver—hanging its head in shame'. Mrs Malaprop's American cousin has devised a startling new meaning for connive (radio signals help pilots 'twist, connive, and slip ...

[In "Fiddler's Green"] a young San Francisco dope peddler named Bruno Felkin, having murdered an underworld rival, accidentally comes aboard the Taaga. Later, finding himself some miles at sea with the boat's captain and his son, Bruno decides that this is a good place to hide out, and he signs on as a crew member. The story adumbrates Bruno's relationship with the captain's son, a fisherman who would rather be a dope peddler, and with the sea, which eventually conq...

Ernest K. Gann writes best sellers about flying and fighting…. Mr. Gann's heroes, whether at war in ancient Masada or World War I France, are usually laconic, fiercely self-reliant loners, cynical sentimentalists, promiscuous with death, faithful to a pal. Oddly, "The Aviator," seems to belong on that nostalgic cottage shelf, to have the descriptive feel and earnest tender style of popular novels written three decades ago; it might have appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post...

Getting the mail through Dead Man's Gulch has been a profitable occupation for novelists since the days of the pony express. Mr. Gann brings the subject up to date with a novel ["Blaze of Noon"] about the pioneering days of air mail and shows that neither time nor technology has daunted the spirit of adventure which attends the delivery of a first-class letter…. Mr. Gann is at his best in transporting you through a cumulonimbus cloud, or landing you at a fogged-in airport. When t...

There have been books about the men who fly bombers, torpedo planes and fighters. Mr. Gann's book ["Island in the Sky"] Ernest K(ellogg) Gann 1910– Courtesy of Ernest K. Gannis written about men who, like himself, are peacetime commercial airline pilots but who today are flying in war. Like all airmen, they live in a world apart and usually they find it difficult to convey to outsiders the sensations of existence ...

The four MacDonalds, soon increased to five by marriage and depleted by air tragedy, are the heroes of ["Blaze of Noon"] Mr. Gann tells their story smoothly and well, though its tone is just a shade too slick to let you think of the author as a flyer first and a professional scribe second…. Full of daring duels with cumulo-nimbus, complete with that inevitable tense huddle around the airport radio, sweating the comrade aloft down through the blizzard, "Blaze of Noon" is pr...

The story of Ernest Gann's fourth novel, "Fiddler's Green," tells of Bruno Felkin's jarring impact upon the lives of Hamil and his son Carl, upon his own girl, Connie, and on the men whose boats and lives centered about a commercial fishing wharf in San Francisco Bay…. The author of this tale is himself an adventurous man, whose previous novels have been about planes and flying men. He writes good adventure stories and his people are not stock characters. There is t...

[With "The Antagonists"] Mr. Gann has attempted to write a historical novel with contemporary relevance. Masada was the last bastion of Jewish resistance after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 A.D., the place where 960 zealots, led by Eleazar ben Yair defied the Tenth Legion commanded by General Silva and chose suicide to Roman captivity. What took place there is intensely exciting history. Not even Mr. Gann's lifeless portrayals of the main characters in his novel can d...

Ernest Gann has taken an historical event of the highest drama and turned it into fiction of high quality [in "The Antagonists"]. General Flavius Silva and Eleazar ben Yair are the antagonists of the title, and they are worthy of each other. Flavius is supremely confident in the might of Rome; Eleazar has firm faith in the power of Jahweh…. In this age, when there are few ideals that seem worth dying for (or living for, either!) it may be difficult to enter into the spirit that created ...

[One] of the really big money-makers of the winter season should be "Twilight for the Gods."… Mr. Gann, who wrote "The High and the Mighty" a few years back, is a lucky fellow. He knows just who his customers are and what they like, and he serves it up to them by the platterful. The feast calls for enormous helpings and no surprises, since each course must be as easy to recognize as it is preposterous…. Mr. Gann's slapdash novel will make a terrific movie, fu...

Ernie Gann is well known to lovers of tales of the air. His classic novels "Fate Is the Hunter" and "The High and the Mighty"—and the movies made from them—captured the magic as well as the tragedy of the early days of aviation. With his new book, "The Aviator," Mr. Gann once again explores this familiar skyscape….

Previously a skillful producer of broad-shouldered adventures, Ernest Gann tries for something more like the Ivy Look in ["The Trouble with Lazy Ethel"] and manages to be more or less continually entertaining. His heroine this time is no member of the nubility, but a young lady with the general contours of a Notre Dame tackle. His hero (so laconic as to seem at times retarded) is a weatherman who can be loosely characterized as scared of girls…. The reader should be warned that material...

In ["Of Good and Evil"] Mr. Gann follows the attempts of the harassed fuzz to keep pace with crime, or at least to come out even. Like most authors who study closely the workings of an honest police force, Mr. Gann is less suspicious of "police brutality" than of the civilian horrendousness that fills the daily blotter with maimed old men, bludgeoned cashiers and corpses of varied origin. And he pleads the cause of the cops in sincere if ponderous terms. This novel has been writt...

Mr. Gann, a forthright and thoroughly masculine writer, misses fire with ["Soldier of Fortune," the] account of an attractive American woman's lonely search through the Hong Kong underworld for news of her husband, an American photographer who is mysteriously missing in Red China. The woman, Jane Hoyt, is real enough, but the underworld she explores is much too gentle and approachable to seem true, and its chief figure, an adventurer named Hank Lee, only occasionally convincing as his a...

[Brain 2000 is a sophomoric] future-fantasy about a child genius and his efforts to avert global catastrophe. Gann's plodding style didn't seriously detract from his straight novels, but it brings this attempt at comedy down to earth with an extremely dull thud. A miscalculation best forgotten as quickly as possible, and certain to disappoint those gripped by the heroics of The High and the Mighty and Fate Is the Hunter. Paul Stuewe, "American Thrillers: 'Firestarter...