John Best
Author, Writer, Storyteller
Biography
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John Best was born in Philadelphia in 1950. His father was mechanical engineer specializing in tool design; his mother was a homemaker who had been a bookkeeper before she married. Like almost every kid on his block in northeast Philly, he attended diocesan grade schools. His teachers—cloistered nuns—made it clear they believed he was not using his full potential in elementary school. Nevertheless, his parents sacrificed to send him to a private Catholic prep school, and it was there that he began to develop his life-long appreciation for the life of the mind. He majored in psychology as an undergraduate at his liberal arts institution, at first believing that he might have a career as some sort of psychotherapist. That changed in graduate school where the intoxicating allure of scientific research pulled him in. He earned his Ph.D. in 1977 in experimental psychology, specializing in cognitive psychology.
The research he conducted in his 36 year-long academic career focused on two problems of cognition. The first of these had to do with strategic thinking, namely with regard to specifying the sources of information that people used to develop an internal representation in a problem solving task. Later, his research focused on the problem of implicature, and the variables that aided or thwarted peoples’ ability to use conditional (“if-then”) reasoning.
He retired from academia in 2013, although that did not put an end to his academic or scholarly writing. Since then, his first book, A Professor at the End of Time, was an analysis of the problems bedeviling the continued existence of the professoriate in the US, especially for those professors who labor at non-elite institutions. It was published in 2017. His second book, The Men in Our Lives, focused on the application of principles from the cognitive psychology of concept formation and memory that may potentially clarify men’s thought processes as they access and use their concepts of masculinity and manhood.
None of this can account for his writing fiction, a phenomenon that has emerged only in the last few years of his life. While some of his fiction has at least the pretensions of being “literary,” the Jake Hammer saga is a hundred miles away from that. What is its origin? Chalk it up to the desire to create a well-crafted product that enables him to be part of the entertainment industry, broadly defined.
At the personal level, since the death of his wife, and the adulthood of their two sons, he lives alone in a small town in a rural Illinois county.
About Me
Given that I’ve included a Biography on my website, having another page with the title “About Me” might seem redundant. I recently read Jane Friedman’s book, “The Business of Being a Writer” (which, if you have any interest in becoming a writer yourself, I can recommend you read, and read early in the game). Friedman discusses the importance of branding yourself as a writer, creating an identity that lets readers know what’s important to you, including “one or two human touches” that might build a bridge between writer and reader. With that in mind, here are three paragraphs that might tell you a little more “about me.”
This first bit actually has something to do with the Jake Hammer story, although it may not seem that way when you start reading. My wife and I raised two boys. Like, I bet, almost every parent in America in the late 20th century we bought Lego building bricks for them to play with. The older son enjoyed them when he was at a certain age and then left them behind for other activities. But the younger son was really into them. He and I spent hours and hours building together, and then playing with the various models we made. He’s all grown up now, but the Lego experience left a mark on me. I still buy Lego sets sometimes, and play with them. So The Lego Group’s decision to release opaque “mystery” packs, each containing a single specially designed minifigure®, hit me like an arrow when I discovered Lego Minifigure Series 11 in the Fall of 2013. I bought one “mystery pack” on a whim. Inside the package was a British constable, and even my wife thought it was “really cute.” I bought another one. This time it was a welder, and a thought came to me from who knows where: “This guy could be a mechanic for another guy who owns an airplane.” And so the Lego minifigure became the basis for Jake’s ace mechanic, Miguel “Sparks” Gonzalez. Along with the British “bobby” (and the numerous other figures that followed), Miguel resides on a window sill in my kitchen.
I enjoy working in my vegetable garden. I’m not a big time gardener: I don’t have a huge space in my backyard, and I can’t say that I grow a lot of different vegetables either. It’s also true that my aspirations each year are higher than my achievements. But still, it’s rewarding, especially the feeling of bringing something to life. Each Spring, I get all fired up, turning over the soil and spreading compost from the pile I have carefully developed over the previous year. And the most fun is putting in the tiny plants and getting them off to a good start. Sometimes on a Summer evening, when I’m out watering, and the sweat is dripping off me and the mosquitoes are threatening to carry me away, I have been known to wonder why I bother. But as soon as I bite into a tomato I have grown myself, all the work it took seems to just melt away. Nothing like it!
Speaking of food, but at the other end of the spectrum from garden grown-vegetables both in terms of nutrition and ecology, I have a confession to make: I could enter competitive pancake eating contests and, I think, be successful. I love to make them, always have. And I love to eat them too, any which way they are fixed. Blueberries in them? Sure! Banana slices? Why not! But my favorite is still the simple unadorned pancake with butter and pure maple syrup. Of which, I typically eat a dozen or so for breakfast on Sunday morning. Which means I have to run a couple of extra miles during the week to lose the calories. But it’s so worth it.
The Stories
First of all, thank you for finding your way to my website. I hope you’ll enjoy all the stories that will eventually appear here. The first story, Jake Hammer and the Merciless Intruders, is my attempt at writing in a genre known in its day, that is, in the 1930s, as “aviation pulp fiction.” The term “pulp fiction” applies to any of the inexpensive magazines that appeared in America in the 1920s through the 1950s, printed on poor quality paper, and designed simply as ephemeral entertainment. Specific genres proliferated: Detective stories, Westerns, science fiction, and horror were just a few. And in an age where the airplane was a machine that somehow simultaneously communicated danger, glamor, and excitement about the future, dozens of aviation pulps thrived. Devotees who perhaps needed an escape from the economic woes of the period read pulps like “Flying Aces,” whose publication started in 1928 and continued in a number of different formats until 2014, and “Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds,” published in the 1930s. Readers seeking to satisfy their craving for adventure might turn to the work of writers like Archie Whitehouse, Joe Archibald, Donald Keyhoe, Robert Sidney Bowen, and Major George Fielding Eliot, as they cranked out one story after another of thrilling aviation action.
The content of aviation pulp fiction centered around airplanes of course, and the derring-do of the pilots who flew them. Typically, a story might involve a pilot from the Great War (i.e., World War I) who finds himself (and it was always a “him”) getting into a series of scrapes. The story I’ve written as the lead-off content for my site, Jake Hammer and the Merciless Intruders, is an example of that type. As aviation pulp stories go, Jake is fairly typical. But sometimes, the stories could be seriously weird. For example, the aviation pulp series, Coffin Kirk, published from 1937 to 1941, featured a pilot, the eponymous Brian Kirk, who sought to avenge the murder of his father by a Nazi spy ring. Brian took to the skies aided by his tail gunner and factotum, Tank, who happened to be a gorilla who could not only speak, but who could also repair airplanes!
Although my story does not have a talking gorilla, I have deliberately blended historical facts and realities into the made-up world in which Jake lives. For example, although Adolf Hitler did not actually come to power in Germany until 1933, I needed him, and his Nazis, as the quintessential bad guys of the 20th century. So here they are in 1930. Obviously, California did not try to secede from the rest of the US that year, so the Nazi’s attempts to use Mexico as its proxy in an invasion are fanciful. However, during World War I, Germany actually did propose conditions for a military alliance between the two nations in which Mexico would recover lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and elsewhere. And this event, encapsulated historically as “The Zimmermann Telegram,” would definitely be part of the mental landscape of the characters in Jake Hammer, creating a plausibility, in their minds, for the events of the story. Similarly, I wanted the aircraft flown by Jake and his nemesis to have a certain “cool” factor that the airplanes actually flying in 1930 did not possess. To achieve that, I imported a couple of aircraft that were not operational until World War II. Readers may have some pleasure in figuring out what it was that Jake and Hans Dietrich were flying. But those who don’t want to bother following the trail of clues given in the story might just look at the blog entry where I spill the beans about the planes’ identities.
I’d like to add a final word about writing style. Sometimes the authors of pulp fiction were great stylists who went on to acclaim in the wider literary world. Dashiell Hammett is an example. Mostly though, pulp authors owed their success to one overarching gift: They could generate (and this, I believe, is the appropriate term) huge amounts of serviceable prose very quickly. One of the authors I mentioned, Robert Sidney Bowen, could regularly disgorge himself of 10,000 words a day! And he was adamant that each story be published as written: No editing. Consequently, much of the writing in the original pulps was very uneven. In homage to the period, in Jake Hammer, I’ve tried to duplicate aspects of that style. As you read, if you come across a passage whose emotional impact seems hyperbolically exaggerated, an analogy that is excessively florid, a word choice that is way over the top, I hope you’ll smile in recognition at an attempt to duplicate a style that has long since departed the literary scene.