BEFORE he created the seminal superhero Doc Savage in 1932, Missouri writer LESTER DENT (1904-1959) mastered most of the pulp-fiction genres popular at the dawn of the Great Depression. Breaking into the field with a string of aviationcentered adventure stories, Dent quickly branched out into other sub-genres, penning Westerns inspired by his upbringing in Wyoming and Oklahoma, acclaimed hardboiled detective mysteries, and briefly, several so-called "airwar" tales set during World War I. "Hate Hop" belongs to what its practitioners dubbed "yammering-gun" pulp yarns because they invariably centered around bloody aerial dogfights of the War to End All Wars.
