Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates

For some time, Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates by Martin Caidin was one of the Indy novels I wanted to read the most, but my decision to read the novels in order meant it took a little time to get there.

Why did I want to read it? Because the title is very exciting – it absolutely sounds like a 1940s serial, befitting the Indiana Jones franchise – and the cover is excellent. What’s not to like about that?

However online comments about Sky Pirates always gave me pause for thought as I worked my way through the other novels. I’m paraphrasing here but, “The author is totally obsessed with aviation to the detriment of the novel…” and, “I don’t think the author has even seen an Indiana Jones film, because the character is so unlike Indy…” were common things I would read and I’d think, come on, could a story be published in a novel line like this if it was really that far off-base? The line had editors, didn’t it? Wouldn’t they have pulled the author back onto the straight and narrow if he was so wildly off-piste? Surely?

After a satisfying opening – where an exciting raid happens on a train just like the pre-credits sequence of an action-adventure movie – I thought all those reviews saying this novel was absolute hot garbage must have been wrong or at least exaggerated. The opening is quite good even if there’s the slight red flag of more aviation detail than is needed. But from there, yes, the novel indeed goes off-course.

It’s like Caidin’s had an idea for a story that’s part spy adventure, part Ocean’s Eleven, with a Danny Ocean style mastermind leading a team to complete a big mission. Instead of just keeping that in his top drawer until it found a publisher, Caidin’s got the Indiana Jones gig, pulled out this story, set it back in the 1930s, and performed a find/replace on the lead character’s name. I’m only half-joking, sadly.

(Given anachronisms in the text like the town of Truth or Consequences existing in this story – which is set in 1930 – when it didn’t exist until a couple of decades later, I get the feeling this was originally a storyline set in the 1950s or 60s and hurriedly converted to a 1930s Indiana Jones adventure.)

There are multiple times in the story where Indy, apart from not acting like himself, doesn’t even talk like himself. He often says incredibly British expressions that don’t suit the character and which I really can’t imagine Harrison Ford uttering on-screen. This is interesting because Caidin himself is American, but he seems to get so engrossed writing the story’s British characters that when Indy interacts with them, the author doesn’t have the patience to write Indy’s dialogue differently and authentically.

Put the dialogue to one side, though. Indy’s entire character is all wrong. It’s frankly bizarre to have Indy as a very cold, calculating and even quite mysterious guy – extremely unlike the make-it-up-as-you-go-along, seat-of-the-pants adventurer we know him to be. Add to that he’s such a game-playing Sherlock Holmes level genius in this story, the US military has basically put itself in his hands and anything he needs – including access to military bases and a state-of-the-art aircraft build – is his to command. Does that sound very ‘Indiana Jones’ to you? Even James Bond doesn’t get this much government support.

And now that I’ve broken the seal and mentioned the building of that aircraft, let’s discuss the aviation this story. Oh lord, the aviation. Let’s be clear: Caidin is obviously an aviation nut – and was also a pilot who did some genuinely impressive things in his career – and puts this to use throughout the novel.

There’s loads and loads about the history of aviation, and the finer details of how to fly a plane. I felt like I could get into the cockpit and have a crack myself after reading this novel. He even has Indy become intensely interested in becoming a pilot, seemingly just to write scenes where even more pilot talk can happen. The afterword to the novel is yet more aviation history and information, with Caidin justifying how all the aviation-related content in the novel (giant airships, saucer shaped fighters, the combat build of the Ford Trimotor, etc), is not only plausible, but gives real-life examples to make his case.

In some ways, this reminded me of the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian (think Master and Commander), where O’Brian always goes into insane detail about how sailing ships operated in the Napoleonic era. The difference, however, is you open an O’Brian novel expecting to hear all about sailing ships in great detail, because that’s what the stories are about and you likely have a real interest in it. Meanwhile, you don’t open an Indiana Jones novel expecting to be hit over the head, repeatedly, with aviation information on almost every page. It’s insane. You open an Indiana Jones novel thinking Indy will be breaking into some ancient tomb, and finding some cool artifact, and maybe having an adversary looking for the same thing… that sort of vibe. This novel gives you nothing of the sort.

Indeed, most of the novel barely features any information about an adversary at all. We know that UFO-like objects have been seen in the skies, and there’s some sort of big mothership… but that’s it.

The first 200 pages plus – count ’em, I’m not joking – are all about Indy gathering a team of hot-shots (who are largely there just to talk about aviation a lot), to go on the hunt for these UFOs. Even when we get to some information about who’s behind the UFOs, however, it’s not some clever, ‘show don’t tell’ and a grand reveal after waiting so long, but a quick info-dump of a bunch of stuff that’s happened, off-screen so to speak, in years prior to the novel’s setting. We’re beyond 250 pages before we even get a scene set on the mothership of the UFOs and although we’re introduced to some characters by name, they never do anything of note or even appear in the novel again. It’s like Caidin had no interest in that side of the story, so simply didn’t write it. Without it, however, we really don’t have a great insight into what Indy’s up against. Even the resolution at the end leaves a bunch of huge, unanswered questions.

At times reading this, I tried to imagine this was Indiana Jones if he’d remained in the intelligence community. When you watch the Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series, there are episodes where Indy is working in intelligence and ends up in some wild escapades – but he ditches that potential career path before going home to America. So while it’s a road not travelled, if I switch my brain off and pretend we’re in an alternate universe, I can imagine the situations in this novel to be somewhat realistic to an Indiana Jones universe, albeit an Indiana Jones universe that never happened. And maybe the author had that in mind, with this novel coming out a year after episodes had aired on TV, featuring Indy as a spy. There’s even a line near the end of the story about Indy serving in the Belgian army during WW1, so there’s absolutely some knowledge of the TV series in the background of the Indy character this story.

Of course I fully acknowledge that I’m clutching at straws there because ‘in-universe’ (which is where it’s supposed to be set; there’s no indication of an Indiana Jones multiverse!), this really makes no sense as an Indiana Jones story at all. But as an intellectual sort of exercise it was almost fun to try and wrap my mind around Indy being a very different kind of character, in a very different kind of situation. But it’s certainly not how many readers would be able to see it (having not seen the Chronicles series and having no knowledge of Indy’s intelligence background), and I think it’s a poor novel in general where you have to imagine a literal alternate timeline for the lead character for it to make any real sense.

So, Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates… is it as bad as people say? Yes. Is there too much aviation in it? Yes. Is it like a novel written for a different lead character altogether? Yes. Will you find it unsatisfying if you have even a passing interest in Indiana Jones? I think so. In summary, while there’s a story here, which goes from A to B to C and the author clearly has some ideas he wants to convey alongside real-world knowledge that he’s trying to work into an action-adventure tale to make it seem more real – and that’s commendable in a broad sense – this is a total mis-fire as far as an Indy adventure goes. 4/10.