The Velvet Ape, by David C. Holmes (Permabooks, 1958). After he died on June 26, 2004, an obituary in The Washington Post recalled that Holmes was “a retired Navy captain who wrote fiction and nonfiction books.” A native of Spokane, Washington, he’d graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and “served on destroyer-mine sweepers in the Pacific during World War II. He became a naval aviator in 1947 and later was part of a hurricane-hunter squadron. His specialty became guided missile systems. His final active duty assignment was at the Washington Navy Yard. In the 1970s and 1980s, he did consulting work for the Naval Research Lab on the global positioning satellite program.” In addition to The Velvet Ape, about a pilot who takes on a hazardous assignment in Central America (read the back-jacket copy here), Holmes wrote 11 other books, including Young People’s Book of Radar (1951), The Story of Weather (1963), and The Search for Life on Other Worlds (1966). He was 84 years old when he breathed his last in Annapolis, Maryland.
Cover illustration by James Meese.
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