Jack D. Hunter - The Blue Max

I had been reading a lot about the WWI fighter pilots and saw this book while bookstore browsing. 

I was excited to find a novel about aces in WWI and this would also be the first adult book I had ever bought. It said on the cover that they were making a movie from this book, so it had to be good, right? And it was, though the hero Bruno Stachel was more dissolute than I expected heroes to be. 

The movie did come out the next year and I did see it, and was impressed by excellent aerial combat scenes, as well as by Ursula Andress, of course!

I only found out recently that a few decades after writing The Blue Max, Jack D. Hunter wrote two more books that followed the dissolute hero Bruno Stachel into the Luftwaffe in WWII and later into disenchantment with the Nazi cause. All the books in the trilogy are available for loan from the Internet Archive: