In the 1920s, Aragón started writing articles for a small newspaper in Madrid, which were modestly successful.
In 1924, these articles brought him to the attention of a book editor who hired him to work on the manuscript for The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks by Spanish novelist Emilio Carrere (which would later go on to become a film of the same name). The contract was ostensibly for error correction, though many believe that the novel had not been finished by Carrere—especially as the novel is mostly a cobbling together of previously written short stories by Carrere—and that substantial portions of it were in fact written by Aragón.[1][4][5]
While Aragón wouldn't be credited for any creative work on the novel, this would still lead him to his own publishing contract, and in that same year he wrote two novels of his own in quick succession: Viaje al fondo del océano (Journey to the bottom of the ocean) and Cuarenta mil kilómetros a bordo del aeroplano "Fantasmo" (Forty Thousand Kilometers Aboard the Airplane Fantasma). As might be suggested by their titles, these works were somewhat derivative of two Jules Verne novels, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the World in Eighty Days, respectively, as well as other elements of Verne's Voyages extraordinaires.[2]
He began working for the Spanish utility Fábrica de gas de Madrid (or "Gasómetro"), but still supplemented his income with writing work, sometimes publishing pulp stories under the pen name “Captain Sirius”—with martial-sounding pen names being common under fascist Francoist Spain—and sometimes writing academic textbooks on accounting under his own name.[6]
His next novel wouldn't be published until five years later, Los piratas del aire, a Yellow Peril novel in which a villainous man named Abdahalla-Fan, along with his gorilla henchman, pilots a dragon-shaped war zeppelin to threaten all of India. He is defeated by the English hero Lord Ewerard Gleenmore.[7][8]
He stopped writing in 1964, after which not much is known of him until his death in 1973. Several of his works were translated into French and Hungarian, but he has seldom, if ever, been translated into English.[2]
