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"Suffering Icarus!"
Biggles learns that his old enemy/crush, the German spy Erich von Stalhein, is being held in a gulag on a wretched little island because he refused to kill Biggles! Biggles agrees to rescue him on the condition that no post-rescue conditions be put on von Stalhein. It would be mean and unfair, Biggles explains, to rescue him only on the condition that he provide British intelligence with information.
At this point (post-war) Biggles is living with Algy, Ginger, and someone named Bertie, whose intro book I apparently missed and so am assuming is Wooster. Honestly, he acts exactly like Bertie Wooster if he was a fighter pilot.
The prison island is very vividly awful. The briefing mentioned that large crabs are dried and ground to flour to make a kind of bread and it only goes downhill from there. Biggles & friends meet up with a Russian with a very well-justified grudge, who plots to kill the camp commander with an axe – not because he’s just that angry, but because all he has is an axe.
The rescue of von Stalhein is very clever and suspenseful, and he and Biggles have some good moments together.
This is one of the darker books in the series, mostly because of the well-evoked setting and the vivid depiction of ordinary people driven to despair. They can rescue von Stalhein and one other prisoner, but the larger situation is out of their hands.
Have a Biggles/von Stalhein h/c fic in which they find the one cozy spot on the entire island.
Biggles learns that his old enemy/crush, the German spy Erich von Stalhein, is being held in a gulag on a wretched little island because he refused to kill Biggles! Biggles agrees to rescue him on the condition that no post-rescue conditions be put on von Stalhein. It would be mean and unfair, Biggles explains, to rescue him only on the condition that he provide British intelligence with information.
At this point (post-war) Biggles is living with Algy, Ginger, and someone named Bertie, whose intro book I apparently missed and so am assuming is Wooster. Honestly, he acts exactly like Bertie Wooster if he was a fighter pilot.
The prison island is very vividly awful. The briefing mentioned that large crabs are dried and ground to flour to make a kind of bread and it only goes downhill from there. Biggles & friends meet up with a Russian with a very well-justified grudge, who plots to kill the camp commander with an axe – not because he’s just that angry, but because all he has is an axe.
The rescue of von Stalhein is very clever and suspenseful, and he and Biggles have some good moments together.
This is one of the darker books in the series, mostly because of the well-evoked setting and the vivid depiction of ordinary people driven to despair. They can rescue von Stalhein and one other prisoner, but the larger situation is out of their hands.
Have a Biggles/von Stalhein h/c fic in which they find the one cozy spot on the entire island.
