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"I'm afraid you're right," agreed Worrals sadly. "Excitement is like a drug. The more you have the more you want, and when you can't get it the old nerves begin to twitch."
Since Worrals acquitted herself so well in the last two books, she's asked if she'd be willing to fly a tiny unarmed plane with foldable wings (the better to hide it) to occupied France so she can fly messages back from a French spy network. Naturally, she brings Frecks. (Poor Frecks, no authorities ever seem to think she was the key to victory even though she often is.)
Worrals and Frecks set up at a decrepit chateau, which they are nonplussed to discover is also inhabited by 1) their main contact, a depressed and apathetic old man, 2) his not-all-there son given to frequent fits of maniacal laughter, 3) an unexpected squad of Nazis. Not what you want when the only place you have to park your airplane is the chateau's immense wine cellar...
Homing pigeons, presumed dead, atmospherically melancholy chateaux, death by antique crossbow, and a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun: this book has it all. It's particularly good with spy vs spy shenanigans. At one point Worrals muses that of five people in a room, all but maybe one were using false identities. Later, we have an English spy pretending to be a German spy pretending to be an English spy.
The two sets of spies independently working on the same missions were one of my favorite parts. The part where the coded message and its source book keep appearing and disappearing was both legitimately tense and a bit funny, with the boy and girl spy pairs sneaking around each other like couples in a bedroom farce.
I was aggravated by the existence of the "half-wit" Lucien at first, but it's retrospectively hilarious that he's a spy whose idea of dodging suspicion by pretending to be mentally not all there mostly consisted of laughing maniacally every few minutes.
Johns also did "my plane got stolen by a Nazi and then crashed due to actions taken by different Nazis before the eyes of my best friend who now thinks I'm dead" in Biggles Sweeps the Desert but it's a fantastic bit and this version has different and very fun details. Worrals getting her plane stolen partly because she couldn't let the caged homing pigeons starve was very sweet, and Frecks' reaction to her supposed fiery death was devastating. Frecks doesn't even try to escape because with Worrals dead, she'd rather die too!
I also loved the multiple iterations of "act normal in front of the Gestapo officer when..." (You've just seen that your beloved friend is alive after all, the captured English officer is a good friend, the nun is a Gestapo officer in a wimple, etc.)
Like the other Worrals books I've read, this one is not only implicitly but explicitly feminist. While Worrals is perfectly willing to use Nazi preconceptions about women to her advantage, she does not tolerate anyone on her own side viewing women as less capable than men or implying that her success was due to chivalry rather her own efforts.
Johns has a surprisingly good understanding of what it's like to be a minority in this context and have to simultaneously deal with risking your life, not being allowed to do things solely because of your gender, having some people assume you're not as good as a man and others try to overprotect you, and, in particularly low moments, wondering whether maybe everyone is right about what women can and can't do.
It's accurate to describe the Worrals books as "Biggles, but with women," but it's equally accurate to describe them as "Biggles, but on extra-hard mode." I assume through conversations with his female pilot buddies on whom he based the characters, Johns has a surprisingly sensitive understanding that Worrals and Frecks can do everything Biggles and his crew can do, but they have to do it backwards and in high heels.
Possibly relatedly, Worrals and Frecks have yet to actually kill anyone, though they've both made very solid efforts in that direction. (In the first book Worrals shoots down a plane but the pilot survives, in this one a male ally kills the Nazi before Frecks can brain him with a poker, etc.) I wonder if that was a bridge too far for Johns' publishers? It really doesn't seem like Johns himself would have a problem with it. Frecks is ferocious in up-close combat, and Worrals has the cool nerve of a fighter pilot.
The ebook includes the original illustrations, of which my favorite is a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun. You can obtain it for free at Faded Page
Since Worrals acquitted herself so well in the last two books, she's asked if she'd be willing to fly a tiny unarmed plane with foldable wings (the better to hide it) to occupied France so she can fly messages back from a French spy network. Naturally, she brings Frecks. (Poor Frecks, no authorities ever seem to think she was the key to victory even though she often is.)
Worrals and Frecks set up at a decrepit chateau, which they are nonplussed to discover is also inhabited by 1) their main contact, a depressed and apathetic old man, 2) his not-all-there son given to frequent fits of maniacal laughter, 3) an unexpected squad of Nazis. Not what you want when the only place you have to park your airplane is the chateau's immense wine cellar...
Homing pigeons, presumed dead, atmospherically melancholy chateaux, death by antique crossbow, and a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun: this book has it all. It's particularly good with spy vs spy shenanigans. At one point Worrals muses that of five people in a room, all but maybe one were using false identities. Later, we have an English spy pretending to be a German spy pretending to be an English spy.
The two sets of spies independently working on the same missions were one of my favorite parts. The part where the coded message and its source book keep appearing and disappearing was both legitimately tense and a bit funny, with the boy and girl spy pairs sneaking around each other like couples in a bedroom farce.
I was aggravated by the existence of the "half-wit" Lucien at first, but it's retrospectively hilarious that he's a spy whose idea of dodging suspicion by pretending to be mentally not all there mostly consisted of laughing maniacally every few minutes.
Johns also did "my plane got stolen by a Nazi and then crashed due to actions taken by different Nazis before the eyes of my best friend who now thinks I'm dead" in Biggles Sweeps the Desert but it's a fantastic bit and this version has different and very fun details. Worrals getting her plane stolen partly because she couldn't let the caged homing pigeons starve was very sweet, and Frecks' reaction to her supposed fiery death was devastating. Frecks doesn't even try to escape because with Worrals dead, she'd rather die too!
I also loved the multiple iterations of "act normal in front of the Gestapo officer when..." (You've just seen that your beloved friend is alive after all, the captured English officer is a good friend, the nun is a Gestapo officer in a wimple, etc.)
Like the other Worrals books I've read, this one is not only implicitly but explicitly feminist. While Worrals is perfectly willing to use Nazi preconceptions about women to her advantage, she does not tolerate anyone on her own side viewing women as less capable than men or implying that her success was due to chivalry rather her own efforts.
Johns has a surprisingly good understanding of what it's like to be a minority in this context and have to simultaneously deal with risking your life, not being allowed to do things solely because of your gender, having some people assume you're not as good as a man and others try to overprotect you, and, in particularly low moments, wondering whether maybe everyone is right about what women can and can't do.
It's accurate to describe the Worrals books as "Biggles, but with women," but it's equally accurate to describe them as "Biggles, but on extra-hard mode." I assume through conversations with his female pilot buddies on whom he based the characters, Johns has a surprisingly sensitive understanding that Worrals and Frecks can do everything Biggles and his crew can do, but they have to do it backwards and in high heels.
Possibly relatedly, Worrals and Frecks have yet to actually kill anyone, though they've both made very solid efforts in that direction. (In the first book Worrals shoots down a plane but the pilot survives, in this one a male ally kills the Nazi before Frecks can brain him with a poker, etc.) I wonder if that was a bridge too far for Johns' publishers? It really doesn't seem like Johns himself would have a problem with it. Frecks is ferocious in up-close combat, and Worrals has the cool nerve of a fighter pilot.
The ebook includes the original illustrations, of which my favorite is a Gestapo officer disguised as a nun. You can obtain it for free at Faded Page
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The book was published in 1942, so presumably written after the fall of France in June 1940.
W. E. Johns was born in 1893, so sufragettes would have been in the news during his teens. By 1942 he was 49, so well into middle age by the standards of the times: he'd married, separated (divorce was next to impossible in the UK back then), cohabited with a new partner, and had an adult son. Finally, flying and "air-mindedness" were technologies with modernist/future-oriented associations in the first half of the 20th century, kind of like computing, AI, and space travel in the latter half.
It's dangerous to psychoanalyze people from their wikipedia bio synopses, but I'm willing to guess that he was socially progressive (by Generation 1893 standards), future-oriented (he also wrote MG SF in the 1950s), and mature enough to empathize his way into lives somewhat dissimilar to his own lived experience.
Which is why we're still reading him!
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I don't know the term "air-mindedness."
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.... And then he'll do an abrupt 180 into "the most racist thing you've ever read." It's so bizarre. I feel like anyone he's personally met and talked to, he can write really well, better than many white male writers of his time period, in fact - and anyone else is this raging stereotype. IT'S SO WEIRD.
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And Li Chi is great! I love the way he cheerfully uses Algy and Biggles in that short story, and he’s equally interesting in his return in Delivers the Goods - I love the bit where he challenges Biggles on the idea that a machete is a ‘uncivilised’ way to kill people, pointing out that bombs and machine guns are not actually any kinder or nicer.
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Li Chi and Admiral Naismith would get on like a house on fire :-D
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Li Chi and Admiral Naismith would get on like a house on fire :-D
The mind boggles. xD
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Li Chi and Admiral Naismith would get on like a house on fire :-D
Lots of screaming and jumping out of windows?
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I ran into a similar thing a few years back with John Russell—well-portrayed, three-dimensional non-white characters coexisting unpredictably with all the period-typical racism and then some—and it is really weird.
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They can sense that her name isn't in the title. She and Algy should commiserate with each other.
This is an incredible premise. And I bet you're right about the publisher not wanting Worrals and Frecks to kill anyone. (Even Nazis, publisher? Let them kill a couple of Nazis as a treat.)
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I shall assume the books were very slightly wartime censored and their actual kill count was higher than stated.
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And I loved the sheer number of spies and people in disguise in this one! And the pigeons...
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Does it work?
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