A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

"Great Jumping Jupiter!"

"Black Peril" has nothing to do with race. The main villain has a black beard and in fact is nicknamed Blackbeard. I thought I'd better put that up front.

I started this because I thought it was the one with the secret island hideout, but it turned out to actually be the one that introduces Ginger. Biggles titles are even worse than Dick Francis titles when it comes to remembering which title goes with which book. They should just be called "The One Where Biggles Gets Homemade Dungeon Cake" and "The One Where Biggles Rescues Von Stalhein From A Gulag" and "The One With the Giant Squid."

Algy and Biggles are flying in their amphibious plane, the Vandal, when they are forced down by bad weather and, in a quite beautiful bit of descriptive writing, discover an underwater landing strip. This is part of a smuggling operation, and Biggles accidentally stows away on the smugglers' experimental plane. He makes a good effort to pretend to be some random person who knows nothing about flying, but is betrayed by his own engraved cigarette case which not only says "RAF" but also contains a photo of him in goggles. Things escalate from there.

In one of this book's multiple kidnappings followed by escapes, Biggles run straight into Ginger, a teenage runaway. Hilariously, Ginger turns out to not only be an aspiring pilot who's run away to join the RAF, but is a Biggles fanboy. He's delighted to get a chance to get to know Biggles and Algy and take part in an adventure; for their part, Biggles and Algy are not terribly perturbed by letting a runaway teenager tag along with them on dangerous adventures to other countries. This makes more sense when you remember that Biggles and Algy were both Ginger's age when they joined the RAF and were sent off to a war they were unlikely to survive.

Ginger is a fan of American movies and peppers his dialogue with borrowed slang. For the first part of the story, he's clearly seeing himself as a movie hero. Here he is with a gun, yelling at some bad guys in the distance.

"Stay back there!" yelled Ginger, "or I'll drill you like - like a... now what the dickens do they drill people like?" he growled. "Colander - that's it." Then, raising his voice, "I'll drill you guys into a colander - two colanders," he bellowed. Then, to himself, as he retreated down the drive, "That doesn't sound right to me; I'll have to look it up in a book."

Later in the book Ginger actually does shoot someone, very justifiably but also point-blank and by accident. In an understatedly heartbreaking scene, he tells Biggles how shaken he is and Biggles talks to him in a brisk but sensitive manner that suggests that he's had the "so you killed someone for the first time" conversation a number of times before.

This was a very fun book overall and Ginger was delightful. I didn't even miss the secret island hideout.

"He hid a Pernod card and bumped me on the boko when I tried to have a dekko at it."

Biggles fails to return from a secret mission, leaving his friends and fellow pilots Ginger, Algy, and Bertie Wooster puzzled and worried. They learn that he was trying to rescue a Sicilian princess in Monaco (long story), and the last anyone saw, he'd been shot, the princess had vanished, and they're both presumed dead. Ginger, Algy, and Bertie to the rescue!

They decide to split up once they're in Monaco, and the story splits with them. Their cover stories and what happens to them all depend on their backgrounds and personalities. Ginger, who doesn't speak French, impersonates a Spanish onion-seller and gets a bit too caught up in his role. The aristocrat Bertie impersonates a troubadour, and his adventure turns on the fact that he once owned a boat in Monaco. As we follow each of them in turn, we see them reacting to events that they don't understand but we do, because we saw one of the other guys encounter the same person or place. It's extremely fun and well-done.

Not only is the plot excellent and unexpected given the series it's in (Biggles doesn't appear till the book is almost over), but it's very atmospheric and full of cool little details. Ginger's cover almost gets blown because he has English onions rather than the sweeter Spanish ones. A location that could have been anywhere as it's mostly just plot-important is known for being abandoned except for a horde of feral cats. The lost princess is a complete badass and clearly the heroine of her own book. This book is consistently better and smarter and more fun than it really needed to be.

I highly recommend Biggles Fails to Return, but not as a first Biggles book. A lot of its fun is in how it upends the normal pattern of the series, and you need to be used to the normal pattern first.

"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.

"I'll keep an eye on you, my chicken."

Biggles is James "Biggles" Bigglesworth, ace pilot and adventurer. Biggles is a boys' adventure series of widely varying quality, but the good ones are legitimately good. Johns flew in WWI, and the series features realistic depictions of aviation and aerial combat from that time period, though the series later extends into WWII and post-war adventure. If you click on the author tag, you will find a post with more context on him and Biggles.

The other thing about Biggles is that he uses some truly unique epithets and exclamations. Maybe they were real slang? But no one else in the books says stuff like "Suffering rattlesnakes!

Biggles Flies East features the fantastic opening hook of Biggles getting mistaken for a different British pilot, a shady malcontent, and offered a job spying and flying for the Germans. Next thing he knows, he's been inserted as a double agent - a job which he isn't qualified for and which he dislikes very much, but which he turns out to be surprisingly good at.

Biggles has an extremely nervewracking time on every possible level. Not only does he need to maintain his cover, gather information, and regularly report back to his own side without getting caught, but the Germans quickly discover his piloting skills and want him to fight. For them. Against his own side. And that's not even taking into account his nemesis Erich von Stalhein, a spookily perceptive intelligence agent who seems to sense something off about Biggles...

This is basically an adventure story with elements like spies being given signet rings as identifiers, but if you take that stuff as a given, the book is surprisingly well-plotted, with some excellent twists. It plays the spy/undercover aspect to the hilt and is legitimately tense. It's extremely full of incident, and leans into the premise to an astonishing degree. Whatever your favorite undercover/imposter trope is, this book probably contains it.

Biggles is a very human character in this installment. He's uncomfortable with his job all the way, is terrified a lot of the time, and has a lot of compassion and fellow feeling for other soldiers, even if they're the enemy. He and von Stalhein have a fascinating relationship, very heavy on mutual respect and slashy vibes.

This makes the unintentional innuendo-by-language-drift moments even better. I'm talking about stuff like, "Not so fast, my cock," Biggles ejaculated.

I don't recall von Stalhein appearing in the books I read as a kid, which is too bad as one of my absolute favorite things is honorable enemies who would be friends if they weren't on opposite sides of the war, and sometimes are friends anyway but they must still meet in battle. I am pretty sure I got this from the Mahabharata, which I also read as a kid.

Von Stalhein is the archetype of the noble and honorable enemy. You see this type of character a lot in WWI fiction, especially when focused on aerial combat, and he's a very appealing version of it. His introduction in this book is GREAT.

He appears in that context in the WWI books, then makes some appearances in WWII books where he's completely different and basically an evil thug, then vanishes from the series only to reappear when it's safely post-war, where he picks up from where he left off in the WWI books and continues to be the dashing and honorable enemy/crush.

Here's what I think happened. W. E. Johns created a classic WWI archetype, then the books became smash hits, then he continued them into WWII and realized that his honorable enemy character did not work in that setting TO SAY THE LEAST, tried writing him as actually terrible, found it deeply depressing, then jumped him ahead in time to a setting that suits him better. At least I assume that's what happened. If so, I feel for Johns.

For my continued fannish enjoyment, I shall consider that von Stalhein was a double agent in WWII and that's why he was so out of character, which would actually make sense with his roles in both earlier and later books.

These books are very hard to find in the US and I obtained my copy at this odd site.

You can also find a few Biggles books and several Worrals books at Faded Page.

Worrals was Biggles' female counterpart. I'm excited to read some of the Worrals books, as those have previously been impossible to find (as opposed to difficult).

General content note for Biggles books: Levels of racism/colonialism range from zero to a line or two of mild stereotyping along the lines of "The Arabs are a noble warrior race" to holy shit I didn't know you could pack that much racism into a two lines of dialogue. In general, I recommend avoiding any books with titles like Biggles in Australia.