Biggles

[Skyring]

CC Image via Wikipedia

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I suspect that I am not alone in having Squadron Leader James Charles Bigglesworth as a childhood companion. My father never met a book he didn't want to buy and so I went through the whole set – and there was a lot of them – when I was a kid. Turned out that when "Captain" W E Johns first began publishing these stories in 1932 they were so popular that Johns, with his unexpected wealth, not only spent up big but climbed into a series of unfamiliar tax brackets and when the tax department came looking for their cut he had no money left and had to write more simply to pay the tax bill.

A vicious circle, as it turned out.

Anyway, I loved these stories as a kid. My grandfather, who had been in the Australian Flying Corps in Egypt and Palestine, didn't think that books aimed at children could capture the true dimension of warfare, and I must admit that when I spent a road trip with an audiobook of one of the later adventure stories, I found it all the most dismal tripe. Sexist, racist, cardboard characters doing ridiculous things in exotic parts of the world.

Anyway, fast forward sixty years, and I'm writing novels myself, self-publishing under a variety of pen names. Alas, without the income that causes the ears of the tax department to prick up, but hey, it's fun.

I'm contemplating writing a series that would traverse the same territory as Biggles, leaning more toward Goshawk Squadron and Winged Victory.

Jack Malone is nineteen years old, a Queensland cattleman's son reading History at Oxford, when the war begins in August 1914. He talks his way into the RFC, reaches France in 1915, and spends the next four years flying over the Western Front — first in obsolete reconnaissance aircraft that the Germans pick off at leisure, then in the fighters that define the air war at its most brutal. Across fifteen novels he goes from bewildered newcomer to decorated squadron commander, from boy to something harder and less innocent, watching England perform its courage and its class system simultaneously from the particular vantage point of a man who understands the culture without belonging to it. The series takes its tone from Derek Robinson rather than Biggles — the fear is real, the incompetence is real, the killing is real, and so is the dark comedy of institutions sending young men to die with great administrative efficiency. It is also, underneath all of that, a long meditation on what is lost when a generation goes to war, and what — if anything — can be carried home.​

Tales of war and adventure and social commentary and humour. Rather more disciplined than my own rambling style here – commercial fiction demands an adherence to plot and genre and tropes, with pacing and reader expectations front and centre – and all the better for it.

Before I commit to something that would likely consume years out of the few that I have left, is there a market for such fiction? I'm asking those who have their own aerial adventures, albeit tending more toward comfort in a lie-flat seat than in a wood and canvas contraption with minimal protection from wind and weather and enemy fire.