Having recently got into the Biggles books, I keep thinking about them. So (I hope) some of these thoughts will gel into wee mini-essays here on Dreamwidth, if only so I can go on to do more thinking, hopefully about other things. Even if it's other Biggles-related things!

So here's a bit of an introduction.

With the exception of the first few stories, which were written for a general audience, Capt. W.E. Johns’ Biggles books are adventure stories marketed to boys around ten or twelve years old. His hero, James C. Bigglesworth (nicknamed “Biggles”), and his friends are pilots who travel the world foiling spies, smugglers, thieves or what have you, and locating stolen goods, lost treasure, kidnapped scientists, and top-secret documents. With over a hundred volumes, many of which are collections of short stories, the series would—at least on the face of it—seem to be about as likely to fix my interest as the Tom Swift books that fascinated me when I was ten or twelve. Which is to say enormously at that age and not at all today.

So what is the attraction of Biggles? After all, if you read enough of the books, you quickly see that Johns reuses the same handful of tropes multiple times. True, the stories tend to be well-plotted and exciting; but one would think that my interest would be quickly exhausted just as, long ago, I tired of Tom Swift. The fact is, though, that I am constitutionally inclined to organize and analyze data—whatever data!—and have been finding in the Biggles series rather more of interest than mere adventure. (Though, mind you, they are a lot of fun.)

From what I’ve been able to tell off the internet in the past few months, Biggles fans generally divide the books into four “eras”.

The first is where it all began: with short stories and a couple of novels about a young fighter pilot in World War I. These were all written in the 1930s, mostly published in magazines (in serial format for the novels) and then collected into volumes, some of which have been mix’n’match reprinted under various titles in the years since. Within the Biggles series, these World War I stories comprise a distinct group. They have a definite internal chronology, which assiduous fans have pieced together, partly from hints regarding the development of the war, partly from internal references, and partly from the different airplanes that are mentioned. Thus Biggles’ war career starts in the summer of 1916, when he enlists underage in the Royal Flying Corps, receives swift and perfunctory training, and is tossed into the maelstrom of war; and it ends in November 1918, by which time he is disillusioned, drinking heavily, and shot down and captured just as the armistice is signed. The flying exploits, in particular, are notably authentic: the author was himself a fighter pilot in World War I, and drew on his own experience as well as that of others in the Royal Flying Corps. Of all the Biggles series, it is therefore this particular subset of stories that are most highly regarded from a critical perspective. They are also generally considered to be the ones that have best stood the test of time.

Although Johns continued to write his hero’s youthful war exploits through the 1930s, almost immediately he also began to publish contemporary adventures. One oft-noted consequence, therefore, is a lacuna in the timeline: no one knows what Biggles was doing in the decade after World War I, since Johns never wrote about that period. (Oddly, very few fans have essayed to write about it, either, perhaps because they have no hints to work with.) The so-called “interwar books”, therefore, actually skip the '20s and go straight into the '30s. They are an odd lot; and, despite the term—which suggests they comprise a clear, consistent group—they're really a very mixed bag. In fact, a few of them were actually published after the war began. From my perspective, the most interesting are those that have clear references to or are grounded in contemporary political events. These segue into the first of the World War II stories. In fact, the first few WW2 books are actually much like the interwar ones in term of cast: Biggles, his friend Algy, and their protegé Ginger.

Then the Battle of Britain starts; and the rest of the WW2 stories comprise a distinct group. Johns quickly repurposed several of his short stories about the earlier war, subbing in a new set of characters (and, of course, new styles of airplane and British locations) to replace the originals. Biggles is put in charge of a squadron of misfits who are quickly licked into a superb fighting force; and, in a series of novels, they serve as a sort of Special Ops team sent to trouble spots around the world.

Although, Biggles is most associated with the WW1 and WW2 periods, in fact the majority of the series is set post-war. In Sergeant Bigglesworth C.I.D. (1947), he and his friends are persuaded to join the newly formed Special Air Police, attached to Scotland Yard; and they play this (rather vaguely defined) role in the rest of the series, up until 1968, when the author died in the middle of writing the final volume. Like the interwar books, the SAP stories are a very mixed lot. At times, Biggles’ team act more or less as regular police officers, albeit ones who fly planes to work. That is to say they solve relatively minor mysteries involving theft, smuggling, and drug trafficking, typically within various parts of the British Isles, though sometimes liaising with their opposite number, Marcel Brissac of the French Sureté. Many of the short stories are of this type; but so are several of the full-length novels. On the other hand, there are those adventures that definitely put the “Special” into “Special Air Police”: books that take them round the globe, generally to parts of the ever-diminishing empire-on-which-the-sun-never-sets, often liaising with other countries through Interpol. In such stories, the SAP act more as members of Special Branch, if not even as operatives of MI5.

When I first decided to try reading the Biggles series, I started with a few I had picked up in the '90s, mostly ones set in the WW2 period. Then I jumped around a bit, reading the stories that got mentioned the most by other fans, since secondhand books do cost money. However, once I realized that I could get them on line, I started them in chronological order, one by one. That has its own interest, actually: you see how the series evolved.

So I keep seeing comparisons between books, relevance to contemporary history, re-use of favourite motifs, and such. I’m hoping that, now and then, I’ll get the time/energy to put some of that down in bits of meta. Or lit. crit., depending on how you want to look at it.