rosanicus

Hello, I call as I crawl from my cave (the cave is called 'being a primary school teacher')! I have read three Biggles/Gimlet books in the past fortnight and I have a few thoughts, which I will share below.

Biggles in the Orient

An absolutely cracking adventure yarn! I confess I have occasionally struggled with the WW2 books - Baltic is still only about 15% finished on my ereader, and while I love Spitfire Parade for introducing Bertie it's not exactly the strongest of the short story anthologies. This circumvented my apparent struggles here by having the whole plot set somewhere I know very little about, especially during WW2, and with a mystery with just enough red herrings to be satisfying to solve.

Biggles is under so much stress in this book and I can only hope that immediately post-book 666 Squadron get the leave they're owed and smother Biggles in a cuddle pile of some sort. Honestly it's been long enough since I read now that the details have faded somewhat but the scene where he discovers Moorven's crash has definitely stayed with me. He cares so deeply and so immediately about people and it's always a blessing and a curse!!

Gimlet Goes Again

It's been absolutely ages since I read King of the Commandos so it took me a while to rediscover the characters but I had a good enough time with this. The thing about Gimlet is he is absolutely never the POV character (as far as I remember, anyway) so he has this really odd, elusive quality to his character. I loved

tweague 's Gimlet&Bertie schoolfic so much for this exact reason - Gimlet is just genuinely inscrutable, and I find it a pretty compelling way to write a character. Unfortunately we also have Cub who is sort of Ginger but bloodthirsty, and Copper and Trapper who are respectively Cockney and Canadian and possibly gay but not much else. I liked that more of the Kittens appeared in this book but they didn't get much play since they were rescued so late. I don't know if I would recommend this series in general but the Biggles & Co cameo in this book definitely makes it a light recommendation to the fandom.

Biggles Foreign Legionnaire

Took me literal months to get past the first two chapters of this, then I read the last 160 pages in one sitting last night. It's a pretty fun read and has a number of excellent moments but I have to admit the experience as a whole left me a little cold. I wished there was more Marcel for one - especially since there's a bit of Marcel whump occurring offscreen! - and also that there was a little more Biggles POV than there ended up being. The entire sequence in Kurdistan was of course wonderful but again it felt slightly sterile, possibly because it starts so late and then has to be resolved within about thirty pages.

I enjoyed Ginger's point of view on Von Stalhein quite a bit, to be fair - especially the part where he notes that Von Stalhein seems to think, just for a moment, that Biggles has shot at him and looks genuinely a bit upset - but AGAIN I just feel like it wasn't enough. I know I have my shipping blinders on for this but I just always want more flirting, okay, and there was barely any! On the plus side I finally have context for a number of fics I read back when I first joined the fandom a year and a half ago (holy shit), so those will be due a reread soon.

Next on the docket is Murder by Air, because

black_bentley reminded me Steeley exists and I need to get back on the Steeley polycule wago. For my health. Incidentally, I now have a 'Teacher Reads' display bit in my classroom and am slowly getting over the embarrassment of being honest about it (three Johns in a row...).