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the adorable Canon Daniel Clements
Jun. 23rd, 2026 01:42 pmI watched the TV adaptation of the first book in this series, Murder Before Evensong and found it pretty watchable, in a Call The Midwife with more murders sort of way - English village life in a slightly glossier version of the 1980s with murder and the vicar Rector as sleuth, along with a handsome Asian detective Neil Vanloo, plus dogs. Everything has to have dogs at the moment; when I was at the cinema last week every single trailer was a Dog Film, and here there are also dogs. Anyway, the TV adaptation of the book leaned hard on the village's wartime secrets with the SOE and the Free French stationed there: the archivist from the stately home was mysteriously murdered with a pair of secateurs in the church, and our hero Canon Daniel Clements has to figure it out. Meanwhile the body count is piling up, and there's lots of village drama, with the lord of the manor's rebellious gay son staging a very 1980s art exhibition and the Bishop coming to tea and the church flower guild at each other's throats and the Rector's mother trying to assert her place in the village's social pecking order not always helped by her meek and prayerful son.
The motive for the murder in the TV show did not make sense to me at all.
But I enjoyed the TV show anyway and figured I would have a look at the books when I stumbled across them and see whether the motive made any more sense in the book, and then I did stumble across the first one in a charity shop so I bought it and read it. And it was very different from the TV show in a lot of interesting ways, and I promptly read all the other ones as well.
However, the motive for the murders in the first book was not at all an improvement. It was different, but not in way that clarified anything that confused me about the TV show: it was a totally different thing, the weirdest motive for murdering three people you can imagine and although it made logical sense - the killer wanted to achieve a specific goal and felt that killing these three people would do it - the actual motive was deeply weird.
I guess it gets points for unusualness. You can see the TV show tried to improve matters but it did not really succeed, though it did introduce lots of fun new elements.
However, while the murder was even weaker in the book, what was much more engaging was the gossipy, intricate look at parish life from Daniel's point of view, with a completely believable priestly voice from him. Also I learned that Evensong is not the same as what I call Evening Prayer or Vespers, among many other things; on the whole if you want a good look at a fairly high Anglican priest mindset this book does a great job of that, and Daniel is an absolute sweetheart. The author Richard Coles, also a gay Anglican priest, knows exactly what he's writing about here and it shows.
And the other thing the book had which the TV series mostly didn't was slashiness. Daniel is gay - which is also implied in the TV show - and extremely, well, repressed isn't quite the right word for it, but he is very detached from his emotions and his desires, he inhabits his priestly role wholly and that means his life is about prayer and about looking after his flock and that's what he is and what he does and nothing else including his own feelings are particularly important. He doesn't think it's a sin to be gay, but he does think it's wrong for a priest to have intimate relationships; while priestly celibacy is not ever discussed, Daniel very much sees his role as a priest as necessitating celibacy so that he can be wholly available to his flock and to God. And so he completely fails to notice that he and the detective Neil Vanloo (who is white in the book; I like the TV version of him as south Asian though it would need a rewrite of the Moravian Bretheren backstory he has in the book, where Neil's spiritual life is also a story thread) are becoming increasingly close. I especially loved the scene in the first book where Daniel, who is a terrible driver, is trying and failing to park his car and Neil affectionately takes over and parks the car for him. There's also a scene in the second book where Neil takes Daniel to a football match and Daniel cheers when the wrong team scores and Neil has to face down a bunch of very angry football fans for him. They're adorable together.
And the rest of the series is like this. The murders are very much afterthoughts: the plots don't make a lot of sense, Daniel's solving of the murders by observation and intuition doesn't make any sense either, and the narrative and characters increasingly desperately discuss the way murders follow Daniel around in a way that doesn't so much lampshade it as violate genre conventions by drawing too much attention to it. The majority of each book is about Daniel's work as a parish priest, the various ups and downs of his parishoners' lives, his thoughts on the various theological infighting within the Anglican church - lots of that, this is the sort of book that will happily interrupt everything else for five pages of characters arguing about women's ordination or what kind of burial and prayers are appropriate for pets or the interesting clashes that happen when Daniel, who is pretty high church, gets a very evangelical curate - and Daniel's increasingly complicated feelings about Neil. The third book in particular, Murder at the Monastery, is pretty much nothing but Daniel having a personal and spiritual crisis about his love for Neil just as he finds out Neil is in a relationship with a woman, along with lots of geeky details about an Anglican Benedictine monastery infighting. Props to the author: I have rarely seen a male author write his middle-aged male hero break down crying dozens of times in a book.
The author has a great eye for character, everyone has interesting details about them and nobody is obvious. There's also a lot of English class stuff, where the author does sometimes seem to fall into his own traps in a very English detective novelist sort of way: characters sententiously observing that the class distinctions are nonsense, but also that it's nonsense that the housemaid's daughter could pass herself off as middle-class, there were some bits where it seems as if the author as well as the books are in the 1980s.
But in general, if you would like lots of Anglican liturgical and theological geekery, a gay detective priest who has spiritual problems with being in a queer relationship but not the ones you're probably thinking of, lots of vivid English village characters and some deeply improbably murders, these are great fun and I will happily read more of them and hope the author will eventually let Daniel and Neil get their happy ending together.
The motive for the murder in the TV show did not make sense to me at all.
spoilers
In the TV show, the killer is covering up the fact that in 1944 they killed a Nazi spy in self defence, which inexplicably they didn't want to tell anyone about even though it was self defence and there was clear evidence that he was a Nazi spy and in 1944 it seems unlikely that this would have got them into serious trouble. So why this needs covering up, and needs it enough to murder multiple more people forty years later because they are on the verge of finding out about it, was not clear at all.But I enjoyed the TV show anyway and figured I would have a look at the books when I stumbled across them and see whether the motive made any more sense in the book, and then I did stumble across the first one in a charity shop so I bought it and read it. And it was very different from the TV show in a lot of interesting ways, and I promptly read all the other ones as well.
However, the motive for the murders in the first book was not at all an improvement. It was different, but not in way that clarified anything that confused me about the TV show: it was a totally different thing, the weirdest motive for murdering three people you can imagine and although it made logical sense - the killer wanted to achieve a specific goal and felt that killing these three people would do it - the actual motive was deeply weird.
Spoilers
The killer was desperate to prevent their favourite pew in the far corner of the parish church being removed to make way for a bathroom.I guess it gets points for unusualness. You can see the TV show tried to improve matters but it did not really succeed, though it did introduce lots of fun new elements.
However, while the murder was even weaker in the book, what was much more engaging was the gossipy, intricate look at parish life from Daniel's point of view, with a completely believable priestly voice from him. Also I learned that Evensong is not the same as what I call Evening Prayer or Vespers, among many other things; on the whole if you want a good look at a fairly high Anglican priest mindset this book does a great job of that, and Daniel is an absolute sweetheart. The author Richard Coles, also a gay Anglican priest, knows exactly what he's writing about here and it shows.
And the other thing the book had which the TV series mostly didn't was slashiness. Daniel is gay - which is also implied in the TV show - and extremely, well, repressed isn't quite the right word for it, but he is very detached from his emotions and his desires, he inhabits his priestly role wholly and that means his life is about prayer and about looking after his flock and that's what he is and what he does and nothing else including his own feelings are particularly important. He doesn't think it's a sin to be gay, but he does think it's wrong for a priest to have intimate relationships; while priestly celibacy is not ever discussed, Daniel very much sees his role as a priest as necessitating celibacy so that he can be wholly available to his flock and to God. And so he completely fails to notice that he and the detective Neil Vanloo (who is white in the book; I like the TV version of him as south Asian though it would need a rewrite of the Moravian Bretheren backstory he has in the book, where Neil's spiritual life is also a story thread) are becoming increasingly close. I especially loved the scene in the first book where Daniel, who is a terrible driver, is trying and failing to park his car and Neil affectionately takes over and parks the car for him. There's also a scene in the second book where Neil takes Daniel to a football match and Daniel cheers when the wrong team scores and Neil has to face down a bunch of very angry football fans for him. They're adorable together.
And the rest of the series is like this. The murders are very much afterthoughts: the plots don't make a lot of sense, Daniel's solving of the murders by observation and intuition doesn't make any sense either, and the narrative and characters increasingly desperately discuss the way murders follow Daniel around in a way that doesn't so much lampshade it as violate genre conventions by drawing too much attention to it. The majority of each book is about Daniel's work as a parish priest, the various ups and downs of his parishoners' lives, his thoughts on the various theological infighting within the Anglican church - lots of that, this is the sort of book that will happily interrupt everything else for five pages of characters arguing about women's ordination or what kind of burial and prayers are appropriate for pets or the interesting clashes that happen when Daniel, who is pretty high church, gets a very evangelical curate - and Daniel's increasingly complicated feelings about Neil. The third book in particular, Murder at the Monastery, is pretty much nothing but Daniel having a personal and spiritual crisis about his love for Neil just as he finds out Neil is in a relationship with a woman, along with lots of geeky details about an Anglican Benedictine monastery infighting. Props to the author: I have rarely seen a male author write his middle-aged male hero break down crying dozens of times in a book.
The author has a great eye for character, everyone has interesting details about them and nobody is obvious. There's also a lot of English class stuff, where the author does sometimes seem to fall into his own traps in a very English detective novelist sort of way: characters sententiously observing that the class distinctions are nonsense, but also that it's nonsense that the housemaid's daughter could pass herself off as middle-class, there were some bits where it seems as if the author as well as the books are in the 1980s.
But in general, if you would like lots of Anglican liturgical and theological geekery, a gay detective priest who has spiritual problems with being in a queer relationship but not the ones you're probably thinking of, lots of vivid English village characters and some deeply improbably murders, these are great fun and I will happily read more of them and hope the author will eventually let Daniel and Neil get their happy ending together.
Fic: Touch
May. 22nd, 2026 06:22 pmIt's nearly my five-year Bigglesversary! And that means there has to be fic. My plans for actually finishing one of the fics I started practically five years ago to the day have not quite come off yet, so instead have this bit of ridiculousness that wandered into my head yesterday and wouldn't go away.
Title: Touch
Content: Biggles/EvS, a bit of EvS/Zorotov and Biggles/Marie, UST, resolved UST, 1000 words
Summary: months later, Erich could still feel each separate touch
( Touch )
Title: Touch
Content: Biggles/EvS, a bit of EvS/Zorotov and Biggles/Marie, UST, resolved UST, 1000 words
Summary: months later, Erich could still feel each separate touch
( Touch )
recent watching
May. 9th, 2026 08:36 amCallan
A 1960s-70s TV series about David Callan, government assassin. It seems not all of this survives, but some of it is available on DVD and we've been watching the black and white episodes. Some of them were evidently recovered in a slightly weird way and you get odd ghostly images and moments when the picture jumps slightly, but it didn't matter because it's very watchable. It's a tightly written, dark series about an unmentionable branch of the British government that does assassinations and other black ops. Callan is our expert, miserable, lonely assassin and general purpose operative, assigned to jobs like helping the Israelis abduct a Nazi war criminal for trial, or figuring out whether or not a young woman is about to leak nuclear secrets to the Soviets, or investigating the mysterious death of a French intelligence agent, or retrieving his new boss from East Germany through a minefield. Sometimes he's clearly doing something important, other times it's all a disaster, and when he can Callan makes his own decisions about who lives and who doesn't. The government department is extremely cold: they routinely torture people or question them under drugs, the commanding officer - always named Charley Hunter regardless of his actual name - has little regard for his men's safety or how many innocent people get hurt in the process of saving the nation, and Callan's fellow assassin is a very posh sadist. It's only by contrast with them that Callan is a nice guy. Callan's only friend is a shabby little petty thief known as Lonely who Callan bullies, insults and protects in equal degree and who can be relied upon to follow people, burgle houses, keep watch or know a fellow petty criminal who can do anything Callan wants done. In return Callan will fight anyone up to and including his fellow assassins and his boss to protect Lonely from harm, and also makes sure he eats and bathes occasionally. We've watched maybe a dozen of the episodes and they've all been very well done.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)
A German-language film about the Red Army Faction far-left terrorists of the 1970s and 80s. I didn't really know what to expect going into this, it's 18-rated which I tend to be a bit wary of, and there was a lot of very graphic violence. But it was absolutely fascinating, it's not a documentary or a biopic but it is attempting to stay very close to the historical events, showing very clearly both the understandable and even virtuous motives of the RAF and their reasoning behind their actions and the extent to which they had public support - and also the devastation they caused and the destruction of lives eventually including their own. A really good unflinching look at terrorism, and at a segment of history that I have read a little of lately but not in depth.
Design For Living (1933)
A film I have heard about for years and never watched, the classic OT3 of all OT3s. Based - loosely - on the Noel Coward play of the same title, this is about Gilda and the two young men, George and Tom, she meets in a train compartment. George is a painter, Tom a playwright, Gilda a commercial artist, and after Gilda goes out with both men simultaneously, they end up living in a platonic menage a trois. However, this falls apart when Gilda sleeps with one of the two, and after that the narrative tries out all the dyads possible: Gilda and George, Gilda and Tom, then Gilda decides to try being respectable and marries Mr Impeccable Virtue and Three Square Meals Plunkett leaving George and Tom alone together - but none of the dyads work and eventually the three of them drive off into the sunset together. The film is hilarious and adorable and tremendous fun to watch, I highly recommend it. I found it on Youtube here if anyone else wants to enjoy a hilarious and sincerely OT3 romp. And I shall have to try to track down the play to see what the differences are.
In other film-related news, Cub spent his Christmas money on a small projector and screen and has created a mini beanbag cinema, and therefore has suddenly taken an interest in watching films - he always refused to watch films before and said he didn't like them at all. Now, watching films on your own is boring, but watching films with Mum is a lot more fun especially if Mum can be persuaded to provide snacks too. Anyway, Cub is quite cautious with films and doesn't want anything with too much in the way of gore, emotional distress or kissing, and he does like war stories, so older war films of the more sanitised but still exciting kind are right up his street. He had a wonderful time with The Great Escape and We Dive At Dawn and Angels One Five and The Colditz Story and The Guns of Navarone, he liked Ice Cold In Alex too though it had a bit more kissing than he really wanted, but when I tried him on Master & Commander for a change of pace (and no kissing!) he found the whole children having their arms amputated aspect, plus a suicide, a bit too upsetting and didn't sleep well afterwards, and also while I tried to persuade him that it represented the pinnacle of technology at the time he wasn't having it; he wanted engines! The Imitation Game got points for being a true story and about computers, though he found the multiple threads confusing. He thoroughly enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick which has just about an acceptable kissing:aircraft ratio and we've just started Mission Impossible though this also has slightly more kissing than he really wants but also superb action sequences. I'd like to try him on Star Trek but so far he has been very resistant to aliens and spaceships as far too unrealistic, he likes stories about things that relate to the real world or to history best - he asked me suspiciously if Mission Impossible was superheroes when I suggested it, and he is very anti anything that involves fantasy. Obviously at some point I will have to introduce him to Bond. And I'll happily take suggestions for other things, especially if they're available on BBC iPlayer or one of the other UK streaming TV services.
A 1960s-70s TV series about David Callan, government assassin. It seems not all of this survives, but some of it is available on DVD and we've been watching the black and white episodes. Some of them were evidently recovered in a slightly weird way and you get odd ghostly images and moments when the picture jumps slightly, but it didn't matter because it's very watchable. It's a tightly written, dark series about an unmentionable branch of the British government that does assassinations and other black ops. Callan is our expert, miserable, lonely assassin and general purpose operative, assigned to jobs like helping the Israelis abduct a Nazi war criminal for trial, or figuring out whether or not a young woman is about to leak nuclear secrets to the Soviets, or investigating the mysterious death of a French intelligence agent, or retrieving his new boss from East Germany through a minefield. Sometimes he's clearly doing something important, other times it's all a disaster, and when he can Callan makes his own decisions about who lives and who doesn't. The government department is extremely cold: they routinely torture people or question them under drugs, the commanding officer - always named Charley Hunter regardless of his actual name - has little regard for his men's safety or how many innocent people get hurt in the process of saving the nation, and Callan's fellow assassin is a very posh sadist. It's only by contrast with them that Callan is a nice guy. Callan's only friend is a shabby little petty thief known as Lonely who Callan bullies, insults and protects in equal degree and who can be relied upon to follow people, burgle houses, keep watch or know a fellow petty criminal who can do anything Callan wants done. In return Callan will fight anyone up to and including his fellow assassins and his boss to protect Lonely from harm, and also makes sure he eats and bathes occasionally. We've watched maybe a dozen of the episodes and they've all been very well done.
The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)
A German-language film about the Red Army Faction far-left terrorists of the 1970s and 80s. I didn't really know what to expect going into this, it's 18-rated which I tend to be a bit wary of, and there was a lot of very graphic violence. But it was absolutely fascinating, it's not a documentary or a biopic but it is attempting to stay very close to the historical events, showing very clearly both the understandable and even virtuous motives of the RAF and their reasoning behind their actions and the extent to which they had public support - and also the devastation they caused and the destruction of lives eventually including their own. A really good unflinching look at terrorism, and at a segment of history that I have read a little of lately but not in depth.
Design For Living (1933)
A film I have heard about for years and never watched, the classic OT3 of all OT3s. Based - loosely - on the Noel Coward play of the same title, this is about Gilda and the two young men, George and Tom, she meets in a train compartment. George is a painter, Tom a playwright, Gilda a commercial artist, and after Gilda goes out with both men simultaneously, they end up living in a platonic menage a trois. However, this falls apart when Gilda sleeps with one of the two, and after that the narrative tries out all the dyads possible: Gilda and George, Gilda and Tom, then Gilda decides to try being respectable and marries Mr Impeccable Virtue and Three Square Meals Plunkett leaving George and Tom alone together - but none of the dyads work and eventually the three of them drive off into the sunset together. The film is hilarious and adorable and tremendous fun to watch, I highly recommend it. I found it on Youtube here if anyone else wants to enjoy a hilarious and sincerely OT3 romp. And I shall have to try to track down the play to see what the differences are.
In other film-related news, Cub spent his Christmas money on a small projector and screen and has created a mini beanbag cinema, and therefore has suddenly taken an interest in watching films - he always refused to watch films before and said he didn't like them at all. Now, watching films on your own is boring, but watching films with Mum is a lot more fun especially if Mum can be persuaded to provide snacks too. Anyway, Cub is quite cautious with films and doesn't want anything with too much in the way of gore, emotional distress or kissing, and he does like war stories, so older war films of the more sanitised but still exciting kind are right up his street. He had a wonderful time with The Great Escape and We Dive At Dawn and Angels One Five and The Colditz Story and The Guns of Navarone, he liked Ice Cold In Alex too though it had a bit more kissing than he really wanted, but when I tried him on Master & Commander for a change of pace (and no kissing!) he found the whole children having their arms amputated aspect, plus a suicide, a bit too upsetting and didn't sleep well afterwards, and also while I tried to persuade him that it represented the pinnacle of technology at the time he wasn't having it; he wanted engines! The Imitation Game got points for being a true story and about computers, though he found the multiple threads confusing. He thoroughly enjoyed Top Gun: Maverick which has just about an acceptable kissing:aircraft ratio and we've just started Mission Impossible though this also has slightly more kissing than he really wants but also superb action sequences. I'd like to try him on Star Trek but so far he has been very resistant to aliens and spaceships as far too unrealistic, he likes stories about things that relate to the real world or to history best - he asked me suspiciously if Mission Impossible was superheroes when I suggested it, and he is very anti anything that involves fantasy. Obviously at some point I will have to introduce him to Bond. And I'll happily take suggestions for other things, especially if they're available on BBC iPlayer or one of the other UK streaming TV services.
1913: The World before the Great War, Charles Emmerson
This was a good, fairly light, snapshot of the world just before the outbreak of WW1. Emmerson selects a range of cities around the world, starting and ending in London and crossing Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and some of Asia, with a brief glimpse of Melbourne, Algiers and Durban for Oceania and Africa, and gives a summary of their political and social situations in 1913, often with an overview of the history of each place. For getting a good overall image of the relations between various parts of the world, especially between England and her empire, it's an excellent book, and I learned something especially about the Argentina-UK connection that comes up so often in novels of this period and a bit later, and also I enjoyed the German tourist's guide to London in 1913. Of course there are thousands and thousands more things the author could have included, but it's a fun read.
Hawthorn: a Scottish ghost story, Elaine Thomson
Aka the bog trauma story. This was very readable, though rather languidly paced. Our hero Robert Sutherland is working with a team making the first Ordnance Survey map of Scotland, only he falls in a bog and then onwards his life becomes weird. And very full of swooning, at least three quarters of the book is him swooning, having hallucinations, fevers and other problems, while milling about waiting for the plot to happen. I would have liked more map-making, which is more flavouring than part of the story, and it would have been nice to have more female characters who weren't evil or dead, and I feel like it could have committed harder to the ending of discrediting Sutherland for extra horrific interest. But there really was an excellent amount of manly swooning.
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (available here at Project Gutenberg)
One of the oldest of the spy novel genre, written in 1903. I found this tremendously fun to read, unexpectedly hilarious and delightful, not so much for the plot as for the two main characters, Carruthers and Davies, and their fabulous odd-couple adventures sailing around the German coastline trying to figure out what the dastardly Germans are up to. Carruthers, fastidious, cynical, very posh and clever, and Davies, straightforward, enthusiastic, loyal, and brilliant at sailing but rubbish at intrigue - the book is written in the first person from Carruthers' perspective and I adore his narrative voice, he is clearly an absolute nightmare in many ways but with a saving dose of self-awareness and a genuine and growing affection for Davies and his very different virtues. There are tons of references to maps and charts and the interested reader can follow along with every nautical detail of the story, but I was not interested in the nautical details except in the superb competence kink in Davies' navigational skills. Luckily Carruthers also doesn't understand most of the nautical details and so the reader can keep up as much as they need to. I did get a bit lost in the details of the plot, but I didn't mind because I was having fun with the Davies/Carruthers show. I also watched the 1979 Michael York film, which was good fun: it elides a lot of the plot, but leans in nicely to the Davies/Carruthers dynamic, though I am not quite able to cope with film!Davies's giant moustache. But film!Carruthers is perfect; the shopping list sequence is hilarious in the film and even more hilarious in the book. This might be fun to request for Yuletide to see if anyone wants to write me some actual Davies/Carruthers, too.
Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris, Jane Thynne
WW2 spy novel series. These were inexplicably readable and I am trying to work out why. The plots were weak and the characters pretty two-dimensional, most of the characters were either real people or straight from Central Casting (would you like a mildly alcoholic private investigator with a failed romantic life and a problem with authority? of course you would. would you like to guess what kind of WW1 experience he had? you won't need two guesses. would you like to guess whether or not he is ruggedly handsome and inexplicably attractive to women who as we know love a low-life boozer?). The narrative was fluid and easy to ride along with, but a lot of the interest for me was in the fact that the author has lifted great chunks of her story from a variety of the history books I've read over the past few years, especially the complete works of Helen Fry, who probably should have a co-author credit for the second novel. And, as I said, most of the characters are real people: Thynne never bothers to invent a character when she can just use Noel Coward or Dorothy Sayers or Maxwell Knight or some other poor sod. The plot is weak: again, Thynne just uses real events and hitches her plot to them, but there's very little suspense or sense of danger or excitement, the characters have little interest in or awareness of the stakes and mostly spend their time wondering why they're even getting mixed up in this business. 'Um, I had a hunch' is a key plot motivator in both books, used so often the author unconvincingly lampshades it a few times. The heroine's assorted romantic options are a large chunk of the plot: her Viennese former fiance, her fellow student at Oxford turned refugee, her best friend's brother who happens to be Churchill's aide, and of course our inexplicably attractive to women piece of rough, the hero. No doubt she will shack up with the hero after extensively exploring all the other options over the course of multiple books. In fact, the two lead character and their dynamic are also not original, being 2D versions of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, transplanted to 1940 and with connections to the security services. The period setting is pretty well done, superficial but filled in at least a few degrees better than the popular press version of WW2. The second book's plot was particularly weak: for most of the book our heroes were running around on the basis that there was a German spy ring infiltrating Trent Park - which is a great concept - but then at the end it's oh no there is no German spy ring at all, we picked up the German spies the day they arrived for being Very Bad Spies and probably Canaris is sending Very Bad Spies on purpose because he wants Hitler to lose. Which is historically accurate, but when the plot of your spy thriller novel is 'catch the German spies before they reveal our very important secret' then saying 'oh no actually there aren't any spies' at the end is a pretty major cop-out. If you were writing a much darker and more serious novel about how spy work is pointless and people run around frantically and suffer for no reason and no gain at all, then this would have been a perfect ending: Le Carre could have pulled it off, but this was not even remotely that kind of book, this is your basic frothy romantic suspense wartime adventure, and in this kind of book you have to play the plot straight, or if there are twists they have to be the sort of twists that make it more exciting, not less exciting. So: the author's done her homework and the period setting is decent, the romance is nice and the narrative carries you along without requiring any actual thought, but the plot is not very well constructed.
No 2 Whitehall Court, Alan Judd
Another attempt to find some good WW1 spy adventures: this one features a female agent, Emily Grey, a linguist who is seconded to work for the fledgling MI6 under its famous head C, Mansfield Cummings. The author of this book knows his stuff, he's written a biography of C and there's evidence of plenty of research--but that is the problem with this book. Or one of the problems, anyway. Again, half the characters are real people, and I'm increasingly thinking that this is a mistake in this sort of fiction, because our heroine and POV character can't really have relationships with them. She's observing them without having an impact on them, and when your main character can't have any kind of relationship other than historical observer with many of your other key characters, the novel suffers. And that is the problem with this book: it's flat, plodding, the prose is leaden, the characters atomised, and considering that it's sold as a WW1 spy thriller, it's almost totally lacking in any kind of thrills. About the closest we get to suspense is when Emily starts to suspect that someone is following her - and someone is, it's MI5 to keep an eye on her in a completely harmless way and it all ends in farce. In general the farce was the best bit of this book: Emily is given a hapless failed Marine named Nigel to be her general fixer and bodyguard, and Nigel is absolutely shit at his job in almost every way and also is very believably chauvinistic and patronising towards Emily despite his obvious incompetence. This was where the story came to life - the sequence where Emily and Nigel are on a warship heading for Rotterdam and Nigel is a complete nuisance with far too much luggage was all hilarious - but there were never really any consequences from Nigel's incompetence, Emily is only very mildly annoyed by it and in the end Nigel gets to be a hero and save the day revealing an entire hitherto unmentioned bit of supreme competence. Otherwise, the real villain is telegraphed so hard you can see it from space, which meant that by the time the characters finally caught up with the reader, the overwhelming feeling was 'took you long enough' rather than 'oh wow, I didn't see that coming but it makes so much sense' - the latter being what any half-decent writer of a thriller is aiming for. The spy plot and depiction of how spying worked was all rock solid - as I said, the author's done his research, he knows how all this worked in reality, but what he doesn't know is how to take these historical realities and turn them into a tense, interesting, characterful plot. I was deeply surprised to learn that Judd's written many previous spy thrillers many of which have excellent reviews, I would have taken this to be a first attempt at fiction by a history geek. Anyway, the further this book got from repeating bits of history, the better it was as a novel, which is why the horrible Nigel was the best bit. But I'll definitely go take a look at his non-fiction now.
This was a good, fairly light, snapshot of the world just before the outbreak of WW1. Emmerson selects a range of cities around the world, starting and ending in London and crossing Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and some of Asia, with a brief glimpse of Melbourne, Algiers and Durban for Oceania and Africa, and gives a summary of their political and social situations in 1913, often with an overview of the history of each place. For getting a good overall image of the relations between various parts of the world, especially between England and her empire, it's an excellent book, and I learned something especially about the Argentina-UK connection that comes up so often in novels of this period and a bit later, and also I enjoyed the German tourist's guide to London in 1913. Of course there are thousands and thousands more things the author could have included, but it's a fun read.
Hawthorn: a Scottish ghost story, Elaine Thomson
Aka the bog trauma story. This was very readable, though rather languidly paced. Our hero Robert Sutherland is working with a team making the first Ordnance Survey map of Scotland, only he falls in a bog and then onwards his life becomes weird. And very full of swooning, at least three quarters of the book is him swooning, having hallucinations, fevers and other problems, while milling about waiting for the plot to happen. I would have liked more map-making, which is more flavouring than part of the story, and it would have been nice to have more female characters who weren't evil or dead, and I feel like it could have committed harder to the ending of discrediting Sutherland for extra horrific interest. But there really was an excellent amount of manly swooning.
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers (available here at Project Gutenberg)
One of the oldest of the spy novel genre, written in 1903. I found this tremendously fun to read, unexpectedly hilarious and delightful, not so much for the plot as for the two main characters, Carruthers and Davies, and their fabulous odd-couple adventures sailing around the German coastline trying to figure out what the dastardly Germans are up to. Carruthers, fastidious, cynical, very posh and clever, and Davies, straightforward, enthusiastic, loyal, and brilliant at sailing but rubbish at intrigue - the book is written in the first person from Carruthers' perspective and I adore his narrative voice, he is clearly an absolute nightmare in many ways but with a saving dose of self-awareness and a genuine and growing affection for Davies and his very different virtues. There are tons of references to maps and charts and the interested reader can follow along with every nautical detail of the story, but I was not interested in the nautical details except in the superb competence kink in Davies' navigational skills. Luckily Carruthers also doesn't understand most of the nautical details and so the reader can keep up as much as they need to. I did get a bit lost in the details of the plot, but I didn't mind because I was having fun with the Davies/Carruthers show. I also watched the 1979 Michael York film, which was good fun: it elides a lot of the plot, but leans in nicely to the Davies/Carruthers dynamic, though I am not quite able to cope with film!Davies's giant moustache. But film!Carruthers is perfect; the shopping list sequence is hilarious in the film and even more hilarious in the book. This might be fun to request for Yuletide to see if anyone wants to write me some actual Davies/Carruthers, too.
Midnight in Vienna and Appointment in Paris, Jane Thynne
WW2 spy novel series. These were inexplicably readable and I am trying to work out why. The plots were weak and the characters pretty two-dimensional, most of the characters were either real people or straight from Central Casting (would you like a mildly alcoholic private investigator with a failed romantic life and a problem with authority? of course you would. would you like to guess what kind of WW1 experience he had? you won't need two guesses. would you like to guess whether or not he is ruggedly handsome and inexplicably attractive to women who as we know love a low-life boozer?). The narrative was fluid and easy to ride along with, but a lot of the interest for me was in the fact that the author has lifted great chunks of her story from a variety of the history books I've read over the past few years, especially the complete works of Helen Fry, who probably should have a co-author credit for the second novel. And, as I said, most of the characters are real people: Thynne never bothers to invent a character when she can just use Noel Coward or Dorothy Sayers or Maxwell Knight or some other poor sod. The plot is weak: again, Thynne just uses real events and hitches her plot to them, but there's very little suspense or sense of danger or excitement, the characters have little interest in or awareness of the stakes and mostly spend their time wondering why they're even getting mixed up in this business. 'Um, I had a hunch' is a key plot motivator in both books, used so often the author unconvincingly lampshades it a few times. The heroine's assorted romantic options are a large chunk of the plot: her Viennese former fiance, her fellow student at Oxford turned refugee, her best friend's brother who happens to be Churchill's aide, and of course our inexplicably attractive to women piece of rough, the hero. No doubt she will shack up with the hero after extensively exploring all the other options over the course of multiple books. In fact, the two lead character and their dynamic are also not original, being 2D versions of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, transplanted to 1940 and with connections to the security services. The period setting is pretty well done, superficial but filled in at least a few degrees better than the popular press version of WW2. The second book's plot was particularly weak: for most of the book our heroes were running around on the basis that there was a German spy ring infiltrating Trent Park - which is a great concept - but then at the end it's oh no there is no German spy ring at all, we picked up the German spies the day they arrived for being Very Bad Spies and probably Canaris is sending Very Bad Spies on purpose because he wants Hitler to lose. Which is historically accurate, but when the plot of your spy thriller novel is 'catch the German spies before they reveal our very important secret' then saying 'oh no actually there aren't any spies' at the end is a pretty major cop-out. If you were writing a much darker and more serious novel about how spy work is pointless and people run around frantically and suffer for no reason and no gain at all, then this would have been a perfect ending: Le Carre could have pulled it off, but this was not even remotely that kind of book, this is your basic frothy romantic suspense wartime adventure, and in this kind of book you have to play the plot straight, or if there are twists they have to be the sort of twists that make it more exciting, not less exciting. So: the author's done her homework and the period setting is decent, the romance is nice and the narrative carries you along without requiring any actual thought, but the plot is not very well constructed.
No 2 Whitehall Court, Alan Judd
Another attempt to find some good WW1 spy adventures: this one features a female agent, Emily Grey, a linguist who is seconded to work for the fledgling MI6 under its famous head C, Mansfield Cummings. The author of this book knows his stuff, he's written a biography of C and there's evidence of plenty of research--but that is the problem with this book. Or one of the problems, anyway. Again, half the characters are real people, and I'm increasingly thinking that this is a mistake in this sort of fiction, because our heroine and POV character can't really have relationships with them. She's observing them without having an impact on them, and when your main character can't have any kind of relationship other than historical observer with many of your other key characters, the novel suffers. And that is the problem with this book: it's flat, plodding, the prose is leaden, the characters atomised, and considering that it's sold as a WW1 spy thriller, it's almost totally lacking in any kind of thrills. About the closest we get to suspense is when Emily starts to suspect that someone is following her - and someone is, it's MI5 to keep an eye on her in a completely harmless way and it all ends in farce. In general the farce was the best bit of this book: Emily is given a hapless failed Marine named Nigel to be her general fixer and bodyguard, and Nigel is absolutely shit at his job in almost every way and also is very believably chauvinistic and patronising towards Emily despite his obvious incompetence. This was where the story came to life - the sequence where Emily and Nigel are on a warship heading for Rotterdam and Nigel is a complete nuisance with far too much luggage was all hilarious - but there were never really any consequences from Nigel's incompetence, Emily is only very mildly annoyed by it and in the end Nigel gets to be a hero and save the day revealing an entire hitherto unmentioned bit of supreme competence. Otherwise, the real villain is telegraphed so hard you can see it from space, which meant that by the time the characters finally caught up with the reader, the overwhelming feeling was 'took you long enough' rather than 'oh wow, I didn't see that coming but it makes so much sense' - the latter being what any half-decent writer of a thriller is aiming for. The spy plot and depiction of how spying worked was all rock solid - as I said, the author's done his research, he knows how all this worked in reality, but what he doesn't know is how to take these historical realities and turn them into a tense, interesting, characterful plot. I was deeply surprised to learn that Judd's written many previous spy thrillers many of which have excellent reviews, I would have taken this to be a first attempt at fiction by a history geek. Anyway, the further this book got from repeating bits of history, the better it was as a novel, which is why the horrible Nigel was the best bit. But I'll definitely go take a look at his non-fiction now.
fannish discoveries and a mystery solved
Apr. 27th, 2026 01:59 pmThe fabulous ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rosanicus has been investigating the long-lost 1960s Biggles TV series, of which up till now we have only had one very bad episode on Youtube featuring a toy boat sinking. But now Rosie has discovered more, embedded in a collection of clips from old tv: a six minute clip of Bertie making good use of the NATO phonetic alphabet, and Biggles trying to work out how to behave in a pub (Biggles starts at 33.59). Also Rosie found the summaries of all the episodes and put them together in a single document, so now we know what it was about, approximately speaking. Don't miss 'Follows On Up The Amazon', or the grand finale which features Biggles and von Stalhein trapped together in a collapsing Egyptian tomb.... you can see all the details at rosanicus's post here. If Rosie's efforts come to something we might get to be able to watch more of the show one day soon, but in the meantime I feel like the episode summaries would make fantastic fic prompts.
And as well as all that, we have also finally solved a fannish mystery, which is probably interesting to about six people in the world but I'm one of them. Judging by the episode descriptions, it's clear that in the TV series continuity Buries a Hatchet hasn't happened and von Stalhein continues to be a villain-for-hire and Biggles's nemesis, and - since all villains need a sidekick - he has a sidekick named Laxter.
Now, some while back I posted about the mystery of Laxter, who is mentioned as von Stalhein's sidekick in a short story in Biggles Flies To Work, but doesn't appear anywhere else in connection with von Stalhein, and I had no idea where he had come from or why, or why von Stalhein was suddenly evil again in a story well after Buries a Hatchet.
But now it's obvious. He's from the TV series. The TV series is 1960, Flies To Work is 1961. So the best explanation for the sudden appearance both of Erich as a villain again and with Laxter as his sidekick is that Flies To Work is in TV continuity, and not the main book canon continuity.
And while von Stalhein does not appear in any of the currently extant TV, the detective efforts of the WEJ discord have produced a few photos of Carl Duering in that role, which are below the cut.
( images below the cut )
rosanicus has been investigating the long-lost 1960s Biggles TV series, of which up till now we have only had one very bad episode on Youtube featuring a toy boat sinking. But now Rosie has discovered more, embedded in a collection of clips from old tv: a six minute clip of Bertie making good use of the NATO phonetic alphabet, and Biggles trying to work out how to behave in a pub (Biggles starts at 33.59). Also Rosie found the summaries of all the episodes and put them together in a single document, so now we know what it was about, approximately speaking. Don't miss 'Follows On Up The Amazon', or the grand finale which features Biggles and von Stalhein trapped together in a collapsing Egyptian tomb.... you can see all the details at rosanicus's post here. If Rosie's efforts come to something we might get to be able to watch more of the show one day soon, but in the meantime I feel like the episode summaries would make fantastic fic prompts. And as well as all that, we have also finally solved a fannish mystery, which is probably interesting to about six people in the world but I'm one of them. Judging by the episode descriptions, it's clear that in the TV series continuity Buries a Hatchet hasn't happened and von Stalhein continues to be a villain-for-hire and Biggles's nemesis, and - since all villains need a sidekick - he has a sidekick named Laxter.
Now, some while back I posted about the mystery of Laxter, who is mentioned as von Stalhein's sidekick in a short story in Biggles Flies To Work, but doesn't appear anywhere else in connection with von Stalhein, and I had no idea where he had come from or why, or why von Stalhein was suddenly evil again in a story well after Buries a Hatchet.
But now it's obvious. He's from the TV series. The TV series is 1960, Flies To Work is 1961. So the best explanation for the sudden appearance both of Erich as a villain again and with Laxter as his sidekick is that Flies To Work is in TV continuity, and not the main book canon continuity.
And while von Stalhein does not appear in any of the currently extant TV, the detective efforts of the WEJ discord have produced a few photos of Carl Duering in that role, which are below the cut.
( images below the cut )
Fic: Umbrellas
Mar. 7th, 2026 08:48 amLate last year I saw a prompt on tumblr for EvS PTSD fic, and I wrote most of this, and then when I came back to it to write the ending, it took off at an entirely unexpected tangent due to me making the mistake of doing some research about film history. So here it is: Biggles, EvS, trauma and Bond Girls.
Title: Umbrellas
Content: trauma, hurt/comfort, Biggles's opinion of James Bond, 1900 words
Summary: One of Biggles's dinners with von Stalhein goes a little off-script.
( Umbrellas )
Title: Umbrellas
Content: trauma, hurt/comfort, Biggles's opinion of James Bond, 1900 words
Summary: One of Biggles's dinners with von Stalhein goes a little off-script.
( Umbrellas )
spies, romance and mystery
Mar. 5th, 2026 09:43 pmA Perfect Spy (BBC 1987)
An adaptation of the Le Carré book, and unusually for Le Carré I could follow what was going on the whole time. It helps that it wasn't particularly twisty as plots go, and it was really a psychological exploration of Magnus Pym, where he comes from and how his relationship with his father made him into a perfect spy and then into a double agent, rather than complicated spy shenanigans as such. And it did this very well, with a slow steady journey through Magnus's life from start to end. Also it was devastatingly slashy: Axel and Magnus were just absurdly in love with each other and the show absolutely leaned into this far more than I would have expected for something made in 1987. Poppy and Sir Magnus, my poor heart. I shall have to read the book.
The German Secret Service, Walter Nicolai
This was a fascinating piece of history. Walter Nicolai was the head of German military intelligence during World War I, and he published this book in 1924 about his work. And it's an intensely, hilariously biased narrative, also full of Nicolai's fairly predictable prejudices. The way Nicolai tells it, WW1 was just not playing fair and the virtuous, noble, honourable Germans had everyone else ganging up on them in a very mean way for no reason at all and when Germans wanted to do things honourably and properly they had to contend with everyone else cheating and making unfair kinds of war with trenches and blockades which cruelly prevented the Germans from doing what they were good at and winning outright. But along with all that is a really comprehensive overview of the entire German intelligence system and also the various Entente Powers' intelligence systems and how they interacted. Nicolai lays out the different theatres of the intelligence aspects of WW1 in Europe - he doesn't go into the wider world elements - and discusses the differences between the Russian, British, French, Belgian and American intelligence networks and what they focused on and where they operated, and the measures he took to counter them. He focuses more on this than on how the German system was operating, for all that it claims to be a book about the German secret service it's more a book about catching enemy spies than about what German spies were up to, though he does talk a lot about how difficult it was to get spies out of Germany anyway when there were hostile countries on all sides. But I spent a lot of time laughing at how he kept turning absolutely everything into a propaganda argument for how much better Germans are than everyone else, even things like the significant number of Germans who were induced to spy on their own country he makes into a virtue by carefully explaining that these German traitors were utterly faithful to their new masters, loyal and reliable and provided really valuable intel and didn't ask for large sums of payment, and so as well as being the best at everything else, they were also the best double agents!
A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
Harriet Morton runs away from her oppressive bigoted father and miserly aunt to join a ballet company going on tour up the Amazon river to the newly prosperous Brazilian city of Manaus. Like all the other Ibbotsons I've read, once I'd started this it whisked me along to the end without really drawing breath, it's a delightful experience to read. The characters are gorgeous, the romance is lovely, the descriptions of Harriet blossoming in her new life are a joy and the whole thing was a tremendous ride. I did find the various misunderstandings a trifle contrived, Ibbotson is quite fond of the sort of misunderstandings that cause total disaster for the characters but could have been averted with ten seconds of conversation - though she did lampshade it a bit with the Romeo and Juliet feather motif - but I loved the characters and narrative voice and the storytelling overall so much that I just rolled my eyes at those parts and carried on happily anyway.
Magic Flutes, Eva Ibbotson
In the aftermath of WW1, an Austrian princess is working backstage at the opera while her elderly aunts arrange the sale of their castle to a fantastically wealthy English industrialist, who wants to impress the woman he still loves despite the fact that she previously turned him down for being too poor and unknown. Lots of fun here, with the opera company being fantastically, hilariously and vividly described, the elderly aunts are an utter joy, and of course everyone nearly ends up married to the wrong person before a bit of subterfuge sorts it all out.
A Song for Summer, Eva Ibbotson
This one was particularly good. Ellen, raised by three determined suffragettes, unfortunately enjoys cooking more than attempting to train in a profession, so she swaps university for cooking college and then takes a job as matron of an experimental school in Austria in 1938. Here she takes on a deeply chaotic school full of troubled children whose wealthy parents don't want them around, with all of Ibbotson's usual fantastic characters, and also the mysterious groundsman Marek who is pruning trees and looking after animals in between disappearing on mysterious jobs into Nazi Germany, and refusing to participate in any music whatsoever. I won't spoil the plot, but Ibbotson doesn't follow the strict romance novel rules of the other books quite so much here and I really liked how it all worked out.
Death On Ice, R.O. Thorp
A fun contemporary murder mystery with a Golden Age vibe. Our heroes are twins, both marine biologists, who are going on a joint luxury cruise/scientific expedition to the Arctic, when one of their shipmates turns up messily dead. The Arctic luxury cruise ship recreates all the best things about a traditional country house murder mystery, with the structured formality, enforced interaction and fancy settings, and this very much had the country house mystery feel to it. The plot was a bit involved in places, but the story overall was great fun, the characters were well drawn and I did not figure out whodunnit before the reveal - though unfortunately I also did not have the 'oh, OF COURSE' sense you get in a really well constructed murder mystery. Still, I'd definitely read another of this series, and I believe there is one, so that's all to the good.
An adaptation of the Le Carré book, and unusually for Le Carré I could follow what was going on the whole time. It helps that it wasn't particularly twisty as plots go, and it was really a psychological exploration of Magnus Pym, where he comes from and how his relationship with his father made him into a perfect spy and then into a double agent, rather than complicated spy shenanigans as such. And it did this very well, with a slow steady journey through Magnus's life from start to end. Also it was devastatingly slashy: Axel and Magnus were just absurdly in love with each other and the show absolutely leaned into this far more than I would have expected for something made in 1987. Poppy and Sir Magnus, my poor heart. I shall have to read the book.
The German Secret Service, Walter Nicolai
This was a fascinating piece of history. Walter Nicolai was the head of German military intelligence during World War I, and he published this book in 1924 about his work. And it's an intensely, hilariously biased narrative, also full of Nicolai's fairly predictable prejudices. The way Nicolai tells it, WW1 was just not playing fair and the virtuous, noble, honourable Germans had everyone else ganging up on them in a very mean way for no reason at all and when Germans wanted to do things honourably and properly they had to contend with everyone else cheating and making unfair kinds of war with trenches and blockades which cruelly prevented the Germans from doing what they were good at and winning outright. But along with all that is a really comprehensive overview of the entire German intelligence system and also the various Entente Powers' intelligence systems and how they interacted. Nicolai lays out the different theatres of the intelligence aspects of WW1 in Europe - he doesn't go into the wider world elements - and discusses the differences between the Russian, British, French, Belgian and American intelligence networks and what they focused on and where they operated, and the measures he took to counter them. He focuses more on this than on how the German system was operating, for all that it claims to be a book about the German secret service it's more a book about catching enemy spies than about what German spies were up to, though he does talk a lot about how difficult it was to get spies out of Germany anyway when there were hostile countries on all sides. But I spent a lot of time laughing at how he kept turning absolutely everything into a propaganda argument for how much better Germans are than everyone else, even things like the significant number of Germans who were induced to spy on their own country he makes into a virtue by carefully explaining that these German traitors were utterly faithful to their new masters, loyal and reliable and provided really valuable intel and didn't ask for large sums of payment, and so as well as being the best at everything else, they were also the best double agents!
A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson
Harriet Morton runs away from her oppressive bigoted father and miserly aunt to join a ballet company going on tour up the Amazon river to the newly prosperous Brazilian city of Manaus. Like all the other Ibbotsons I've read, once I'd started this it whisked me along to the end without really drawing breath, it's a delightful experience to read. The characters are gorgeous, the romance is lovely, the descriptions of Harriet blossoming in her new life are a joy and the whole thing was a tremendous ride. I did find the various misunderstandings a trifle contrived, Ibbotson is quite fond of the sort of misunderstandings that cause total disaster for the characters but could have been averted with ten seconds of conversation - though she did lampshade it a bit with the Romeo and Juliet feather motif - but I loved the characters and narrative voice and the storytelling overall so much that I just rolled my eyes at those parts and carried on happily anyway.
Magic Flutes, Eva Ibbotson
In the aftermath of WW1, an Austrian princess is working backstage at the opera while her elderly aunts arrange the sale of their castle to a fantastically wealthy English industrialist, who wants to impress the woman he still loves despite the fact that she previously turned him down for being too poor and unknown. Lots of fun here, with the opera company being fantastically, hilariously and vividly described, the elderly aunts are an utter joy, and of course everyone nearly ends up married to the wrong person before a bit of subterfuge sorts it all out.
A Song for Summer, Eva Ibbotson
This one was particularly good. Ellen, raised by three determined suffragettes, unfortunately enjoys cooking more than attempting to train in a profession, so she swaps university for cooking college and then takes a job as matron of an experimental school in Austria in 1938. Here she takes on a deeply chaotic school full of troubled children whose wealthy parents don't want them around, with all of Ibbotson's usual fantastic characters, and also the mysterious groundsman Marek who is pruning trees and looking after animals in between disappearing on mysterious jobs into Nazi Germany, and refusing to participate in any music whatsoever. I won't spoil the plot, but Ibbotson doesn't follow the strict romance novel rules of the other books quite so much here and I really liked how it all worked out.
Death On Ice, R.O. Thorp
A fun contemporary murder mystery with a Golden Age vibe. Our heroes are twins, both marine biologists, who are going on a joint luxury cruise/scientific expedition to the Arctic, when one of their shipmates turns up messily dead. The Arctic luxury cruise ship recreates all the best things about a traditional country house murder mystery, with the structured formality, enforced interaction and fancy settings, and this very much had the country house mystery feel to it. The plot was a bit involved in places, but the story overall was great fun, the characters were well drawn and I did not figure out whodunnit before the reveal - though unfortunately I also did not have the 'oh, OF COURSE' sense you get in a really well constructed murder mystery. Still, I'd definitely read another of this series, and I believe there is one, so that's all to the good.
WW1 and Vienna
Feb. 14th, 2026 05:18 pmReturn of the Dark Invader, Franz von Rintelen
Rintelen had so much fun writing his wartime memoirs that he decided to write a sequel too. This is not as successful or as entertaining as the first volume, partly because he doesn't have nearly the interesting material of wartime sabotage and capture to discuss, but mostly because in peacetime Rintelen has become an obsessed monomaniac about Franz von Papen and the evilness of the postwar German government. All honour, chivalry, goodness and truth are gone from Berlin and Rintelen is here with his green ink to tell you all about it, with lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. One thing that was less apparent in the first book but which is very apparent here is that Rintelen is very rich, rich enough that even the hyperinflation years don't seem to hurt him that much, and more than rich enough to keep bringing lawsuits against everyone. But there were some interesting moments mixed in to a lot of somewhat unhinged ranting and stories of the 'and then everyone applauded' variety that do not convince. There was a rather sad, sparse account of Rintelen returning home once he was released from the American prison, and discovering that he and his wife didn't know each other any more and couldn't make it work - and also later there was the deeply hilarious excursion into Rintelen's winter sports adventure which ended up with him going for a rather tipsy walk around a frozen lake and falling in and having to be rescued by his date - he was separated from his wife, but had plenty of lady friends. And, inevitably, more of his profound love affair with various English officers - who, unlike his fellow Germans, were in his mind still capable of honour and chivalry - and his moving to England around about the time the Nazis took power. Though he doesn't seem to have that much insight into his reactions, he very much gives the impression of someone who thrived in wartime but then couldn't find a way to function in peacetime.
Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin
A popular history of the events leading up to the start of WW1, with a focus on the final weeks before the fighting started and also on identifying and exploring exactly why it started, whose decisions drove it and whether anything could have prevented it. This was very readable and summarises a lot of information very concisely and clearly. Fromkin's conclusion is interesting: he divides things up into two separate wars, a local Balkan conflict where Austria-Hungary was determined to invade and conquer Serbia but with no interest or intention towards any kind of wider conflict, and a much bigger Great Powers war started by Germany to maintain and increase her position of pre-eminence in Europe. Fromkin argues that Germany encouraged and pushed Austria-Hungary to be more aggressive towards Serbia in order to create the pretext needed to go to war with Russia and France, because Germany thought that if they waited any longer for their war they would have a greater chance of losing it, and they needed Austria-Hungary to be prepared to fight alongside them. The problem Germany faced was that while they had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, they did not think Austria-Hungary would back them up in a conflict that Germany started. But once Austria-Hungary had an actual reason why they really wanted to fight, because they believed Serbia was an existential threat, and a pretext in the Serb-backed assassination of their crown prince, Germany could co-opt their aggression for its own ends which were that of a pan-European war.
Fromkin also takes issue with the popular idea that WW1 came out of nowhere, pointing out the massive military build-ups that had been happening over the previous decade in all the Great Powers involved, the many smaller wars and proxy wars and colonial wars in which the Great Powers had been embroiled in from the very start of the twentieth century, the naval arms race between Germany and the UK and the general belief in all of these countries that a major war was inevitable and the only question was when. So then he tackles the question of why this war, why August 1914, why not earlier or later, and unpicks the various diplomatic efforts that had prevented previous crises from turning into war and argues that in this particular crisis, many key players both in Germany and in Austria-Hungary were actively pushing for their two wars.
And as for why Germany wanted a war at all, a large chunk of that was because the Prussian military aristocracy that had been running the country were seeing their traditional backing start to fade, and they needed a reason to justify their maintaining of power at home, and they had all been very much indoctrinated in the belief that war was one of the pinnacles of human achievement. And they had convinced themselves that the French and the Russians were just itching to invade them, and so it was their job to invade first to prevent this from happening. So having a war, in their view, was a good thing and a necessary thing, and their key question was, how could they arrange this war so that they would have the maximum chance of winning. By harnessing their war to the Austrian response to an assassination, they were able to make it appear as if the wider war was started by someone else, whereas in actuality Germany was encouraging and supporting Austria-Hungary to respond very aggressively to the assassination rather than accept a political or legal restitution (which Serbia was willing to make; in prior potential conflicts Germany had largely reined Austria-Hungary in). And, tragically, Franz Ferdinand had been the key person on the Austrian side who had been very inclined to keep going with diplomacy and peace-making rather than war, and was also a close friend of the Kaiser, who had also been key on the German side to preventing previous crises from flaring up into wars but who now, with his friend assassinated, was in a much more belligerent mood.
I plan to read some other books on the origins of the first world war next for other viewpoints, but the interesting thing about this book is the way it explores and interrogates the connection that's otherwise a little baffling: how you make the step between the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian terrorist, and German, French and British troops slaughtering each other in the mud of Flanders.
The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson
Absolutely first class, an utterly delightful romance novel which takes the 'marriage of convenience' trope and does fantastic things with it. Twenty-year-old Ruth Berger, due to a complicated mix-up, is left behind in Vienna in 1938 when her partly-Jewish family flees the Nazis. Quinton Somerville, a family friend and English professor of paleology, is also in Vienna and the only way he can think of to rescue her is to marry her, so that as a British subject she can safely reunite with her family in London and then, hopefully, quickly get the marriage annulled. Things rapidly get more complicated for them both. This was a joy to read, I inhaled it all in one evening and loved every page, Ibbotson is incredibly funny in her prose, her characters all live and breathe and have such wonderful inner and outer lives, and she writes with gorgeously vivid and realistic experience of living in Vienna and of being a refugee in London, since Eva Ibbotson also fled Vienna for London at the outset of WW2. I loved it absolutely to pieces.
Also I enjoyed it so much that I went straight out and got two more by the same author.
A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson
This was equally delightful, though a trifle more romance-tropey and fairytale in nature: the young Countess Anna Grazinsky, having fled St Petersburg in 1919 with her family and lost their family jewels along the way, takes up a job as a housemaid at a romantic English country house and rapidly goes through the entire household befriending everyone and everything in sight, and especially the young lord, wounded in the RFC and engaged to an extremely unpleasant but very rich young woman. This one is more romantic fairytale and less realistic and funny, but again, the descriptions of all the characters are sheer delight, the settings are beautifully done and I adored it too. I especially liked the depiction of disabled characters in this, who are both a significant part of the plot and also very well realised as characters.
Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
This is the account of a year in the life of Susannah, a fashionable dressmaker in the eponymous square in Vienna, pre-WW1. It was a bit different from the other two, it wasn't a coming-of-age story or a get-together romance, Susannah is 36 and already in a settled relationship. But I absolutely adored it, maybe most of all of these three, it was so immersive and so full of beautifully vivid characters living their lives. It's told in the first person and Susannah slowly reveals all her secrets as the book goes on, I loved how in a story that doesn't have a lot of surface plot, Ibbotson maintains the tension and interest by gradually letting Susannah unfold so that we find out how she got to be who she is and why. And also we explore the lives of her friends, neigbours, employees and clients, through Susannah's interest in them all. There are lots of romances, of course, including Susannah's own, but it's not a romance novel the way the other two are. Absolutely gorgeous.
And I have several more Eva Ibbotons waiting for me now...
Rintelen had so much fun writing his wartime memoirs that he decided to write a sequel too. This is not as successful or as entertaining as the first volume, partly because he doesn't have nearly the interesting material of wartime sabotage and capture to discuss, but mostly because in peacetime Rintelen has become an obsessed monomaniac about Franz von Papen and the evilness of the postwar German government. All honour, chivalry, goodness and truth are gone from Berlin and Rintelen is here with his green ink to tell you all about it, with lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. One thing that was less apparent in the first book but which is very apparent here is that Rintelen is very rich, rich enough that even the hyperinflation years don't seem to hurt him that much, and more than rich enough to keep bringing lawsuits against everyone. But there were some interesting moments mixed in to a lot of somewhat unhinged ranting and stories of the 'and then everyone applauded' variety that do not convince. There was a rather sad, sparse account of Rintelen returning home once he was released from the American prison, and discovering that he and his wife didn't know each other any more and couldn't make it work - and also later there was the deeply hilarious excursion into Rintelen's winter sports adventure which ended up with him going for a rather tipsy walk around a frozen lake and falling in and having to be rescued by his date - he was separated from his wife, but had plenty of lady friends. And, inevitably, more of his profound love affair with various English officers - who, unlike his fellow Germans, were in his mind still capable of honour and chivalry - and his moving to England around about the time the Nazis took power. Though he doesn't seem to have that much insight into his reactions, he very much gives the impression of someone who thrived in wartime but then couldn't find a way to function in peacetime.
Europe's Last Summer, David Fromkin
A popular history of the events leading up to the start of WW1, with a focus on the final weeks before the fighting started and also on identifying and exploring exactly why it started, whose decisions drove it and whether anything could have prevented it. This was very readable and summarises a lot of information very concisely and clearly. Fromkin's conclusion is interesting: he divides things up into two separate wars, a local Balkan conflict where Austria-Hungary was determined to invade and conquer Serbia but with no interest or intention towards any kind of wider conflict, and a much bigger Great Powers war started by Germany to maintain and increase her position of pre-eminence in Europe. Fromkin argues that Germany encouraged and pushed Austria-Hungary to be more aggressive towards Serbia in order to create the pretext needed to go to war with Russia and France, because Germany thought that if they waited any longer for their war they would have a greater chance of losing it, and they needed Austria-Hungary to be prepared to fight alongside them. The problem Germany faced was that while they had an alliance with Austria-Hungary, they did not think Austria-Hungary would back them up in a conflict that Germany started. But once Austria-Hungary had an actual reason why they really wanted to fight, because they believed Serbia was an existential threat, and a pretext in the Serb-backed assassination of their crown prince, Germany could co-opt their aggression for its own ends which were that of a pan-European war.
Fromkin also takes issue with the popular idea that WW1 came out of nowhere, pointing out the massive military build-ups that had been happening over the previous decade in all the Great Powers involved, the many smaller wars and proxy wars and colonial wars in which the Great Powers had been embroiled in from the very start of the twentieth century, the naval arms race between Germany and the UK and the general belief in all of these countries that a major war was inevitable and the only question was when. So then he tackles the question of why this war, why August 1914, why not earlier or later, and unpicks the various diplomatic efforts that had prevented previous crises from turning into war and argues that in this particular crisis, many key players both in Germany and in Austria-Hungary were actively pushing for their two wars.
And as for why Germany wanted a war at all, a large chunk of that was because the Prussian military aristocracy that had been running the country were seeing their traditional backing start to fade, and they needed a reason to justify their maintaining of power at home, and they had all been very much indoctrinated in the belief that war was one of the pinnacles of human achievement. And they had convinced themselves that the French and the Russians were just itching to invade them, and so it was their job to invade first to prevent this from happening. So having a war, in their view, was a good thing and a necessary thing, and their key question was, how could they arrange this war so that they would have the maximum chance of winning. By harnessing their war to the Austrian response to an assassination, they were able to make it appear as if the wider war was started by someone else, whereas in actuality Germany was encouraging and supporting Austria-Hungary to respond very aggressively to the assassination rather than accept a political or legal restitution (which Serbia was willing to make; in prior potential conflicts Germany had largely reined Austria-Hungary in). And, tragically, Franz Ferdinand had been the key person on the Austrian side who had been very inclined to keep going with diplomacy and peace-making rather than war, and was also a close friend of the Kaiser, who had also been key on the German side to preventing previous crises from flaring up into wars but who now, with his friend assassinated, was in a much more belligerent mood.
I plan to read some other books on the origins of the first world war next for other viewpoints, but the interesting thing about this book is the way it explores and interrogates the connection that's otherwise a little baffling: how you make the step between the assassination of the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary by a Serbian terrorist, and German, French and British troops slaughtering each other in the mud of Flanders.
The Morning Gift, Eva Ibbotson
Absolutely first class, an utterly delightful romance novel which takes the 'marriage of convenience' trope and does fantastic things with it. Twenty-year-old Ruth Berger, due to a complicated mix-up, is left behind in Vienna in 1938 when her partly-Jewish family flees the Nazis. Quinton Somerville, a family friend and English professor of paleology, is also in Vienna and the only way he can think of to rescue her is to marry her, so that as a British subject she can safely reunite with her family in London and then, hopefully, quickly get the marriage annulled. Things rapidly get more complicated for them both. This was a joy to read, I inhaled it all in one evening and loved every page, Ibbotson is incredibly funny in her prose, her characters all live and breathe and have such wonderful inner and outer lives, and she writes with gorgeously vivid and realistic experience of living in Vienna and of being a refugee in London, since Eva Ibbotson also fled Vienna for London at the outset of WW2. I loved it absolutely to pieces.
Also I enjoyed it so much that I went straight out and got two more by the same author.
A Countess Below Stairs, Eva Ibbotson
This was equally delightful, though a trifle more romance-tropey and fairytale in nature: the young Countess Anna Grazinsky, having fled St Petersburg in 1919 with her family and lost their family jewels along the way, takes up a job as a housemaid at a romantic English country house and rapidly goes through the entire household befriending everyone and everything in sight, and especially the young lord, wounded in the RFC and engaged to an extremely unpleasant but very rich young woman. This one is more romantic fairytale and less realistic and funny, but again, the descriptions of all the characters are sheer delight, the settings are beautifully done and I adored it too. I especially liked the depiction of disabled characters in this, who are both a significant part of the plot and also very well realised as characters.
Madensky Square, Eva Ibbotson
This is the account of a year in the life of Susannah, a fashionable dressmaker in the eponymous square in Vienna, pre-WW1. It was a bit different from the other two, it wasn't a coming-of-age story or a get-together romance, Susannah is 36 and already in a settled relationship. But I absolutely adored it, maybe most of all of these three, it was so immersive and so full of beautifully vivid characters living their lives. It's told in the first person and Susannah slowly reveals all her secrets as the book goes on, I loved how in a story that doesn't have a lot of surface plot, Ibbotson maintains the tension and interest by gradually letting Susannah unfold so that we find out how she got to be who she is and why. And also we explore the lives of her friends, neigbours, employees and clients, through Susannah's interest in them all. There are lots of romances, of course, including Susannah's own, but it's not a romance novel the way the other two are. Absolutely gorgeous.
And I have several more Eva Ibbotons waiting for me now...
We have had our annual Biggles Airdrop with 24 excellent fics to read, which considering only a dozen people were signed up suggests that the fandom's enthusiasm is still going strong.
I received two amazing gifts:
Odette, a von Zoyton-centric fic in which he provides a bitingly hilarious outsider perspective on von Stalhein's unhinged Biggles Obsession, with superb characterisation, glittering prose and EvS asking von Zoyton for flying lessons. 7000 words, background Biggles/EvS insanity about each other.
A New Life, a gorgeously written vignette looking at Fritz visiting his Uncle Erich later in canon, with a truly adorable surprise for him. 700 words, background Biggles/EvS.
And I wrote two fics:
Soft Landings (3000 words, gen), slight Hatchet AU where Algy is the first person to encounter von Stalhein.
dialogue for one voice (with chorus), (2000 words, Biggles/EvS/Marie as a work in progress), an additional scene from the ending of Looks Back, Marie sitting with Biggles in hospital.
And while this was not a gift for me, I do have to give honourable mention to International Relations, which is 15k of Marcel Brissac cheerfully fucking his way through everyone in Biggles's orbit starting with Raymond, and is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and also makes it plain that Bertie has been talking to the fitters from 'The Raid'!
Many thanks tosholio and sheron for organising it all, I had a wonderful time!
I received two amazing gifts:
Odette, a von Zoyton-centric fic in which he provides a bitingly hilarious outsider perspective on von Stalhein's unhinged Biggles Obsession, with superb characterisation, glittering prose and EvS asking von Zoyton for flying lessons. 7000 words, background Biggles/EvS insanity about each other.
A New Life, a gorgeously written vignette looking at Fritz visiting his Uncle Erich later in canon, with a truly adorable surprise for him. 700 words, background Biggles/EvS.
And I wrote two fics:
Soft Landings (3000 words, gen), slight Hatchet AU where Algy is the first person to encounter von Stalhein.
dialogue for one voice (with chorus), (2000 words, Biggles/EvS/Marie as a work in progress), an additional scene from the ending of Looks Back, Marie sitting with Biggles in hospital.
And while this was not a gift for me, I do have to give honourable mention to International Relations, which is 15k of Marcel Brissac cheerfully fucking his way through everyone in Biggles's orbit starting with Raymond, and is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and also makes it plain that Bertie has been talking to the fitters from 'The Raid'!
Many thanks to
sholio and sheron for organising it all, I had a wonderful time!Fic: aye blythe blink
Jan. 18th, 2026 07:27 pmI started writing this ages ago as a treat for a horror exchange, though I can't now remember for whom or which exchange - if it sounds like something you might have requested, it's probably for you! It grew out of all proportion - it was going to be about 500 words - and picked up all kinds of other things including some of my experience of Berlin, and after a great deal of wrestling with the ending I have finally finished it. I was going to think of a cleverer title for it, this one was because I was listening to 'Bonnie Jean Cameron' a lot while writing it, but I accidentally posted it with this working title (which is slightly better than the other working title of Horror Soulbonding) and decided to let it stick.
Title: aye blythe blink
Content: angst with a happy ending, nightmares, hallucinations, soulbonding as horror, Biggles/EvS, 11k words
Summary: Biggles starts to have strange nightmares. Algy looks for a solution.
( the only thing they could recommend )
Title: aye blythe blink
Content: angst with a happy ending, nightmares, hallucinations, soulbonding as horror, Biggles/EvS, 11k words
Summary: Biggles starts to have strange nightmares. Algy looks for a solution.
( the only thing they could recommend )
The Dark Invader, Kapitänleutnant Franz von Rintelen (available on Gutenberg Australia)
The autobiography of one of Germany's most successful secret agents in WW1. One of the good bits from my previous book was the mention of this autobiography in the author's note at the end, since Rintelen appears as a minor character in 'The Spies of Hartlake Hall'. So I looked it up and read it, and what a read it was. Rintelen is an absolute lunatic; what he most reminded me of was a German Miles Vorkosigan, including the bit where his superiors ship him off to cause problems for the enemy instead of having him meddling in politics at home. He likes coming up with wild ideas and carrying them out, he has bucketloads of chutzpah, he's not above creatively delaying his obedience to orders, he's not afraid of wading into just about anything and he's very cocky. He is exactly who you don't want as a coworker in headquarters, but exactly who you do want to send off to sabotage the enemy.
And since he spoke excellent English - the memoir is written by him in English, not translated from German - the Germans sent him to America to do something about the fact that America, though neutral, was supplying huge volumes of ammunition to the Allies. And so he sets about arranging the manufacture of time-bombs to put in the holds of cargo ships carrying munitions, he looks for ways to sabotage harbours, he tries to send money and weapons to Mexico to encourage them to invade the USA, he gets involved in organising strikes among dock workers and munition workers, and he makes friends with Irish nationalists and encourages them to help him with all of this. And, because this is real life and not fiction and he's not quite as lucky as Miles Vorkosigan, eventually he gets captured by the British on his way back to Germany, and put in a POW camp, and then later was sent for trial and imprisonment in the USA for his crimes there - he doesn't get back to Germany again until 1921, after four years of hard labour in pretty grim conditions which he makes plain in his memoir that he felt was extremely inappropriate as an enemy soldier.
But he did very obviously adore the British officers who captured him, he's incredibly Anglophile and the whole description of his being captured is interleaved with a description of him spending Christmas with one of the officers involved years later and how well they got on ('dearly beloved ex-enemies' is his phrase); he loves England and the British. He found that Germany wasn't the place for him when he got out - not least because von Papen, the Weimar chancellor, was his fellow naval attache in the US embassy while he was carrying out all this sabotage and they hated each other's guts and, according to Rintelen, Papen deliberately let his name leak out so that the British knew who he was and could arrest him. So Rintelen moved to London and settled there, and according to the Wikipedia article about him, it's possible that when WW2 came around he helped train SOE operatives in sabotage work, this being something of his area of expertise.
The memoir is very obviously written with his own biases and interpretation and grievances about various things, but it's a fantastic read and honestly even though he was clearly a complete nightmare in so many ways, I couldn't help but like him.
The autobiography of one of Germany's most successful secret agents in WW1. One of the good bits from my previous book was the mention of this autobiography in the author's note at the end, since Rintelen appears as a minor character in 'The Spies of Hartlake Hall'. So I looked it up and read it, and what a read it was. Rintelen is an absolute lunatic; what he most reminded me of was a German Miles Vorkosigan, including the bit where his superiors ship him off to cause problems for the enemy instead of having him meddling in politics at home. He likes coming up with wild ideas and carrying them out, he has bucketloads of chutzpah, he's not above creatively delaying his obedience to orders, he's not afraid of wading into just about anything and he's very cocky. He is exactly who you don't want as a coworker in headquarters, but exactly who you do want to send off to sabotage the enemy.
And since he spoke excellent English - the memoir is written by him in English, not translated from German - the Germans sent him to America to do something about the fact that America, though neutral, was supplying huge volumes of ammunition to the Allies. And so he sets about arranging the manufacture of time-bombs to put in the holds of cargo ships carrying munitions, he looks for ways to sabotage harbours, he tries to send money and weapons to Mexico to encourage them to invade the USA, he gets involved in organising strikes among dock workers and munition workers, and he makes friends with Irish nationalists and encourages them to help him with all of this. And, because this is real life and not fiction and he's not quite as lucky as Miles Vorkosigan, eventually he gets captured by the British on his way back to Germany, and put in a POW camp, and then later was sent for trial and imprisonment in the USA for his crimes there - he doesn't get back to Germany again until 1921, after four years of hard labour in pretty grim conditions which he makes plain in his memoir that he felt was extremely inappropriate as an enemy soldier.
But he did very obviously adore the British officers who captured him, he's incredibly Anglophile and the whole description of his being captured is interleaved with a description of him spending Christmas with one of the officers involved years later and how well they got on ('dearly beloved ex-enemies' is his phrase); he loves England and the British. He found that Germany wasn't the place for him when he got out - not least because von Papen, the Weimar chancellor, was his fellow naval attache in the US embassy while he was carrying out all this sabotage and they hated each other's guts and, according to Rintelen, Papen deliberately let his name leak out so that the British knew who he was and could arrest him. So Rintelen moved to London and settled there, and according to the Wikipedia article about him, it's possible that when WW2 came around he helped train SOE operatives in sabotage work, this being something of his area of expertise.
The memoir is very obviously written with his own biases and interpretation and grievances about various things, but it's a fantastic read and honestly even though he was clearly a complete nightmare in so many ways, I couldn't help but like him.
Major Sterne would never
Jan. 7th, 2026 02:55 pmThe Spies of Hartlake Hall, RL Graham
This was a Christmas present that looked very promising, being a WW1 espionage murder mystery with a female sleuth, and therefore with all sorts of interests of mine all lined up. Unfortunately it was only a middling book: the authors never really seemed to know what they were doing, both the mystery aspect and the espionage aspect were a mess, and the period details were a bit of a mixed bag. It started really strongly: an unknown dead body, inside a closet locked from the inside in the heart of naval intelligence, clutching the un-decoded Zimmerman telegram, found by a secretary who is not what she seems - but it was all downhill from there on. Still: spies, WW1, murder mystery, female sleuth (though one of many disappointments with the book is that our female sleuth was instantly sidelined for the real hero who is of course a male counterespionage guy who has a fridged love interest and an unpleasant mother, he has Angst About Women and a Tragic Past instead of any actual characterisation) - I read the whole thing. But it felt like it was the ropy first draft of a much better book.
( fuller review with some spoilers )
This was a Christmas present that looked very promising, being a WW1 espionage murder mystery with a female sleuth, and therefore with all sorts of interests of mine all lined up. Unfortunately it was only a middling book: the authors never really seemed to know what they were doing, both the mystery aspect and the espionage aspect were a mess, and the period details were a bit of a mixed bag. It started really strongly: an unknown dead body, inside a closet locked from the inside in the heart of naval intelligence, clutching the un-decoded Zimmerman telegram, found by a secretary who is not what she seems - but it was all downhill from there on. Still: spies, WW1, murder mystery, female sleuth (though one of many disappointments with the book is that our female sleuth was instantly sidelined for the real hero who is of course a male counterespionage guy who has a fridged love interest and an unpleasant mother, he has Angst About Women and a Tragic Past instead of any actual characterisation) - I read the whole thing. But it felt like it was the ropy first draft of a much better book.
( fuller review with some spoilers )
Yuletide reveals!
Jan. 2nd, 2026 12:17 pmI matched one of my 'why not try this' fandoms this year in Yuletide and had a lovely request for Heyer's Cotillion. I've never written Heyer fic, or any Regency romance fic unless you count the more Heyeresque parts of Bujold, but she's a longstanding favourite author and I wanted to have a go, and Cotillion is such a fun book, one of my absolute favourites of hers. And Lord Legerwood is one of Heyer's many delightfully sardonic older men and so writing his POV was tremendous fun - I had a couple of false starts trying to write something for this request, but once I started writing Lord Legerwood it all came together very smoothly. And a comedy of misunderstandings seemed very appropriate for Heyer.
By Special Licence (Heyer - Cotillion, canon pairings, epilogue, 2000 words)
To get into the spirit of the thing, as well as reading Cotillion a couple of times through I have been slowly reading through all the Heyers, partly to get the voice and also because it's always like this when I pick up one Heyer: I have to read all the other ones immediately afterwards. I haven't reread any of the Georgian ones yet because I wanted to keep my head in the Regency voice, but now that my fic is all done I will be getting to them because what can beat These Old Shades - the first Heyer I ever read, not necessarily the best place to start except of course it is the best place to start. Anyway, I have been reading through the Regencies more or less in favourite order, so I've now reached Arabella - which has many things I do love but the 'told a silly lie and now have to stick to it' trope isn't one of them. (Top ten Heyer Regencies, not in order: Frederica, Venetia, A Civil Contract, Cotillion, Friday's Child, The Nonesuch, The Foundling, The Unknown Ajax, The Reluctant Widow, Black Sheep.) But even my least favourite Heyers are still fun to reread.
And as well as what I wrote, the authors of my gifts are revealed:
![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
morvidra wrote Happiness In Time Of Joy (Wimsey missing scenes from Busman's Honeymoon)
longwhitecoats wrote Double Exposure (long Wimsey casefic with Harriet/Peter/Bunter)
fullborn wrote Wandrers Nachtlied ('The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' Theo/Clive fic).
Thank you all very much!
By Special Licence (Heyer - Cotillion, canon pairings, epilogue, 2000 words)
To get into the spirit of the thing, as well as reading Cotillion a couple of times through I have been slowly reading through all the Heyers, partly to get the voice and also because it's always like this when I pick up one Heyer: I have to read all the other ones immediately afterwards. I haven't reread any of the Georgian ones yet because I wanted to keep my head in the Regency voice, but now that my fic is all done I will be getting to them because what can beat These Old Shades - the first Heyer I ever read, not necessarily the best place to start except of course it is the best place to start. Anyway, I have been reading through the Regencies more or less in favourite order, so I've now reached Arabella - which has many things I do love but the 'told a silly lie and now have to stick to it' trope isn't one of them. (Top ten Heyer Regencies, not in order: Frederica, Venetia, A Civil Contract, Cotillion, Friday's Child, The Nonesuch, The Foundling, The Unknown Ajax, The Reluctant Widow, Black Sheep.) But even my least favourite Heyers are still fun to reread.
And as well as what I wrote, the authors of my gifts are revealed:
Thank you all very much!
feasts of the day
Dec. 26th, 2025 05:57 pmMerry Christmas! And Happy Yuletide! I have had a startlingly straightforward time here, with lots of singing and cooking and family but no drama at all.
And I have three wonderful gifts in Yuletide, two that appeared in the main collection and one total surprise that showed up at the very last minute in Madness, all of them so beautifully tailored to my likes, I can't praise them enough.
Happiness In Time Of Joy, a Wimsey fic, some utterly adorable missing scenes just before Lord Peter and Harriet get married, featuring Gherkins being himself in full measure.
Double Exposure, another Wimsey fic, 17k of fantastic Peter/Harriet/Bunter casefic, with ghosts of WW1 and excellent period details and a beautiful get-together for my OT3.
Wandrers Nachtlied, a total surprise in Yuletide Madness, a 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' fic - which I've requested many years and never got before - with such a clever play on the non-linear narrative of the film, but with the Clive/Theo made even more central to it all, a gorgeous look at them both.
Every year I am totally astounded by the work people put in to making such generous and thoughtful gifts. Thank you, dear anonymous authors!
And I have three wonderful gifts in Yuletide, two that appeared in the main collection and one total surprise that showed up at the very last minute in Madness, all of them so beautifully tailored to my likes, I can't praise them enough.
Happiness In Time Of Joy, a Wimsey fic, some utterly adorable missing scenes just before Lord Peter and Harriet get married, featuring Gherkins being himself in full measure.
Double Exposure, another Wimsey fic, 17k of fantastic Peter/Harriet/Bunter casefic, with ghosts of WW1 and excellent period details and a beautiful get-together for my OT3.
Wandrers Nachtlied, a total surprise in Yuletide Madness, a 'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' fic - which I've requested many years and never got before - with such a clever play on the non-linear narrative of the film, but with the Clive/Theo made even more central to it all, a gorgeous look at them both.
Every year I am totally astounded by the work people put in to making such generous and thoughtful gifts. Thank you, dear anonymous authors!
the inevitable commentfic
Dec. 22nd, 2025 01:54 pmSholio wrote a wonderful variation on the evergreen 'presumed dead' trope and invited continuations, and since there are certain kinds of temptation I don't even bother trying to resist, I wrote some more for it.
Sholio's fic (second one down)
( 1400 words of waking up after being presumed dead (Biggles gen) )
Sholio's fic (second one down)
( 1400 words of waking up after being presumed dead (Biggles gen) )
Mistletoe Challenge and fic
Dec. 20th, 2025 05:24 pmI have been putting up my Christmas decorations, and amongst them are my amazing wonderful Biggles Christmas decorations, generously made and given to me by debriswoman. I shared a photo of them on discord, and inevitably this led to taking them as a fic prompt, and so now we have the very informal Mistletoe Challenge. The rules are, the fics must be inspired by these decorations, and less than 1000 words because it's a busy time of year. I have made a little AO3 collection for any resulting fics, silversmith has already written a fic, and having accidentally started something, I had to write a ficlet myself!
The Mistletoe Challenge collection, if anyone else wants to write a ficlet.
( a photo of the decorations, and my drabble sequence about them )
debriswoman. I shared a photo of them on discord, and inevitably this led to taking them as a fic prompt, and so now we have the very informal Mistletoe Challenge. The rules are, the fics must be inspired by these decorations, and less than 1000 words because it's a busy time of year. I have made a little AO3 collection for any resulting fics, The Mistletoe Challenge collection, if anyone else wants to write a ficlet.
( a photo of the decorations, and my drabble sequence about them )
Still reading steadily through the series. These books are just perfect for decompression reading, they're mostly lightweight though with the odd flash of seriousness, they're full of fun hijinks and adventures, all the characters are very nicely drawn and overall they're just plain fun to read. Plus a nice sprinkling of historical interest for the period.
Among Those Absent
Prisoners are escaping and disappearing with tremendous success. Tommy Hambledon has to find out why. While Biggles would have tackled this by looking for rogue airplanes, Hambledon tackles this by getting himself a cover as a fraudster and being sent to prison, whereupon he muscles in on someone else's escape and gets rescued from prison. By hot air balloon and parachute. And after Hambledon and a fellow escapee have a wonderful hot air balloon and parachute ride, they then have to deal with the fact that the escape gang want paying for their rescue out of the totally fictional ill-gotten gains Hambledon is supposed to have stashed somewhere. In the process of dealing with this, Hambledon encounters a different slightly shady group of guys who--well, their leader lives in a truly flamboyantly ridiculous suburban mansion which is named, and I really could not believe my eyes when I read this, Kuminboys. It is almost redundant to add that he has all sorts of miscellaneous young men calling on him at all hours who are willing to do all sorts of shady odd jobs for him. He deals with blackmailers unofficially. Manning and Coles never say anyone is gay or refer to sexuality in any way, but then they do things like this and I love it. And, well, there is a plot involving Hambledon sorting out the prison break gang, but I'm afraid my brain seized up at Kuminboys and I can't actually remember what happened otherwise. The anti-blackmail gang was fine at the end and so was Tommy, and that's the main thing.
Not Negotiable
This one opens with a prologue explaining that the Nazis had an industrial-scale programme forging currency from the various Allied countries in an effort to destabilise their economies. Now, after the war, large numbers of dubious notes are turning up across France and Belgium and Tommy Hambledon is trying to find the source. A fun Belgian detective teams up with him for this, and lots of Manning & Coles's usual vivid secondary characters including a reformed crook and a young man who tries crime and doesn't like it, plus two young women who attack a gangster with a frying pan with considerable success. Not one of the most outstanding, but plenty of fun to read.
Diamonds To Amsterdam
This was an absolute classic, featuring a mad scientist, so many people in disguise, gold and jewels and a seaplane and a Very Significant Umbrella and kidnappings and escapes and really everything you could possibly want. The story opens with our mad scientist being found murdered. The mad scientist in question had just solved, allegedly, the problem of how to turn silver into gold, and then someone bludgeoned him over the head and his notes all disappeared. Then his assistant disappeared, then his machinery was stolen, and Tommy Hambledon is traipsing around a Home Counties village trying to find clues to all of this and figure out what was going on, with occasional trips to Amsterdam thrown in for good measure. A great ride, plus some excellent whump as various characters are drugged or kidnapped and imprisoned, lots of fun all around.
Dangerous By Nature
Tommy Hambledon visits Central America. While this had some moments of period-typical racism, it was not as bad as I expected. The story was a familiar one from multiple Biggles and a Gimlet on this theme: in a fictional Central American state, a slightly lost British sailor saw a ship secretly unloading goods in a remote part of the country while hiding its identification. Hambledon is sent to investigate. He is told that he can liaise with the excellent American spy Mr Hobkirk who is already there; however no such person ever comes up. Instead he has a peculiarly devoted and helpful local man named Matteo who follows him around everywhere, produces useful information and kills assassins and generally devotes himself to Hambledon's wellbeing and work, far more than you would expect from the guy who you paid to carry your luggage to the hotel. Hambledon, unusually for him, has no suspicions about the identity of the capable and knowledgeable Matteo. Anyway, the country is run by your standard thriller dictator who has annoyed the local aristocracy and is fleecing the local peasantry and has plans to flee the country with all the wealth he can carry away, soon. Hambledon discovers that the mysterious cargo was of course weapons, supplied by the Russians; however the Russians are somewhat inexplicably arming both the President and also the old aristos who oppose him, and having bought everyone off with guns, they are busy building something involving lots of concrete in the middle of the jungle. Hambledon investigates, nearly gets killed many times over in the classic way, discovers he does not like jungles at all, and eventually figures out what it's all about. (spoilers for the plot)
Now Or Never
Hambledon has heard rumours of a secret resurgent Nazi society in occupied Cologne and heads out to investigate. Forgan and Campbell, our gay model train shop and lawbreaking-for-fun guys, come along to help out, impersonating the Spanish financiers who are supposed to be meeting the Nazis in Cologne - a job that does not become easier when the actual Spaniards show up. Meanwhile, Hambledon makes friends with an earnest and enthusiastic German private detective, and tries to figure out what's going on. Excellent atmospheric descriptions of bombed-out Cologne and life there as things start to recover postwar. These are all very much immediate postwar books, and it's fascinating to see what the attitudes are and the snippets of different settings, in France and the Netherlands and Germany and England, every character has a war backstory of some sort and most of the plots are about leftovers of war one way and another.
Alias Uncle Hugo
A Ruritanian adventure of a familiar mould for Biggles readers. Tommy Hambledon is undercover in Soviet-occupied Ruritania to retrieve the teenage king of Ruritania, who is living incognito with his elderly tutor to care for him, and take him to England. Presumably to head up a government-in-exile or possibly to go to school, Manning and Coles wisely leave the politics to look after themselves and concentrate on the fun bits, ie Hambledon undercover as a Soviet inspector of factories trying to find an opportunity to extract young Kaspar from his Very Communist School For Little Communists. Unlike Biggles, Hambledon has no compunction at all about leaving a trail of bodies behind him and does cheerfully shoot people in the head the minute they suspect him. He also has a great line in making friend with people and then dropping them in the shit, in this case several senior communist police officers who think he's the bee's knees right up until they get killed or arrested for their connection with him. There's some excellent Aeroplane Content in this one too, Hambledon doesn't team up with Biggles but his life might have been a bit easier if he had, and being sent to make a stealth landing in Ukraine to retrieve the Ruritanian Prince and the British spy who's rescued him is exactly the sort of job Biggles does all the time. But Hambledon has to figure out his own aeroplane evacuation, and there's plenty of aeroplane fun as he does so.
Among Those Absent
Prisoners are escaping and disappearing with tremendous success. Tommy Hambledon has to find out why. While Biggles would have tackled this by looking for rogue airplanes, Hambledon tackles this by getting himself a cover as a fraudster and being sent to prison, whereupon he muscles in on someone else's escape and gets rescued from prison. By hot air balloon and parachute. And after Hambledon and a fellow escapee have a wonderful hot air balloon and parachute ride, they then have to deal with the fact that the escape gang want paying for their rescue out of the totally fictional ill-gotten gains Hambledon is supposed to have stashed somewhere. In the process of dealing with this, Hambledon encounters a different slightly shady group of guys who--well, their leader lives in a truly flamboyantly ridiculous suburban mansion which is named, and I really could not believe my eyes when I read this, Kuminboys. It is almost redundant to add that he has all sorts of miscellaneous young men calling on him at all hours who are willing to do all sorts of shady odd jobs for him. He deals with blackmailers unofficially. Manning and Coles never say anyone is gay or refer to sexuality in any way, but then they do things like this and I love it. And, well, there is a plot involving Hambledon sorting out the prison break gang, but I'm afraid my brain seized up at Kuminboys and I can't actually remember what happened otherwise. The anti-blackmail gang was fine at the end and so was Tommy, and that's the main thing.
Not Negotiable
This one opens with a prologue explaining that the Nazis had an industrial-scale programme forging currency from the various Allied countries in an effort to destabilise their economies. Now, after the war, large numbers of dubious notes are turning up across France and Belgium and Tommy Hambledon is trying to find the source. A fun Belgian detective teams up with him for this, and lots of Manning & Coles's usual vivid secondary characters including a reformed crook and a young man who tries crime and doesn't like it, plus two young women who attack a gangster with a frying pan with considerable success. Not one of the most outstanding, but plenty of fun to read.
Diamonds To Amsterdam
This was an absolute classic, featuring a mad scientist, so many people in disguise, gold and jewels and a seaplane and a Very Significant Umbrella and kidnappings and escapes and really everything you could possibly want. The story opens with our mad scientist being found murdered. The mad scientist in question had just solved, allegedly, the problem of how to turn silver into gold, and then someone bludgeoned him over the head and his notes all disappeared. Then his assistant disappeared, then his machinery was stolen, and Tommy Hambledon is traipsing around a Home Counties village trying to find clues to all of this and figure out what was going on, with occasional trips to Amsterdam thrown in for good measure. A great ride, plus some excellent whump as various characters are drugged or kidnapped and imprisoned, lots of fun all around.
Dangerous By Nature
Tommy Hambledon visits Central America. While this had some moments of period-typical racism, it was not as bad as I expected. The story was a familiar one from multiple Biggles and a Gimlet on this theme: in a fictional Central American state, a slightly lost British sailor saw a ship secretly unloading goods in a remote part of the country while hiding its identification. Hambledon is sent to investigate. He is told that he can liaise with the excellent American spy Mr Hobkirk who is already there; however no such person ever comes up. Instead he has a peculiarly devoted and helpful local man named Matteo who follows him around everywhere, produces useful information and kills assassins and generally devotes himself to Hambledon's wellbeing and work, far more than you would expect from the guy who you paid to carry your luggage to the hotel. Hambledon, unusually for him, has no suspicions about the identity of the capable and knowledgeable Matteo. Anyway, the country is run by your standard thriller dictator who has annoyed the local aristocracy and is fleecing the local peasantry and has plans to flee the country with all the wealth he can carry away, soon. Hambledon discovers that the mysterious cargo was of course weapons, supplied by the Russians; however the Russians are somewhat inexplicably arming both the President and also the old aristos who oppose him, and having bought everyone off with guns, they are busy building something involving lots of concrete in the middle of the jungle. Hambledon investigates, nearly gets killed many times over in the classic way, discovers he does not like jungles at all, and eventually figures out what it's all about. (spoilers for the plot)
It's atom bombs. The Russians are building a missile site so they can launch atom bombs at the Panama Canal. This book was written in 1950 and it's clear that Manning and Coles don't know that much about atom bombs at this point, because apparently there are twelve atomic warheads on site. This site gets shelled by the aristocrats, and the atom bombs are all set off by accident. Hambledon, hiding down the valley with his friends a few miles away, is fine. Radiation and fallout are not a concern for anyone. It's fascinating seeing that while everyone is scared of atom bombs, they are not nearly scared enough, they're treated as being functionally the same as super-sized regular bombs and there is no mention of any further ill effects. Hambledon arranges that the story is put out that a previously unknown volcano erupted and that was what the big mushroom cloud was all about (the mushroom cloud, evidently, they have heard of). And once all the atom bombs have detonated, the whole story is over.
Now Or Never
Hambledon has heard rumours of a secret resurgent Nazi society in occupied Cologne and heads out to investigate. Forgan and Campbell, our gay model train shop and lawbreaking-for-fun guys, come along to help out, impersonating the Spanish financiers who are supposed to be meeting the Nazis in Cologne - a job that does not become easier when the actual Spaniards show up. Meanwhile, Hambledon makes friends with an earnest and enthusiastic German private detective, and tries to figure out what's going on. Excellent atmospheric descriptions of bombed-out Cologne and life there as things start to recover postwar. These are all very much immediate postwar books, and it's fascinating to see what the attitudes are and the snippets of different settings, in France and the Netherlands and Germany and England, every character has a war backstory of some sort and most of the plots are about leftovers of war one way and another.
Alias Uncle Hugo
A Ruritanian adventure of a familiar mould for Biggles readers. Tommy Hambledon is undercover in Soviet-occupied Ruritania to retrieve the teenage king of Ruritania, who is living incognito with his elderly tutor to care for him, and take him to England. Presumably to head up a government-in-exile or possibly to go to school, Manning and Coles wisely leave the politics to look after themselves and concentrate on the fun bits, ie Hambledon undercover as a Soviet inspector of factories trying to find an opportunity to extract young Kaspar from his Very Communist School For Little Communists. Unlike Biggles, Hambledon has no compunction at all about leaving a trail of bodies behind him and does cheerfully shoot people in the head the minute they suspect him. He also has a great line in making friend with people and then dropping them in the shit, in this case several senior communist police officers who think he's the bee's knees right up until they get killed or arrested for their connection with him. There's some excellent Aeroplane Content in this one too, Hambledon doesn't team up with Biggles but his life might have been a bit easier if he had, and being sent to make a stealth landing in Ukraine to retrieve the Ruritanian Prince and the British spy who's rescued him is exactly the sort of job Biggles does all the time. But Hambledon has to figure out his own aeroplane evacuation, and there's plenty of aeroplane fun as he does so.
undercover hijinks galore
Nov. 8th, 2025 11:14 amEven more of Manning Coles's Tommy Hambledon books, this is proving a wonderfully entertaining series and I am having a blast with it all - the books are pretty light-hearted, with lots of humour but also plenty of adventure and twists and turns of the plot, and the characters are all vivid and delightful.
Green Hazard
Tommy Hambledon goes undercover in Switzerland trying to find out more about a mysterious Swiss chemist who may have invented a new and exciting form of explosive. Unfortunately, the Nazis also want this Swiss chemist and his explosive, and also the Swiss chemist is not at all who he seems, and within a very few pages Hambledon has been abducted by the Gestapo who believe him to be the Swiss chemist, and is set up with a laboratory in Berlin and ordered to make novel explosives. Excellent undercover hijinks, with Hambledon deciding his best defence against knowing zero chemistry is to be the most bad-tempered, arrogant and annoying scientist ever, while trying to avoid anyone who knew him the last time he was undercover in Berlin in a totally different identity only a few years earlier. Another tremendous undercover adventure with all the frills you can hope for and Hambledon coming up with a superb way to finally extricate himself from the situation. I had a great time with this one.
The Fifth Man
Five British soldiers are taken from POW camps in Germany and persuaded to return to England as spies for the Nazis. Four of them surrender to the British police or are killed as soon as they arrive. The fifth does something very different. I am really liking how Manning & Coles are introducing new sets of characters for their books as well as having continuity with the recurring characters, and the lead character of this book, Anthony Colemore, is fantastic. Colemore was a petty criminal and smuggler who broke out of prison in England, fled to the Continent, decided he wanted to fight Nazis so wound up in the French army just in time for the fall of France, quickly changed identities and uniforms with a dead British officer to get better treatment and promptly ended up in a POW camp where the Germans identified his newly assumed identity as a close relation of a British Fascist and invited him to spy for them. And it only gets more complicated from there, Manning & Coles love playing with false identities for all their characters and wringing every possible trope they can out of them, and it's great. Hambledon is largely in the background for this, running Colemore as an agent but not doing much in the plot, but Colemore is more than strong enough as a character to carry the story, he is the sort of character who should get recruited by Miles Naismith for the Dendarii Mercenaries, he loves taking initiative and showing off how good he is and is endlessly resourceful at making his schemes work. I also shipped him tremendously with another fascinating character, the ingenuous young German officer he escapes with from a British POW camp, who is also not all he seems.
A Brother For Hugh (also titled With Intent to Deceive; also online lists vary about the order the series should go in, but this one is definitely next)
The first post-war adventure, again with new characters. James Hyde has had a very boring life working for his father's business and never going anywhere. But when his father dies, James sells the business and discovers he's a rich man, and starts to think he wants adventure. Meanwhile, Hugh Selkirk looks extremely like James, but while James has barely left Yeovil in his life, Selkirk is dashing and well-travelled British-Argentine businessman with a serious problem: a gang of mafia-style crooks stole some Nazi gold stashed in Argentina, Selkirk stole it from them, and both the gang and the remaining Nazis are hunting him. Selkirk and James meet, James tells Selkirk he wants adventure, and since they resemble each other, Selkirk suggests they have a mini-adventure by swapping identities for a few days. He doesn't mention to James that he's being hunted by both the mafia and also the Nazis. James Hyde settles down in Selkirk's hotel with Selkirk's devastatingly competent manservant Adam looking after him (they are very shippable, and Adam is Not What He Seems) and it's all going well until someone shoots Selkirk and a crook tries to break in through James's hotel window. Another one where Hambledon's role in the plot is largely confined to following around collecting up the assorted gangsters that are being left giftwrapped around the place. Also there's an adorable heavily-implied-to-be-gay couple in this who run a model railway shop together and have a fantastic time aiding and abetting Selkirk and his friends and thwarting the police.
Let The Tiger Die
I have no idea what relationship the title has to the book, but it's a great title. After all the new characters, we're back to Hambledon taking the lead when his Swedish holiday is interrupted by his own urge to run around investigating things that look a little weird. Being Tommy Hambledon, within a chapter he's wanted for murder and been abducted twice in rapid succession and in possession of some mysterious documents, and he doesn't know why. It turns out some communists are trailing around Europe assassinating stray wanted Nazis, and because Hambledon stepped in when he saw an assassination taking place in the street, now the stray wanted Nazis think he's one of them, and the communists want to assassinate him too. This involves a ridiculous and fantastic chase across Europe from Stockholm to Cadiz. Even better, Hambledon decides to call in James Hyde and the gay model railway couple from the previous book to help him with his scheme to avoid the assassins while unravelling the entire fugitive Nazi organisation and its plan to restore the Third Reich all in one go. Tremendous fun and even more identity porn as Hambledon pretends to be himself, the guy just adores his fake identities and they're always fun to watch.
Green Hazard
Tommy Hambledon goes undercover in Switzerland trying to find out more about a mysterious Swiss chemist who may have invented a new and exciting form of explosive. Unfortunately, the Nazis also want this Swiss chemist and his explosive, and also the Swiss chemist is not at all who he seems, and within a very few pages Hambledon has been abducted by the Gestapo who believe him to be the Swiss chemist, and is set up with a laboratory in Berlin and ordered to make novel explosives. Excellent undercover hijinks, with Hambledon deciding his best defence against knowing zero chemistry is to be the most bad-tempered, arrogant and annoying scientist ever, while trying to avoid anyone who knew him the last time he was undercover in Berlin in a totally different identity only a few years earlier. Another tremendous undercover adventure with all the frills you can hope for and Hambledon coming up with a superb way to finally extricate himself from the situation. I had a great time with this one.
The Fifth Man
Five British soldiers are taken from POW camps in Germany and persuaded to return to England as spies for the Nazis. Four of them surrender to the British police or are killed as soon as they arrive. The fifth does something very different. I am really liking how Manning & Coles are introducing new sets of characters for their books as well as having continuity with the recurring characters, and the lead character of this book, Anthony Colemore, is fantastic. Colemore was a petty criminal and smuggler who broke out of prison in England, fled to the Continent, decided he wanted to fight Nazis so wound up in the French army just in time for the fall of France, quickly changed identities and uniforms with a dead British officer to get better treatment and promptly ended up in a POW camp where the Germans identified his newly assumed identity as a close relation of a British Fascist and invited him to spy for them. And it only gets more complicated from there, Manning & Coles love playing with false identities for all their characters and wringing every possible trope they can out of them, and it's great. Hambledon is largely in the background for this, running Colemore as an agent but not doing much in the plot, but Colemore is more than strong enough as a character to carry the story, he is the sort of character who should get recruited by Miles Naismith for the Dendarii Mercenaries, he loves taking initiative and showing off how good he is and is endlessly resourceful at making his schemes work. I also shipped him tremendously with another fascinating character, the ingenuous young German officer he escapes with from a British POW camp, who is also not all he seems.
A Brother For Hugh (also titled With Intent to Deceive; also online lists vary about the order the series should go in, but this one is definitely next)
The first post-war adventure, again with new characters. James Hyde has had a very boring life working for his father's business and never going anywhere. But when his father dies, James sells the business and discovers he's a rich man, and starts to think he wants adventure. Meanwhile, Hugh Selkirk looks extremely like James, but while James has barely left Yeovil in his life, Selkirk is dashing and well-travelled British-Argentine businessman with a serious problem: a gang of mafia-style crooks stole some Nazi gold stashed in Argentina, Selkirk stole it from them, and both the gang and the remaining Nazis are hunting him. Selkirk and James meet, James tells Selkirk he wants adventure, and since they resemble each other, Selkirk suggests they have a mini-adventure by swapping identities for a few days. He doesn't mention to James that he's being hunted by both the mafia and also the Nazis. James Hyde settles down in Selkirk's hotel with Selkirk's devastatingly competent manservant Adam looking after him (they are very shippable, and Adam is Not What He Seems) and it's all going well until someone shoots Selkirk and a crook tries to break in through James's hotel window. Another one where Hambledon's role in the plot is largely confined to following around collecting up the assorted gangsters that are being left giftwrapped around the place. Also there's an adorable heavily-implied-to-be-gay couple in this who run a model railway shop together and have a fantastic time aiding and abetting Selkirk and his friends and thwarting the police.
Let The Tiger Die
I have no idea what relationship the title has to the book, but it's a great title. After all the new characters, we're back to Hambledon taking the lead when his Swedish holiday is interrupted by his own urge to run around investigating things that look a little weird. Being Tommy Hambledon, within a chapter he's wanted for murder and been abducted twice in rapid succession and in possession of some mysterious documents, and he doesn't know why. It turns out some communists are trailing around Europe assassinating stray wanted Nazis, and because Hambledon stepped in when he saw an assassination taking place in the street, now the stray wanted Nazis think he's one of them, and the communists want to assassinate him too. This involves a ridiculous and fantastic chase across Europe from Stockholm to Cadiz. Even better, Hambledon decides to call in James Hyde and the gay model railway couple from the previous book to help him with his scheme to avoid the assassins while unravelling the entire fugitive Nazi organisation and its plan to restore the Third Reich all in one go. Tremendous fun and even more identity porn as Hambledon pretends to be himself, the guy just adores his fake identities and they're always fun to watch.
A series of spy adventures written in the 40s and 50s and set from WW1 onwards. I found this series by wandering around the books on Faded Page tagged with WW1, and have been inhaling them this week, the perfect counterbalance to a bad cold and a somewhat stressful half term holiday. 'Manning Coles' is a pseudonym for two people, Adelaide Manning and Cyril Coles, who co-wrote the entire series, and Cyril Coles actually was an undercover agent in Germany during WW1 and based some of the plots on his own experiences; the WW1 story is notably more realistic than any of the others.
Drink To Yesterday, Manning Coles (1940)
The first in the series, and by far the most serious and dark of all the ones I've read. The book has a framing device of the inquest into the mysterious death of an unknown person; we then go back in time to young Michael Kingston's schooldays and his precocious skill at languages with his equally brilliant teacher Mr Hambledon. At the outbreak of war, Mr Hambledon vanishes from the school and young Michael itches to join up and eventually does so under a false name. From there he is then recruited for intelligence work and deployed to Germany as the fake nephew of Hambledon, who is also in the spy business. One of the fascinating things about this book is that the narration, which is mostly from Michael's POV, uses whatever name he's currently going by as his name in the narration; how spies have to adopt specific identities and completely subsume themselves in them is one of the recurring themes of the book. Anyway, while undercover they collect information of various sorts and Michael gets recruited by the head of German intelligence in the area (a war-wounded aristocrat with 'flashing dark eyes' who likes to take young Michael out for dinner and sardonic conversation) and sent back to England, and rapidly discovers that life as a spy is terrifying and morally complicated and involves killing innocent people or destroying their lives. He and Hambledon have a wonderful mentor-friendship-slashy dynamic, there are adventures galore and the whole story is a very good read, though with a rather dark and unhappy ending.
Toast To Tomorrow (also titled Pray Silence, 1940)
I think this one has been my favourite so far. While Tommy Hambledon was Presumed Dead at the end of the previous book, given that the whole series is about him, it's not much of a spoiler to say no, he is not dead. In fact he is in Germany, suffering from amnesia. While amnesiac he concludes that he was a good German soldier during the war, he makes friends with a wide range of people which unfortunately include Hitler, and rises to become quite powerful in the growing Nazi party right up to when he gets his memory back. The authors just throw everything at the amnesia tropefic aspect of this, it's great; in general they love to lean in to all the spy tropes and situations and dramas. Hambledon then sets about trying to make contact with London and sending them intelligence without getting himself killed by the Nazis. Tons of exciting adventures of Hambledon living undercover and trying to figure out how to make the best of his unexpected situation, with unexpected allies and enemies and all sorts of spy shenanigans and a fascinating depiction of Germany just before WW2 got started.
They Tell No Tales (1941)
Back in England in 1938, Hambledon and his faithful comrade acquired in the previous book settle down to live together near Portsmouth and are given a young and somewhat feckless agent to help them investigate why naval ships keep mysteriously blowing up. This one has a large and complicated cast and is closer to a murder mystery than a spy novel, though it's very good fun as that, with all sorts of shenanigans and near-misses and a ruthless German spy ring and Hambledon trying to teach his young agent some survival skills as he sends him out to tackle the problem. The story has disguises and mysterious shootings and red herrings and all the trimmings of a classic spy/crime drama and I had a blast with this one too.
Without Lawful Authority (1943)
This introduces two new main characters, Warnford and Marden. Warnford was a military engineer working on new designs for tanks who was cashiered after his designs mysteriously found their way into the enemy's hands; Marden is the gentleman burglar Warnford caught trying to rob his safe. In the classic Golden Age style they like each other instantly and team up to set about trying to clear Warnford's name and catch the spy who really did steal the tank designs. In the process of this they stumble across an amazing number of other spies, whom they capture, tie them up and leave with a note for Hambledon to tidy up, so then Hambledon is trying to figure out which rogue agents are catching German spies for him. It's a great romp of a plot, though somewhat marred by the ending which involves a showdown in a lunatic asylum which - well, it's period-typical, but not in a good way. But all the same it was a fun light read and Warnford and Marden are great.
And I am looking forward to reading more of these, I believe Hambledon returns undercover to Germany in the next one which should be excellent.
Drink To Yesterday, Manning Coles (1940)
The first in the series, and by far the most serious and dark of all the ones I've read. The book has a framing device of the inquest into the mysterious death of an unknown person; we then go back in time to young Michael Kingston's schooldays and his precocious skill at languages with his equally brilliant teacher Mr Hambledon. At the outbreak of war, Mr Hambledon vanishes from the school and young Michael itches to join up and eventually does so under a false name. From there he is then recruited for intelligence work and deployed to Germany as the fake nephew of Hambledon, who is also in the spy business. One of the fascinating things about this book is that the narration, which is mostly from Michael's POV, uses whatever name he's currently going by as his name in the narration; how spies have to adopt specific identities and completely subsume themselves in them is one of the recurring themes of the book. Anyway, while undercover they collect information of various sorts and Michael gets recruited by the head of German intelligence in the area (a war-wounded aristocrat with 'flashing dark eyes' who likes to take young Michael out for dinner and sardonic conversation) and sent back to England, and rapidly discovers that life as a spy is terrifying and morally complicated and involves killing innocent people or destroying their lives. He and Hambledon have a wonderful mentor-friendship-slashy dynamic, there are adventures galore and the whole story is a very good read, though with a rather dark and unhappy ending.
Toast To Tomorrow (also titled Pray Silence, 1940)
I think this one has been my favourite so far. While Tommy Hambledon was Presumed Dead at the end of the previous book, given that the whole series is about him, it's not much of a spoiler to say no, he is not dead. In fact he is in Germany, suffering from amnesia. While amnesiac he concludes that he was a good German soldier during the war, he makes friends with a wide range of people which unfortunately include Hitler, and rises to become quite powerful in the growing Nazi party right up to when he gets his memory back. The authors just throw everything at the amnesia tropefic aspect of this, it's great; in general they love to lean in to all the spy tropes and situations and dramas. Hambledon then sets about trying to make contact with London and sending them intelligence without getting himself killed by the Nazis. Tons of exciting adventures of Hambledon living undercover and trying to figure out how to make the best of his unexpected situation, with unexpected allies and enemies and all sorts of spy shenanigans and a fascinating depiction of Germany just before WW2 got started.
They Tell No Tales (1941)
Back in England in 1938, Hambledon and his faithful comrade acquired in the previous book settle down to live together near Portsmouth and are given a young and somewhat feckless agent to help them investigate why naval ships keep mysteriously blowing up. This one has a large and complicated cast and is closer to a murder mystery than a spy novel, though it's very good fun as that, with all sorts of shenanigans and near-misses and a ruthless German spy ring and Hambledon trying to teach his young agent some survival skills as he sends him out to tackle the problem. The story has disguises and mysterious shootings and red herrings and all the trimmings of a classic spy/crime drama and I had a blast with this one too.
Without Lawful Authority (1943)
This introduces two new main characters, Warnford and Marden. Warnford was a military engineer working on new designs for tanks who was cashiered after his designs mysteriously found their way into the enemy's hands; Marden is the gentleman burglar Warnford caught trying to rob his safe. In the classic Golden Age style they like each other instantly and team up to set about trying to clear Warnford's name and catch the spy who really did steal the tank designs. In the process of this they stumble across an amazing number of other spies, whom they capture, tie them up and leave with a note for Hambledon to tidy up, so then Hambledon is trying to figure out which rogue agents are catching German spies for him. It's a great romp of a plot, though somewhat marred by the ending which involves a showdown in a lunatic asylum which - well, it's period-typical, but not in a good way. But all the same it was a fun light read and Warnford and Marden are great.
And I am looking forward to reading more of these, I believe Hambledon returns undercover to Germany in the next one which should be excellent.
Whumptober: Last One Standing
Oct. 29th, 2025 10:03 pmThis one's not particularly whumpy, but inspired by today's prompt anyway, a little ficlet, with thanks to tweague for pointing out that I could just skip the tricky bit!
No. 29: “I hope you see the sun someday in the darkness.”
Fainting | Broken Dishes | Last one Standing
( Biggles team adventure )
tweague for pointing out that I could just skip the tricky bit! No. 29: “I hope you see the sun someday in the darkness.”
Fainting | Broken Dishes | Last one Standing
( Biggles team adventure )
