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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 to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio 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 )
assorted tv dramas
Oct. 25th, 2025 12:00 pmNanny (1980s TV series)
An interwar-into-WW2 TV series following a single main character, Barbara, as she qualifies as a nanny and takes a series of jobs. This was fairly gentle TV to watch, following Barbara from one family and household to another and dealing with a wide variety of family issues ranging from bullying to bereavement and the complicated halfway between upstairs and downstairs nature of her position. Lots of period childcare details, lots of closeup looks at the social setups and status of families who employ nannies. Barbara sometimes stays with a family for only one episode, sometimes for an entire season of the show, which does mean that sometimes you get really involved in the details of particular characters' lives but then never see them again. And as well as her work there's her love life, her need to conceal the fact that she is a divorcee from many of her employers, her relationship with her elderly father, her eventual marriage and subsequent marital difficulties. Plus the outbreak of WW2 and all the social upheaval that involves and Barbara eventually moving on from nannying to a different kind of childcare career. There were some episodes that I wasn't so fond of (the one with the little girl with significant learning disabilities was almost unwatchable for me) but overall it was a very sweet show that deserves a bit more love. Might be a good one for anyone who likes both Call the Midwife and Upstairs Downstairs.
Berlin Station, season 1
A contemporary spy drama based around the American CIA station in Berlin, where a mysterious whistleblower keeps leaking their more unethical behaviour to the press. This was good in many ways, with lots of great Berlin scenery to entertain, but also more than a bit uphill and impenetrable as far as the plot went, and had an awful lot of identical middle-aged white guy spies, all of whom also had substance abuse problems, marital troubles, career troubles or all of the above, so I couldn't reliably tell them apart for the first half of the story. There was a lot of very confusing action and office politicking, and I spent most of the first half with only a vague idea of what plot might be happening. The main investigator character was pretty boring, but the (bi) antihero was a whole lot of fun and he managed to make the investigator a bit more engaging, so I persisted with it and I'm glad I did, because the plot did finally more or less come together, there were two deeply fraught queer romances, and at the end it got hugely iddy and decided to whump the character I particularly wanted whumped, ie the antihero: he was captured, drugged, questioned, forced to relive his worst memories, shot, went on the run with his erstwhile interrogator while shot... the storytellers were going for a bingo card there and I had zero problem with any of this. And if you're going to have a deeply melodramatic showdown scene, Teufelsberg is a pretty damn good site for it. I kind of want to rewatch it now to see if the plot makes more sense the second time around now, though I suspect only parts of it will; a lot was added as window dressing without the writers really caring what happened in it. I don't know why so many spy dramas feel they need to be completely impenetrable but I suspect the influence of Le Carre. It's not that their plots are inherently more complex than others, but you definitely get the sense that the storytellers feel it's important to tell them in the most obscure way possible. Still, I'd like to watch more of it but the other two seasons seem to be harder to get hold of here.
The House of Eliott, season 1-2
A TV series I've been meaning to get around to for ages but hesitated because all I knew about it was that it was about fashion and set in the 1920s. But I have finally got around to it. It started really strongly: our two heroines are Beatrice and Evangeline Eliott, two vaguely upper-class young women whose ultra-controlling father has just died leaving them with no friends, no education and no money, and a distant cousin who wants to be just as overbearing a guardian as their father was. Their one talent is dressmaking, and they try to find ways to use that talent to gain their independence and build lives for themselves. Most of the early episodes as they work their way through this situation were really good, their gradually growing circle of friends, their false starts and mistakes, but gradually the story became less centred on Bea and Evie overcoming adversity together and became more reliant on melodramatic miscommunications, characters making every conceivable bad romantic decision, and people instantly shouting at each other or storming off just as the other was about to tell them some plot-critical piece of information so that things immediately go wrong for lack of the information (this happened multiple times in rapid succession). But I was sufficiently fond of the characters and the nicely done 1920s setting and background that it's fun to watch despite the soapiness, and every so often the intelligent storytelling of the earlier episodes comes back. And of course the costumes are gorgeous. And there are even some period aeroplanes!
An interwar-into-WW2 TV series following a single main character, Barbara, as she qualifies as a nanny and takes a series of jobs. This was fairly gentle TV to watch, following Barbara from one family and household to another and dealing with a wide variety of family issues ranging from bullying to bereavement and the complicated halfway between upstairs and downstairs nature of her position. Lots of period childcare details, lots of closeup looks at the social setups and status of families who employ nannies. Barbara sometimes stays with a family for only one episode, sometimes for an entire season of the show, which does mean that sometimes you get really involved in the details of particular characters' lives but then never see them again. And as well as her work there's her love life, her need to conceal the fact that she is a divorcee from many of her employers, her relationship with her elderly father, her eventual marriage and subsequent marital difficulties. Plus the outbreak of WW2 and all the social upheaval that involves and Barbara eventually moving on from nannying to a different kind of childcare career. There were some episodes that I wasn't so fond of (the one with the little girl with significant learning disabilities was almost unwatchable for me) but overall it was a very sweet show that deserves a bit more love. Might be a good one for anyone who likes both Call the Midwife and Upstairs Downstairs.
Berlin Station, season 1
A contemporary spy drama based around the American CIA station in Berlin, where a mysterious whistleblower keeps leaking their more unethical behaviour to the press. This was good in many ways, with lots of great Berlin scenery to entertain, but also more than a bit uphill and impenetrable as far as the plot went, and had an awful lot of identical middle-aged white guy spies, all of whom also had substance abuse problems, marital troubles, career troubles or all of the above, so I couldn't reliably tell them apart for the first half of the story. There was a lot of very confusing action and office politicking, and I spent most of the first half with only a vague idea of what plot might be happening. The main investigator character was pretty boring, but the (bi) antihero was a whole lot of fun and he managed to make the investigator a bit more engaging, so I persisted with it and I'm glad I did, because the plot did finally more or less come together, there were two deeply fraught queer romances, and at the end it got hugely iddy and decided to whump the character I particularly wanted whumped, ie the antihero: he was captured, drugged, questioned, forced to relive his worst memories, shot, went on the run with his erstwhile interrogator while shot... the storytellers were going for a bingo card there and I had zero problem with any of this. And if you're going to have a deeply melodramatic showdown scene, Teufelsberg is a pretty damn good site for it. I kind of want to rewatch it now to see if the plot makes more sense the second time around now, though I suspect only parts of it will; a lot was added as window dressing without the writers really caring what happened in it. I don't know why so many spy dramas feel they need to be completely impenetrable but I suspect the influence of Le Carre. It's not that their plots are inherently more complex than others, but you definitely get the sense that the storytellers feel it's important to tell them in the most obscure way possible. Still, I'd like to watch more of it but the other two seasons seem to be harder to get hold of here.
The House of Eliott, season 1-2
A TV series I've been meaning to get around to for ages but hesitated because all I knew about it was that it was about fashion and set in the 1920s. But I have finally got around to it. It started really strongly: our two heroines are Beatrice and Evangeline Eliott, two vaguely upper-class young women whose ultra-controlling father has just died leaving them with no friends, no education and no money, and a distant cousin who wants to be just as overbearing a guardian as their father was. Their one talent is dressmaking, and they try to find ways to use that talent to gain their independence and build lives for themselves. Most of the early episodes as they work their way through this situation were really good, their gradually growing circle of friends, their false starts and mistakes, but gradually the story became less centred on Bea and Evie overcoming adversity together and became more reliant on melodramatic miscommunications, characters making every conceivable bad romantic decision, and people instantly shouting at each other or storming off just as the other was about to tell them some plot-critical piece of information so that things immediately go wrong for lack of the information (this happened multiple times in rapid succession). But I was sufficiently fond of the characters and the nicely done 1920s setting and background that it's fun to watch despite the soapiness, and every so often the intelligent storytelling of the earlier episodes comes back. And of course the costumes are gorgeous. And there are even some period aeroplanes!
Spy Flyers or Spyflyers? nobody knows
Oct. 24th, 2025 11:12 amThe Spyflyers, WE Johns (available on Faded Page here)
Finally got around to reading this one as other people are requesting it for Yuletide, and it was a fun WW1 spy adventure, and unusually for WEJ, it's a standalone - I was expecting to see Raymond show up to be our spymaster as he seems to in all of WEJ's other series regardless of whether there's any other overlap, but no, we have a different character in that role here. This is one of WEJ's earlier novels, 1933, and it does show - the set-piece scenes are good but the assembly is a bit hit and miss, it's all over the place in structure. You can also see bits WEJ has reused in later books - the entire opening chapter gets a reprise in Biggles in the Baltic - and the whole of it is WEJ trying out ideas that he puts together in a different and far far better way in Biggles Flies East. I don't think Flies East would be anywhere near as good a book if WEJ hadn't written this one first.
The gist of the story, without spoilers, is that our pilot-and-observer duo Rex and Tony are assigned to try to find double agents who are flying around in British aeroplanes causing problems in France in WW1. Rex and Tony are both fluent German speakers and to do this they are assigned a captured German aircraft and some German uniforms and have to land in German-occupied territory and investigate, and soon they encounter the mysterious Captain Fairfax who seems to be in more places than is reasonable for one person - and so we have a wonderful romp of everyone being undercover on the opposite side. And for all that the story is all over the place at the start, by the middle of the story WEJ starts to tighten up the adventure and the ending is great. And I have gone and requested it for Yuletide too now.
Now for spoilers - and I was surprised by several twists in this, so if you think you might read the book, read it first and enjoy the twists unspoiled, and then come back and chat about it with me.
Perhaps because I was so primed by Major Sterne, I absolutely did not see Fairfax as a triple agent coming at all. He has all the dashing brilliance of EvS/El Shareef/Major Sterne in Flies East, and I assumed we were just getting WEJ's usual starry-eyed-ness about brilliant villains in all the loving descriptions of how clever he was and how impossible his feats were. So I was both stunned and delighted by the scene when he holds up the entire German mess to rescue Rex and Tony. And likewise, I had my suspicions of Trevor, but again I didn't expect it because WEJ never ever goes there in his other books: Biggles or Gimlet or Worrals or Steeley may meet all kinds of villains and traitors elsewhere, but there is never any question of Raymond being anything other than completely right and reliable. So having a high-level conspiracy and Rex and Tony being deliberately set up to fail by their traitorous commander was also a surprise - and using them as mules for transporting documents to the Germans was a great twist too. I didn't take strongly to either Rex or Tony, though perhaps I might like them more on a reread. I did like that while at the start they are outwitting the enemy entirely by accident, by the end they start doing it on purpose, but overall I felt like they were more reacting to the plot than driving it or making decisions about it. But I am absolutely and predictably taken by Fairfax and his secret identity as the best German spy.
Finally got around to reading this one as other people are requesting it for Yuletide, and it was a fun WW1 spy adventure, and unusually for WEJ, it's a standalone - I was expecting to see Raymond show up to be our spymaster as he seems to in all of WEJ's other series regardless of whether there's any other overlap, but no, we have a different character in that role here. This is one of WEJ's earlier novels, 1933, and it does show - the set-piece scenes are good but the assembly is a bit hit and miss, it's all over the place in structure. You can also see bits WEJ has reused in later books - the entire opening chapter gets a reprise in Biggles in the Baltic - and the whole of it is WEJ trying out ideas that he puts together in a different and far far better way in Biggles Flies East. I don't think Flies East would be anywhere near as good a book if WEJ hadn't written this one first.
The gist of the story, without spoilers, is that our pilot-and-observer duo Rex and Tony are assigned to try to find double agents who are flying around in British aeroplanes causing problems in France in WW1. Rex and Tony are both fluent German speakers and to do this they are assigned a captured German aircraft and some German uniforms and have to land in German-occupied territory and investigate, and soon they encounter the mysterious Captain Fairfax who seems to be in more places than is reasonable for one person - and so we have a wonderful romp of everyone being undercover on the opposite side. And for all that the story is all over the place at the start, by the middle of the story WEJ starts to tighten up the adventure and the ending is great. And I have gone and requested it for Yuletide too now.
Now for spoilers - and I was surprised by several twists in this, so if you think you might read the book, read it first and enjoy the twists unspoiled, and then come back and chat about it with me.
spoilers
Perhaps because I was so primed by Major Sterne, I absolutely did not see Fairfax as a triple agent coming at all. He has all the dashing brilliance of EvS/El Shareef/Major Sterne in Flies East, and I assumed we were just getting WEJ's usual starry-eyed-ness about brilliant villains in all the loving descriptions of how clever he was and how impossible his feats were. So I was both stunned and delighted by the scene when he holds up the entire German mess to rescue Rex and Tony. And likewise, I had my suspicions of Trevor, but again I didn't expect it because WEJ never ever goes there in his other books: Biggles or Gimlet or Worrals or Steeley may meet all kinds of villains and traitors elsewhere, but there is never any question of Raymond being anything other than completely right and reliable. So having a high-level conspiracy and Rex and Tony being deliberately set up to fail by their traitorous commander was also a surprise - and using them as mules for transporting documents to the Germans was a great twist too. I didn't take strongly to either Rex or Tony, though perhaps I might like them more on a reread. I did like that while at the start they are outwitting the enemy entirely by accident, by the end they start doing it on purpose, but overall I felt like they were more reacting to the plot than driving it or making decisions about it. But I am absolutely and predictably taken by Fairfax and his secret identity as the best German spy.
Whumptober: failed rescue attempt
Oct. 15th, 2025 02:01 pmLoosely on the theme of failed rescue attempts, or at least rescue attempts that the rescuer believes to be a failure, a Looks Back missing scene for today's Whumptober.
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
( Looks Back ficlet, gen, 900 words )
No. 15: “You can take a break, if you just tell me that it hurts.”
Failed Rescue Attempt | Body Part in the Mail | Live-Streamed Torture
( Looks Back ficlet, gen, 900 words )
This one is part of the Marie/Erich married-with-children AU I wrote last year for FIAB. And I apologise for doing this, but the trouble is I wrote the story in the wrong order and this was part of it in my head before I wrote the scene where Leo was born. So now it's extra horrible, but here it is.
( double drabble, WW2 and child death warning )
( double drabble, WW2 and child death warning )
Fic: Lime Jello and Other Dangers
Oct. 6th, 2025 10:34 pmI started this earlier in the year, inspired by the 'stabbed and pinned to the wall' tag in the h/c exchange, and also by watching MASH and thinking that if someone was impaled to the wall in a serious way they would need some really good trauma surgeons really quickly. It's been sitting around unfinished for a while, but today's whumptober prompt is also 'pinned to the wall', and so I have taken the hint and finally written an ending for it and posted it. Whumptober seems to be doing well for getting me to finish longer things that I haven't quite had the impetus to get done, long may it continue.
Title: Lime Jello and Other Dangers
Content: impalement, blood and gore, h/c, MASH crossover, canon-typical relationship dynamics, whatever the h/c equivalent of PWP is, not medically accurate, 7800 words
Summary: Von Stalhein is seriously injured. Biggles won't leave him. Algy knows a guy who runs a field hospital. And Hawkeye just wants more sleep.
( Lime Jello and Other Dangers )
Title: Lime Jello and Other Dangers
Content: impalement, blood and gore, h/c, MASH crossover, canon-typical relationship dynamics, whatever the h/c equivalent of PWP is, not medically accurate, 7800 words
Summary: Von Stalhein is seriously injured. Biggles won't leave him. Algy knows a guy who runs a field hospital. And Hawkeye just wants more sleep.
( Lime Jello and Other Dangers )
Whumptober: We've Done This Before
Oct. 4th, 2025 10:28 pmAnother Whumptober drabble, this one set at the start of Biggles in the Baltic. I seem to be on a war trauma theme at the moment.
( We've Done This Before, Biggles WW2 gen )
( We've Done This Before, Biggles WW2 gen )
