BIGGLES
– SECRET AGENT
by Captain W.
E. Johns
First published
May 1940
CONTENTS – Page 5
List of illustrations – Page 7 (Frontispiece by Howard Leigh and six illustrations
by Alfred Sindall on pages 45, 81, 123, 157 – although the list of
illustrations erroneously says this is on page 159 – 197 and 241)
I. AN
ALARMING PROPOSITION (Pages 9 – 24)
“The Honourable Algernon Lacey rose
slowly from the easy chair in which he had been reclining” asking Ginger “Where
the deuce is Biggles?” Ginger doesn’t know but he was expecting
Biggles back to go to the flicks that afternoon to see the new flying film at
the Plaza. (I originally thought that
Johns was probably referring to “The Lion Has Wings”, a propaganda film
about the R.A.F which was released in 1939, which was the year this story was
written. Johns has definitely seen that
very film as he refers to it by title in the short story “The Black Gauntlet”,
published in the 1953 book “Biggles of the Special Air Police”. However, I must be wrong as the first part of
this story was originally published in Modern Boy on 12th August
1939, but the film did not have its premiere until 3rd November 1939. Perhaps Johns had in mind the film “Dawn
Patrol” starring Errol Flynn and David Niven, released on 24th
December 1938 in the USA and thereafter playing in the UK in 1939). Biggles arrives back and is asked where he
has been. “Biggles ran his fingers
through his fair hair”. He says he has
been having lunch in a private room in Whitehall – in an annexe of the Home
Office, to be precise, with Colonel Raymond and Sir Munstead
Norton, the Permanent Assistant to the Home Secretary. They want Biggles to do a job for them and he
has permission to take Algy and Ginger into his confidence. “The issue involves not less than the safety
of the nation”. Professor Max Beklinder, the inventer of Linderite explosive, a Lucranian
national by birth but British by naturalization has apparently been killed in Lucrania, a little principality between Germany, France and
Switzerland. Twenty years ago, the
Professor, a successful doctor, got mixed up in political intrigue in Lucrania and fled to England, leaving his wife behind. He settled down as a research chemist and
after inventing Linderite, was working on the
production of poison gas. He discovered
a gas “so deadly that he declared that the nation which alone possessed the
formula could make itself master of the world – by the destruction or
terrorization of the others”. The
Professor had been ill and was to take a holiday on the Riviera in his Morris
Ten motor car. Watched by agents of
Scotland Yard, he disappeared in Paris and three days later was reported dead
following a car crash with a lorry in Unterhamstadt,
in Lucrania.
The reports said he was buried in the village churchyard there. The British Government are now extremely
worried. About seven weeks ago, three
weeks after the alleged accident, a British secret agent in Prenzel,
the capital of Lucrania, reported seeing Professor Beklinder driving in a motor-car with the Chief of the Lucranian Secret Police.
If Lucranian agents get their hands on the
poison gas formula “it is good-bye to the British Empire”. Two British agents have already been sent to
investigate and both have disappeared.
Biggles has been asked to go to Unterhamstadt
to ascertain if the Professor is dead or not and that means opening the
grave. Ginger rings for some tea saying
“the statement that we’re all likely to be gassed to death in the near future
suggests that we should make the most of things while the going’s good”.