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”.