Pre-code Biggles, as it were, is a weird no-man's-land. Not as annoyingly wholesome as later books would make him - impulsive, nervous, with judgment that's occasionally as poor as you'd expect of a teenager at war. But also served to us in bits and pieces that barely qualify as storytelling, more a serious of unconnected anecdotes that only occasionally treat the subject with the weight it must have had.

No, I don't expect to ever again enjoy these books the way I did at 11. But it's good to know they're still out there.