I started reading Biggles' Chinese Puzzle after philomytha posted about it, and I have an observation based on the first few pages of the first story in the collection, which I think makes a really interesting compare/contrast with Terai, Buries a Hatchet, and perhaps especially Looks Back.


So, in this book, you get to see what Biggles is like when a friend, but not one of his core people, is in danger. Marcel (the French policeman from some of the other books) has gone missing in Vietnam. Biggles is concerned and goes looking for him. As philomytha pointed out, it's very touching! He's demonstrably willing to risk himself to help out a friend who isn't even one of the core group of "his people." They all are! It's excellent.

... however, it's also an interesting contrast to the absolute insanity that ensues when one of Biggles's core people is at risk. In other words, in Chinese Puzzle, Biggles behaves like a perfectly normal person who has had a friend go missing. He is openly concerned, he talks his boss into letting him go (but also mentions to the others that they aren't going anywhere if Raymond says no), and more or less follows the ground rules that he's been given.

Meanwhile, in the books where someone he truly can't live without has disappeared, he has two settings: I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING, and "creates 12 international incidents before breakfast." (Or both.)

Biggles in Chinese Puzzle: Obviously we're not going to French Indo-China without permission from the boss.

Biggles in Looks Back: Takes vacation time, BUYS A PLANE, sneaks into a Soviet-sphere country with full intentions of doing something illegal, gets chased all over the place by the secret police, eventually flees the country under the cover of darkness in a hail of gunfire.

No wonder Looks Back ends with Raymond yelling at him. I can only imagine what the experience was like from Raymond's point of view, in which his pilots keep taking vacation time and vanishing, while concerning bits of intel float back through the Iron Curtain.

Raymond, wandering through the Air Police office in which only Algy is left: heard from Biggles lately?
Algy, who just helped Bertie buy a plane that he 100% knows is going to be used to illegally sneak across the Czech border: define "Biggles" and "lately", sir

(Algy deserves a medal for putting up with this.)

But it also really highlights how out there Biggles's mental state is in Terai and Hatchet, because this book is what he looks like when he's normal levels of worried - he's fairly open about it, as well as being comparatively cautious in his plans-making - as opposed to OH WELL WHO CARES I **GUESS** I'LL GO I'M FINE (frantically chainsmoking).