Author Bio:
Iain Stewart was born and raised in East Africa. Time spent at Kenton College in Nairobi, Fettes College in Edinburgh, and Christ's College, Cambridge was usually enjoyable and sometimes educational.
His qualifications as an author of this series include a fascination with flying and military aviation. As a child, he learned deflection shooting [badly] by building Airfix models of WW1 airplanes, and rigging up a system where the model airplane slid down a string tied from a tall tree to a lower tree, while he fired at the model with an air rifle. Suffice to say, not many model planes were harmed during the making of this fantasy world.
He earned his pilot's license in Kenya at seventeen. Armed with this, he ventured forth to fly Tiger Moth biplanes and pretended to be Biggles, but swiftly found it was an expensive hobby. He paid for it by flying friends and others to game lodges for lunch, free of charge so long as they paid for the airplane rental and fuel. Several passengers remarked that the flights were lifelong memories, but he insists he never actually crashed. This endeavour taught him friends are a lot less trusting than total strangers. When the airplane sideslipped steeply into short landing strips, strangers marveled at the pilot's presumed skill while friends gibbered with fright. Odd that.
Another childhood fascination was the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and he dreamed of re-imagining elements of those stories to take place in the skies of WW1. After all, Arthur Gould Lee, a WW1 pilot, wrote that the pilots in WW 1 were the "airborne warriors who engaged in single combat, like the knights of mediaeval chivalry, but wielding a winged machine gun in place of lance and sword." And of course, Biggles was basically Lancelot in goggles.
Earning a crust at HSBC for over twenty years delayed the dream, but it turned out to be a four book series. Nowadays, he staves off reality by living in Miami.
Buy the Book: https://amzn.to/3GhpMJ9
Editorial Review:
'I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above; Those that I fight I do not hate; those that I fight for I do not love.....''
These lines from Yeats' poem 'An Irish airman foresees his death' could have been written for Lance Fitch in this splendid tale of aerial warfare in the First World War, with the major difference being that Fitch has an at times all consuming hatred of his German enemies, with good reason. This, and his terrifying experiences on active service in the front line, wounds and shellshock, lead to his decision to transfer as a gunner to the infant Royal Flying Corps where he feels his natural skill as an expert marksman honed at home in East Africa can best be deployed in his hatred of the Germans. And thus 'Knights of the Air' by Iain Stewart begins:
To those of a certain age brought up on stories of 'Biggles' by Captain W.E. Johns, this is already familiar, although considerably raunchier, territory, with descriptions that would never have soiled the eyes and minds of young 'Biggles' fans, with stirring tales of aerial warfare and of latter day chivalric heroes, the 'Knights of the Air'. This book, however, is considerably grimmer; stark and uncompromising in its vivid descriptions of the horrors of combat and the lonely and isolated nature of it. There are, too, moments of descriptive lyrical beauty; such as when the pilots of 100 Wing await the dawn, when they will raid the air bases of the fearsome and rightly dreaded Manfred Von Richthofen and the detonation of a huge mine at Messines to signal a general Offensive, the biggest man made explosion in history.... ''The pilots kept vigil outside the Mess waiting for the greatest explosion in the history of mankind. Most nights the front lines were lit by green and white flares and filled with the crump of shellfire. Tonight sepulchral calm reigned, and the low moon reflected silver in pools of standing water between the huts.'' and, again, a vivid description of the trenches viewed from the air....''Below them, the trenches merged and meshed in the chalky soil. South of Arras the soil changed often, and the snakes turned from chalk white to clay red or loam black. The old hands could navigate by the soil colour of the trenches.....''
Amidst the lonely terror and the appalling death toll there is great camaraderie and comradeship amongst the men on both sides and the author displays great flair in providing the reader with brief and finely drawn portraits of individuals, their motives, foibles and weaknesses. And their strengths. Many of these men prove to be of a literary inclination and delight in peppering their conversations with scholarly and literary quotes. The 'colonial' Lance Fitch, on the other hand, is a loner and remains a solitary outsider. He is a self proclaimed 'Jonah' who brings ill luck to all he becomes close to, and in this particular theatre of war that, he feels, is often fatal. It is small wonder he fails to make friends.....''Now Lance knew the Great Truth. Friendship was a weakness. Friends led to madness. Each of their gruesome deaths prodded you closer to the edge of the precipice....'' So, considered by most as an 'Ahab' type figure or, in the words of one colleague, ''an antisocial, opinionated, stubborn, bloodthirsty psychopath'', Fitch continues to rise and to shine as a gifted fighter pilot with a growing tally of kills and is now an 'Ace' as the year of 1917 progresses. There are highly amorous and erotically charged episodes and encounters with his Commander's sister and a rising death toll as the 'R.F.C.' [Royal Flying Corps] experiments with new aircraft and new tactics to overcome the much feared and successful German' Red Baron' and his 'Flying Circus'.
And so, we arrive finally in the middle of the year of 1917 with the hard boiled and embittered 'lone wolf' Lance Fitch, a highly regarded comrade, one of the few men he had allowed an entry into friendship. ''Knights of the Air'' is Book One of what promises to be a highly enjoyable series and this reviewer, for one, is looking forward to the sequel. Books that can cause the reader to 'leapfrog' and further research the subject are highly commendable objects. Here the reader may be provoked through Google and 'Wikipedia' to stalk the great names of First World War Aviation, the 'Aces', or the machines they flew for further information; as this researcher and his fond memories of 'Biggles' has done. As a final postscript, Iain Stewart has the real life person of Cecil Lewis as a comrade in his Squadron. Lewis' book ''Sagittarius Rising'' is a splendid factual account of this aspect of the First World War and the men of Lance Fitch's generation who were [to quote Yeats once more] driven ''to this tumult in the clouds.''
**
“Knights of the Air” by Iain Stewart is awarded five stars and the “Highly Recommended” award by The Historical Fiction Company
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