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Biggles and the Gun Runners by W. E. Johns was first published in 1966 by Brockhampton Press. The title later came out in paperback by Knight Books with the slightly changed title Biggles and the Gun-Runners. More recently, Norman Wright republished it using the original title. The events in the book take place mainly in the Sudd, an area of wetlands in Sudan.

Synopsis[]

Air Commodore Raymond gets orders to put a stop to a gun-running racket which has been supplying weapons to rebels in Africa. Biggles fakes a retirement from the Air Police in the hope of getting employed, he hopes, by the wrong people.

Plot[]

Note: The sections below contain spoilers. In particular, the plot subpage (click here) has an extended summary of the narrative in the book

Characters[]

Scotland Yard and The Special Air Police[]

  • Air Commodore Raymond
  • Biggles
  • Algy
  • Ginger
  • Bertie Lissie

Others[]

Aircraft[]

Places[]

Visited[]

Mentioned[]

  • Djakarta
  • Salonika
  • Carisville - fictional town in the northeast corner of Congo which was Biggles' destination in Chapter 1.

Incongruities[]

Other Research Notes[]

  • Chapter 7: "It happens I've been here before." In The Case of the Mysterious Gunshots among others.
  • Chapter 7: "I once made a little money by getting out a bogged aircraft." A fuller account of this event is then given in Chapter 9 where Biggles describes how a pilot abandoned his De Havilland Dragon in the Sudd. Biggles bought the salvage for ten pounds and went to the Sudd with a friend, dug it out and sold it for seven hundred pounds, making a profit of six hundred pounds. Biggles doesn't say when this happened but it couldn't have happened in the Air Police era so it could not have been the aircraft mentioned in The Case of the Mysterious Gunshots.
  • Chronology.
    • The so-called "Congo Crisis" where the Congo government fought a series of wars against secessionist rebels stretched from 1960-1965 and also involved troops fighting under the United Nations banner.

Editions[]

International titles[]

  • Dutch: Biggles en de wapensmokkelaars (Het Spectrum 70, W&L 74, Verba 1997)
  • Malay: Biggles dan penyeludupan senjata (Eastern Universities Press 1979)
  • Icelandic: Benni og vopnasmyglararnir (Bokhladan 1985)
  • Czech: Biggles letí se smrti (Riopress 1999)
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