Flyaway

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Flyaway

By: Desmond Bagley

Narrated by: Paul Tyreman

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About this listen

Action thriller by the classic adventure writer about security consultant, Max Stafford, set in the Sahara.

Why is Max Stafford, security consultant, beaten up in his own office? What is the secret of the famous 1930s aircraft, the Lockheed Lodestar? And why has accountant Paul Bilson disappeared in North Africa? The journey to the Sahara desert becomes a race to save Paul Bilson, a race to find the buried aircraft, and – above all – a race to return alive…

Action & Adventure

Classics

Crime Thrillers

Detective

Mystery

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Suspense

Thriller & Suspense

Traditional Detectives

Fiction

Thriller

Consulting

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Critic reviews

'As long as meticulous craftsmanship and honest entertainment are valued, and as long as action, authenticity, and expertise still make up the strong framework of the good adventure/thriller, Desmond Bagley's books will surely be read.' REGINALD HILL, Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers

'Bagley is a master storyteller.' DAILY MIRROR

'Mr Bagley has no equal at this sort of thing.' SUNDAY MIRROR

‘Compulsively readable.’ GUARDIAN

Most relevant

Back in the early days of aviation, flyer Peter Bilson disappeared somewhere in North Africa while competing in a long-distance race. Neither he nor his plane were ever found, and his wife was eventually paid the large sum for which every competitor had been insured. Now, in the 1970s, Peter’s son, Paul Bilson, has also disappeared. Max Stafford, the narrator, owns the firm that provides security services for the company Paul worked for, and finds himself becoming interested in the reasons for Paul’s disappearance. When Paul’s half-sister tells him that Paul had become obsessed with finding his father’s plane, Stafford decides to follow Paul to Algeria. Stafford will soon find himself on a dangerous journey across the Sahara under the guidance of Luke Byrne, an American who has made his life among the Tuareg people. And it will soon become clear that there are men who don’t want Paul to find the wreck of the Flyaway, his father’s plane, and who will stop at nothing to prevent him...

I recently read a posthumous novel of Bagley’s, Domino Island, published just a couple of years ago from a manuscript found among Bagley’s papers and “curated” by Michael Davies, a self-confessed lifelong Bagley fan. Then Davies wrote a follow-up to Domino Island, Outback, using the same characters and sticking to Bagley’s style, but creating an entirely new story. I enjoyed both of these very much and decided it was time I finally read one of Bagley’s original novels. He was hugely popular in his time and still has a strong following among people who enjoy the action thriller genre. So I pulled on my flying helmet, adjusted my goggles and prepared for take-off…

The setting of the novel is its real strength. The desert world that Bagley shows us feels entirely authentic and, while the story stays with the Westerners, we get a real picture of how this region which seems so alien and inhospitable to us is home to many different peoples all with their own individual ways of life. Through Stafford, Bagley gives a vivid picture of the geography of the region and its inhabitants, especially the nomadic Tuareg and their reliance on camels as both a form of transport and a means of trade. Although Stafford is new to the desert, he is, like so many of the heroes of action thrillers, a military veteran and so has good survival skills, knowledge of guns and has kept himself fit. However he is completely reliant on Byrne for all the local knowledge he lacks, and especially for the skills of navigation and survival in this hostile terrain. Byrne is also a good man to have by his side when the baddies show up, since he too is a man of courage and handy with a gun or any other weapon that comes to hand. Byrne also knows about planes, having worked as a mechanic at an earlier point in his life. Again there is a lot of detail about the technical aspects of early flight, and of the challenges that early flyers faced. All this information is interesting and well-presented, but it slows the pace down and sometimes begins to feel rather more like a documentary than an adventure.

The characterisation is a mixed bag. Stafford and Byrne, the two main characters, are well-developed and likeable for the most part. (There’s one ugly scene early on where Stafford hits his wife, which sadly would not have been remarkable at the time – she “deserved” it – but which made it hard for me to go on seeing him as a hero. This is always an issue with action books of this era – the women are treated as secondary at best, and casual low-level violence towards them is not unusual.) The other characters are rather under-developed, to the extent that I kept having to remind myself who was who whenever they were mentioned. The hired baddies are straight out of central casting. Their motivation is that they are bad in exchange for money, and that’s about as deep as the characterisation of them gets. The real baddie who is behind all the mayhem is rather better fleshed out, though only in the latter stages. Female characters are few and far between and play no part in the action, which considering Bagley/Stafford’s attitude towards them is probably a good thing! Interestingly he completely avoids the other common issue in books of that era, racism, showing respect and admiration at all times for the people of the region* and their various cultures.

(*men of the region, that should be – not a single Arab woman gets so much as a passing mention, as far as I recall. It’s as if they don’t exist.)

The plot is intriguing, with the search for the missing plane and its pilot providing a steady, if slow-paced, stream of action, while the underlying question of why the baddies want to stop the plane being found provides both mystery and suspense. Happily the pace picks up towards the end, culminating in the expected thrilling climax and providing a satisfying conclusion to the story. So, despite the slow pace and the woman problem, I enjoyed it overall and will certainly look out for more of his books.

Shenanigans in the Sahara…