Planes, trains and literary loves
I still laugh about the wintry morning when I headed into the library so distracted by thoughts about trains, or rather, about stories with trains -- Anna Karenina throwing herself under a train, Coral Musker aboard the Orient Express with the guard calling "Budapest!" as a fellow passenger presses a folded note into her hand -- that I walked right into a big green loden coat. To my delight, the person inside the big coat was Paul Reynolds, the visionary who developed our first website, but also, and in this case more importantly, a keen reader, who in fact had earned his living as a book reviewer when he first arrived from the UK. Just the person to consult about the question which had me racking my brain: I could think of many books in which trains feature as elements of mystery, excitement, danger -- of romance, in short; but were there not any where aeroplanes play a similar role? Paul was on to it in a flash. "What about Biggles ?", he said. The story cam...