Melvyn Fickling - Author
The Bluebirds Trilogy
Melvyn Fickling - Author
The Bluebirds Trilogy
Bluebirds (Book One)
Bluebirds (Book One)
Andrew Francis and Gerry Donaldson were born on different sides of the Atlantic just before The Great War. Together with the mildly psychotic Bryan Hale, they fly Spitfires through the summer of 1940. Invasion is imminent and the country faces almost certain defeat and destruction at the hands of The Luftwaffe in The Battle of Britain.
Gerry, the first American to fire guns in anger against the Nazis, fights in spite of American isolationism, relinquishing his US citizenship and becoming a reluctant propaganda tool for the Air Ministry along the way. Andrew, newly married, fights to protect his headstrong wife and their unborn child. Bryan fights for the simple pleasure of the kill.
Vincent Drew, broken by childhood abuse, tumbles into their world and tears it apart.
Based on a true story, Bluebirds re-casts The Few in the darker shadow of their desperate times, fighting against terrifying odds with the ever-present expectation of violent, murderous death.
Blackbirds (Book Two)
Blackbirds (Book Two)
The London Blitz is raging.
Bryan Hale and Bluebird Squadron fight on into the autumn of 1940, chasing down the new threat of ‘Jabo’ hit-and-run raids by bomb-laden enemy fighters over the capital’s rooftops.
Bryan’s chance encounter in a London pub with Jenny, an acquaintance from his school-days, starts them both down the road to a relationship that neither wants or can afford. But the deadly perils of London’s Blitz ignite a passion that neither can resist.
Bluebird Squadron rotates out of the front-line to Scotland. Bryan transfers to night-fighters, partly to sate his desire for combat, but also to stay close to Jenny.
Struggling with fledgling radar technology, Bryan and his operator, Tommy Scott, eventually become calculating hunters of the night, stalking and slaying Nazi raiders in a chilling, deadly game of cat-and-mouse in England’s pitch-black winter skies.
The stresses of combat, the loss of friends and the daily grind of mortal danger weigh ever more heavily. As the new year dawns on the battered, bohemian streets of the blitzed capital, Bryan’s life begins to fray and unravel.
Falcons (Book Three)
Falcons (Book Three)
Bryan Hale is a damaged man. The stresses of combat flying in England's summer skies during the Battle of Britain, and night-fighting in the icy darkness of The Blitz, together with the loss of friends and a shattered heart, have left him broken and grounded. Fortress Malta, and the unrelenting Nazi siege that aims to grind it away, will be the furnace that forges him anew.
Struggling with obsolete aircraft, disease and hunger, the pilots of Falcon Squadron battle the cagey Italian raiders and the resurgent Luftwaffe over the harbours and airfields of the tiny besieged island, both by day and night. A dancehall flirtation with a British nurse blossoms into a steamy affair, but it is a married Maltese woman who will lodge irretrievably in his heart.