Customer Reviews

To Play the Fox

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This is the third entry in the series that follows the careers of RAF pilot Kit Curtis and American Ossie Wolf. Of the three, this one concentrates the most on the fighting action, putting their personal lives (and specifically Curtis' relationship with the French widow) in the background for the most part. Barnard does a great job of illustrating the unique situation of the two armies fighting in the foreign and hostile landscape of North Africa. I'm a stickler for detail and I found no missteps in Barnard's description of the action, the weapons or the character's personalities. There are no perfect heroes and no complete villians.

I was intrigued by one particular section that describes an unusual attack by a lone Heinkel He-111 on a Central African fighter staging base. Wolf is engaged in delivering Spitfires to Egypt over the African continent as punishment duty and is caught in the attack that destroys most of the aircraft on the ground. It seems to parallel a scene in Derek Robinson's novel "A Good Clean Fight" that describes a very similar attack from the viewpoint of the Germans in the Heinkel. Coincidence or an homage? I won't insinuate plagiarism - I think he wrote it as a tip of the hat to the dedicated WWII fiction reader.

Overall a very enjoyable read, and highly recommended. I hope Barnard has plans to continue the series.

Frank Barnard, an English writer, gave up his day job to write novels full time. This is the best career decision the man has ever made! He is a fantastic writer and his books are so well written and so well researched that one can easily forget they are fiction (although his subject matter is based on historical fact) and could mistake him for an actual British fighter pilot in World War II.

"To Play the Fox" is the third in a series of novels about Royal Air Force fighter pilots in World War II. The main characters remain the same in all three novels. The first novel, "Blue Man Falling", deals with the Battle of France beginning with the "Phoney War" in the fall of 1939 through the fall of France in June 1940. The second book, "A Band of Eagles", is the best of the three and deals with the siege of Malta during 1941-1942. "To Play the Fox" continues the saga in North Africa in 1943 with the action leading up to and through the momentous Battle of El Alamein.

I actually read the second book first, not knowing that there were two others in the series. I enjoyed it so much that I ordered the other two and read them simultaneously. This did not detract in any way from my enjoyment of the series. The third book, "To Play the Fox", actually seems like Mr. Barnard wrote it as an afterthought, though, because he ends the story of the first two books with an epilogue set in present day England at the end of the second book, yet the third book carries on from where the second book ended and it has no epilogue. I guess his first two books were so popular that the demand for a third book was just too tempting for him to pass up.

I highly recommend this book as well as the other two books in the series. I have not yet found them in US bookstores. I received my copy of "A Band of Eagles" from a friend who had just finished reading it, but when I searched for the other two novels in stores I couldn't find them on the shelves. Amazon was a convenient source to buy these books used. If you're a World War II historian, aviation buff, or just plain like a good read, this series of novels is for you.