This was a bit weird and old fashioned. I didn't warm to the main character, so struggled to get the humour (?)

For fans of - "Flashman", "Biggles", and "Inspector Clouseau" or maybe even, "Inspector Gadget".

Bart Bandy is the anti-hero who seems to always come up trumps. I kept imaging Bart in the visage of Rik Mayall's "Lord Flashheart" from the "Blackadder" series.

Bandy's memoirs begin with his early years in Canada, then onto the battlefields of France during WWI, and then to his career in the Royal Flying Corps.

It is a humourous and witty tale, and finding out that the author served in the RAF in WWII, makes me wonder if this is slightly auto-biographical. A ripping good yarn.

Hi Karen,

My next review is:-

"Three Cheers For Me( The Bandy Papers)", written by Donald Jack and published in paperback by Farrago on 10 Aug. 2017. 320 pages. ISBN-13: 978-1911440451

This is an absolutely brilliant book which once started was impossible to put down and is one of the best historical mysteries that I have ever read.

The story starts in 1916 in Ontario Canada where Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy lives. His family are very religious puritans and Bandy is teetotal, virginal and completely naive about the world outside his family and small town. Anyway, he decides to abandon Medical School to enlist in the army and is assigned to The Victorian light infantry, where after limited training he is shipped off to France to fight the Germans in trench warfare at the Somme and Ypres. There is a lot of humour but the descriptions of conditions in the trenches and the camaraderie between the men is very moving. After some very tense battle scenes, in which Bundy is hopelessly inept and he manages to capture his own colonel in a night raid he transfers to the Royal Flying Corps where he is trained as a pilot.

He crashes his plane into a field near the large English country house where his future wife lives. He goes onto to become an ace fighter pilot and has many adventures in this very fast moving and quite amusing book. The book was originally published in 1962, but seems very modern in its writing style. The author who flew in the RAF with great heroism during the last war and then emigrated to Canada, h has a great skill in writing such a hugely atmospheric but amusing story.

The story was very atmospheric and all the characters are very richly drawn. The story was expertly researched and the give the reader many fascinating details of life during 1916. The plot which was episodic in nature is very entertaining but intensely interesting and a real page turner but I just could not put it down until the final page.

The book is complete in itself but the author writes a further eight novels about the character Barth Bandy, which I must look out for. I understand that the 'Jeeves and Wooster' author P.G.Wodehouse thought a great deal of it and I recommend it most strongly.

Best wishes,

Terry
(to be published on eurocrime.co.uk in due course)

Bartholomew Bandy is a kind of Candide. As Candide he comes from North America, specifically Canada, seen as a place where a certain honesty of thought survives. The son of a bigoted and sober Pastor, goes to war with his his horse-face and his total social incompetence, which makes him say and do whatever comes into his head with the utmost awkwardness and without a second thought. Among hilarious adventures that look a bit like the mythical Müchausen Baron ones and on the wings of a fortune proportionate only to its incredible clumsiness, Bandy went from infantry lieutenant to ace gunner, in the meantime leading to madness any superior in which he comes into contact and having in the meantime learned to drink and smoke.
First Book of a long and successful series, it caused me crisis of laughter that I did not remember from the days of Three Men in a Boat, which is why I will try to get the other volumes.
Thank Farrago and Netgalley for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

For lovers of Flashman crossed with Spike Milligan , an irreverent look at war and military life in WW 1 . Tongue in cheek and perhaps not for the serous reader looking for a true account .

This is a cracking good read! Chock full of chuckles and adventure without veering away from the realities of war.

Highly recommended!

A tale along the lines of P.G.Wodehouse. Eccentric, a bit of a misfit but an ace flyer. I look forward to reading further tales of his exploits.

The blurb says it all really, sadly it wasn't my sort of book but thought I would try something different but I'm sure it will appeal to a lot of readers

I enjoyed Three Cheers For Me a good deal more than I expected to. I tried it because P.G. Wodehouse thought highly of it, but I didn't really know whether I would like it. In fact (after a rather tedious opening chapter or two), I found it readable, funny in places and genuinely touching in others. It had elements of Wodehouse himself, Jerome K. Jerome, Siegfried Sassoon and Cecil Lewis; to my surprise, as well as the humour it gave a powerful, exciting and sometimes moving picture of fighting in the First World War.

The story begins in 1916. It is narrated by Bartholemew Bandy, a naïve, gauche Canadian who enlists in the army to fight in France. He is, of course, hopelessly incompetent, but eventually enlists in the RFC and becomes a pilot. He remains socially inept but finds that in the air he is a brilliant flyer. This gives rise to both comic and genuinely exciting situations.

Although this is billed as a comedy and some parts are genuinely funny, it is the descriptions of life and action at the Front at the Somme and Ypres, and of aerial combat which I found the best parts of this book. These episodes are, in a way, partly comic, but all the more affecting for being so. "Bandy" talks in some places about out-and-out farcical events like wrestling with ancient plumbing in a country house, which reminded me strongly of Three Men In A Boat. In other parts, he uses a similar tone to describe a group of bewildered infantrymen fighting their way into an enemy trench and not knowing what to do, his own terror-induced clumsiness and ineptitude when taking off for his first flight into genuine action and the thrill of flying once he has become extremely skilled at it. The deadpan style lends these things immediacy and real pathos, I think, and through it all Jack creates very believable characters about whom we come to care, and when some are inevitably killed, their loss – described in quiet matter-of-fact tones – genuinely saddened me.

I was surprised to find that these stories were written as late as 1962. They have the feel of having been written by someone who was really there. Jack was in the RAF in the Second World War so his knowledge of flying is intimate, but it is still a considerable achievement to have created such an intimate portrait of an earlier time.

So, this is a mixture of the farcical and the deadly serious. It takes real skill to pull that off successfully, and Jack manages it very well. He was a fine writer and this is an enjoyable and memorable book. I'll be looking out for more by Donald Jack, and I can recommend this warmly.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Imagine Bertie Wooster in the trenches of WWI - except with no Jeeves to save the day - and a deep vein of sadness hiding just below the humor. A classic that deserves a resurgence.

Set during World War I, our hero's ironic self-deprecation makes him a perfect candidate for today's hipster's self-conscious minimalism. The book is well-written and provides interesting insights into early 20th century rural Canada as well as trench and aerial warfare but I had a great deal of trouble liking the egocentric Mr. Bandy. In fact, until at least halfway through the book I was convinced I wouldn't finish it and had put it aside and notified the publisher I wasn't enjoying myself. But I happen to really like most of what Prelude Books/Farrago puts out (largely humor!) so eventually I picked it back up and, as our hero stepped back a bit to let events (instead of himself) unfold, I finally started seeing the very real, wry humor with which this book is infused and thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the story--to the extent that I will be requesting of Netgalley that I be allowed to review the next of the series.