He doesn't care who he kills. If he can't find an enemy he invents one. To defend decency and freedom he has become a thoroughly unscrupulous bastard. If he couldn't fly for us I'm sure he'd be perfectly happy in the Luftwaffe." (pg. 447)

A Good Clean Fight is a hard novel to appraise. It shares many of the qualities of its predecessor, Piece of Cake, as well as many of its drawbacks. In some ways I enjoyed the experience of reading it more; in others, I enjoyed it less. But I closed the book feeling largely satisfied. So let's get the negatives out of the way first.

Many of these are the same as in Piece of Cake, but need repeating here. First of all, the comedy is a bit too much at times, especially earlier on. A lot of the banter works, and some of the events shine a light on the inherent absurdity of war (ah, those wacky Nazi lemmings in their dune-buggies!), but it was a bit exhausting that every character is a snarky comedian. Every character is just waiting to get their line in – which, admittedly, does make the book an easy read – but it seems unrealistic. Even when the narrative switches to the German side, you have Luftwaffe officers one-upping each other and snarky Nazis schooling us in the art of deadpan. Of course, when you get any group of men together there's some banter, but author Derek Robinson cranks it up to eleven and never lets up. It's very entertaining but, peculiarly, at the same time rather tiresome.

The other major negative was the somewhat strange decisions made by some characters, and one or two defects in the narrative as a whole. For starters, Baggy Bletchley – who was quite thoroughly shredded by cannon fire in Piece of Cake set two years earlier – has come back to life. No one bats an eyelid. So there's that. There's also a scene where one of the main British characters, on leave in Cairo, casually kills an Aussie soldier. It sort of makes sense in context but what makes it strange is that another character – who has never met the other one – randomly walks in, doesn't bat an eyelid and helps the murderer dispose of the body. It's quite baffling and, for all of the novel's fine qualities, it's moments like this that take you out of it. Finally, I found the ending a bit predictable – it mirrored in some ways the ending of Piece of Cake (Robinson sure does like his friendly fire!) – and, at least to my mind, one of the side-plots (the lads' weekend in Benghazi) is left unresolved.

Now: the good. There is quite a lot of it, I'm happy to report. The book shares many of the same qualities as Piece of Cake but has less of an agenda than that earlier novel. Robinson doesn't seem to be trying to bash us over the head with his historical revisionism in A Good Clean Fight as he was in his Battle-of-Britain-myth-buster. It is this lack of zealotry which allows the reader to appreciate the novel's finer qualities.

For one, Robinson is a good writer. He is better than just about any other historical novelist I've read at presenting to the reader the dynamics of warfare. In Piece of Cake, it was the nature of aerial dogfighting which was so clearly and articulately brought to life. In A Good Clean Fight, it is ground-strafing and, in the parallel SAS plotline, desert raiding. You really get a sense of the limitations of each of the various aircraft – their weight, manoeuvrability, armament, responsiveness, reliability, personality – featured throughout the book, from the ever-present Tomahawks and Kittyhawks to special guest stars like the Heinkel 111 and bit-part players like the Storch and Lysander.

Robinson is also great at prosing and pacing; he gets the balance between dialogue and description perfectly balanced, and some of the descriptions are quite amusing. At one point, a Hurricane with extra fuel tanks is described as "hung with long-range tanks like a bull's balls" (pg. 89). At another, the tail of a dangerously-overloaded Heinkel 111 is described at take-off as coming up "grudgingly, like a nagged husband" (pg. 446). When allied to the often-snappy dialogue and the well-paced action, for the most part the novel just sails by.

I must also commend Robinson for how ruthlessly he kills off characters. It would put George R. R. Martin to shame. No-one else in fiction disposes of characters quite like Robinson. Lives are ended quickly and unsentimentally, just as in real war. One minute you're reading along happily, and then everything just stops." ( )

This is the second book the RAF trilogy by this author. This book is set in North Africa during the summer of 1942 just after Rommel has taken command of the Afrika Korp and the Brits are on the defensive. The book is sort of a "Rat Patrol" on steroids story complete with megalomaniac fighter pilots and infiltration commando units on speed and drunk on excitement on both sides. This witches brew makes for a crazy situation that reminds me of "Catch 22" at times, and at other times "Dr. Faustus." This is a book of action and lots of it and it is filled with sardonic humor and situations that make the reader laugh and cry. I read "Piece of Cake" years ago and loved it. I remembered it as full of action and interesting characters. I found none of that in this book. The Bartle Bull books in the Anton Ryder series are far superior to this series, and I couldn't help making that comparison as I read this book. Bartle Bull it ain't. I realize that behavior that I might have taken for typical British pluck and dash before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I now understand is really PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder, and most of the men in this story are displaying the tragic behavior of psychologically damaged men. The humor in this book is gross and yet funny. It is not enough to make me like this book. I enjoyed the trilogy by Bartle Bull much more than this book, and while I plan on reading the third book in this series, I hope that it is better than this one. ( )