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Johns, W E

Entry updated 28 September 2026. Tagged: Author.

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(1893-1968) UK air pilot, in active service with the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Air Force throughout World War One until shot down and captured on 16 September 1918, and later author, who began producing boys' action adventures in 1930. His normal byline was Captain W E Johns (a rank he did not in reality attain, having risen no higher than Flying Officer). His total output exceeded 200 volumes, his popularity exceeding any other twentieth-century British writer for children except Enid Blyton. Less well known is his short period as editor of Pearson's Magazine, May-November 1939.

Johns became famous in particular for the 102 Biggles books about a pilot and adventurer whose full name is Major James Bigglesworth, ace veteran of both world wars; a few of these include some sf content. Biggles Hits the Trail (1935) features a lost Himalayan mountain rich in radium, whose inimical Yellow Peril inhabitants have harnessed this resource for (inter alia) Invisibility, Death Rays and a kind of immobilizing Stasis Field driven by static electricity. The sixteen short stories in Biggles – Charter Pilot: The Adventures of Biggles & Co on a World-Wide Cruise of Scientific Investigation (coll 1943) include episodes in which Biggles encounters bizarre plants, giant animals and humans, the lost Element orichalcum, surviving dodos, troglodytes from the Hollow Earth, and vampire bats with the power of Hypnotism. In the post-war era Biggles becomes an airborne investigator linked to Scotland Yard and Interpol: Biggles Presses On (coll 1958) features the tale "Biggles Lays a Ghost" in which seemingly spectral appearances of a Flying Fortress from World War Two are traced to an experimental 3D film system whose inventor, lacking a suitable screen, is projecting his images on to the clouds. Time Travel and Timeslips feature in a film based on the Biggles character if not the Biggles canon: Biggles (1986; vt Biggles: Adventures in Time; vt Biggles Gets Off the Ground) directed by John Hough.

Amongst Johns's numerous other works, of particular sf interest is the Tiger and Rex Clinton sequence beginning with Kings of Space: A Story of Interplanetary Adventure (1954) and Return to Mars: A Story of Interplanetary Flight: A Sequel to Kings of Space (1955), which introduce the two redoubtable Clintons, father and son, who join with the eccentric Professor Lucius Brane whose Inventions initiate the sequence (unlike the Edisonade, this very British sequence separates the warrior hero from the culture hero). In a number of constantly improving saucer-Spaceships, the companions explore various planets and Asteroids in the Solar System and eventually elsewhere, meeting Alien societies and occasionally becoming involved in interplanetary or interstellar Future War, notably in The Death Rays of Ardilla: A Story of Interplanetary Exploration (1959) (see Death Rays). For the full list of titles in this series, see Checklist below. Astronomical terminology is somewhat mangled: the titular destinations in Now to the Stars: A Story of Interplanetary Exploration (1956) are in fact asteroids of our own solar system, a distant one being described as "on the outer edge of the galaxy"; in the same book the travellers are distracted by several minutes of blinding light from a nova and become stuck in "a zone of atmosphere caused by the explosion" (see Scientific Errors). Throughout, especially in such later volumes as The Quest for the Perfect Planet: A Story of Space Exploration (1961) and Worlds of Wonder: More Adventures in Space (coll 1962), Johns's anti-War sentiments, and his growing interest in the increasingly stressed Ecology of planet Earth, are clearly manifest; the series was thus never popular with Johns's usual readers, who found his concerns pessimistic. [JC/AC/DRL]

see also: Rays.

William Earle Johns

born Bengeo, Hertfordshire: 5 February 1893

died Kingston upon Thames, Surrey: 21 June 1968

works (highly selected)

series

Biggles

Tiger and Rex Clinton

about the author

  • Peter Berresford Ellis and Piers Williams. By Jove, Biggles! (London: W H Allen, 1981) [nonfiction: hb/]

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