Freddy Lombard, Vol. 5: F.52 by Yves Chaland

As it happened, this was the last: Yves Chaland published five volumes in his "Freddy Lombard" series in the 1980s, before his untimely death in 1990 in a car wreck. In some better world, he could have gone on to do more of them, over the next three decades - Chaland would only have been in his late sixties now - but that's not the case.

All five of the Freddy Lombard books stand alone, and I think all of them comment or refer in some sly ways to classic bande dessinée stories and tropes, in ways I don't have the cultural knowledge to trace. They also were all historical - not just now, since they're about forty years old, but they were set twenty or thirty years before their publication, in the shiny post-war era of the '50s or very early '60s. The books don't say this very explicitly, except for the fourth, Holiday in Budapest, which has to be 1956 given the events in it.

This fifth and final book, F.52, is not quite as obviously set in the 1950s, but there are strong indications for readers who are looking for them. The title refers to a new gigantic intercontinental jet, flying from Paris to Melbourne in twenty-four hours - the idea of a "giant" airliner and the flight time and the newness of both of those things place it strongly in historical time. The fact that the plane is flying from Le Bourget, which had lost all regular scheduled flights and was purely a business aviation hub when Chaland made this story, would have been a major signpost to its original European audience, too.

Our three heroes, Freddy and his two friends Dina and Sweep, are working as attendants on the maiden voyage of this plane. They are central, but, somewhat like the other books in the series, this isn't entirely their story. F.52 begins a bit languidly, with our heroes having a flat tire in their famously unreliable car, and needing to hitch a lift to make it to the plane on time. (Well, not on time - but not too late to make the flight.) There are some thriller elements, including a Soviet spy taking dirt from a secret site back to his spymasters, and a pair of young schoolgirls switched for deliberately-unclear reasons by a rich couple, but those are part of a larger, workaday narrative of the whole flight, taking only a little more page-space than an nasty purser sexually harassing Dina.

Chaland gives the switched-girls plot real power here - some elements are odd, such as why the rich parents do it at all, and why they thought switching dresses on two girls who look so different would actually work - but it comes across as inevitable, and we see the plane's staff defer to the rich passengers in first class over and over again, so we understand how it could work and how those parents might decide to just do what they want, assuming they will get what they want, this time as always before.

In the end, this is fiction, so it all comes out satisfyingly by the time the plan lands in Melbourne. Chaland's drawing is excellent here, in that mid-century ligne clair style - his people have energy and life, and his spaces look real and clearly of their time. If this had to be the end, if Chaland had to die so young, this is about as good a version of this story we could have asked for to see him off.