One of the modern additions to the Adventures of Blake and Mortimer, this one is an early story in the internal chronology, taking place towards the end of WWII and setting up the original series openers, the Swordfish trilogy. Much daring-do for Blake, with Mortimer taking an important, but subsidiary, part.

Nice touches include the advent of Olrik, and a bit of his back story, unreliable as that information might be, and how Blake comes to reside at 99a Park Lane with Mrs Benson; a missed opportunity was no Alan Turing cameo during the Bletchley scenes. An enjoyable episode in the series. ( )

Gewoonweg fantastisch, met dit boek wordt Edgar P. Jacobs eer aan gedaan ( )

Only two more and the series is complete. Well, there’s two more left that were originally penned by series creator Edgar P Jacobs, but who knows how many more the Jacobs Studio will produce. But since I like the series, that wouldn’t, of course, be a problem. And I actually like the non-Jacobs titles more than the Jacobs ones. Chiefly because they’re more modern, although set in the past, and a good deal cleverer. This one is set during WWII, and details how Blake and Mortimer came to be friends and colleagues. They had met before – in The Oath of the Five Lords (see here) – but had then gone their separate ways. As Plutarch’s Staff opens, Blake is a RAF squadron leader flying Seafires for the Fleet Air Arm, and Mortimer is working at a secret research establishment in a Scottish glen hidden beneath an artificially-generated cloud. But Jacobs’s more-than-problematical villains, the Yellow Empire, are waiting in the wings, ready to pounce once WWII has ended. Although they’re not above helping things along. Sente and Juillard drag in quite a bit of history – including a visit to Bletchley Park – and manage to cleverly slot Jacobs’s weird alternate history into our history. Good stuff. ( )