[5] The novel centred on a fictional young British Royal Air Force pilot named John Quayle who flies obsolete Gladiator biplanes for the true-life 80 Squadron against the larger and more powerful Axis air-forces over Greece, Crete and North Africa 1940–41.

[6] American critic Herbert Faulkner West stated that the book "showed real promise" and ranked it the best of his wartime novels.

[16] An American review for Kirkus, however, while acknowledging the book's premise to be promising and original, labelled it as slow, repetitive and awkward in style.

A drama about fur-hunters living in the wilds of the Ontario bushlands in Canada, the novel was, according to Walter O'Meara in the Saturday Review, written in a "flat direct prose that just when you decide to be bored straightens you up with an incisive and revealing word or phrase."

[18] Aldridge's next book appeared in 1954, a novel entitled Heroes of the Empty View, depicting an English hero-adventurer in the Middle-East in the vein of T. E. Lawrence and Charles Gordon.

Kirkus Reviews labelled it as an effective work, dealing with "men living under stress and with a heightened sense of humanity present the issues that haunt them..."[21] Aldridge's direct experiences of Egypt, where he lived for much of the Post-War era, both as a Foreign Correspondent and later as a novelist, inspired the 1961 novel The Last Exile, set amidst the turbulence of the Suez Crisis in 1957.

[22] Aldridge continued to draw inspiration from topical events and the Cold War tensions between the East and West gave him the subject for his next novel A Captive in the Land (1962), set in the frozen wastes of the Arctic where an English scientist rescues the sole survivor of a crashed Russian aircraft.

Like all of his politically themed works, Aldridge attempted to explore all viewpoints and portray the "grey" area in-between opposing forces and beliefs.

In this case, the Englishman is initially viewed by his fellow Westerners as a hero but later he is treated with increasing suspicision due to his efforts to allow the Russian to be freed.