The story of the Boy’s Own heroics of Bradford-born Maurice Wilson, who won the Military Cross in the First World War, has appeared several times in this newspaper in recent years.

He flew a secondhand de Haviland Gypsy Moth bi-plane to India in 1934, aiming to crash land 14,000ft up Mount Everest and then climb the rest of the way solo.

Needless to say, he died; but opinion was divided about whether he was on his way to the summit or on his way down when his frozen body was discovered.

T&A reader David Oyston, who lives in Bingley, an avid collector of periodicals and books, found Wilson’s story in an anthology of Sixties magazine stories called The Wide World, True Adventures For Men – the sort of thing that probably couldn’t be published these days without questions being asked in Parliament.

Mr Oyston said: “Next May is the 80th anniversary of Wilson’s attempt. My hope is that someday someone will turn this incredible story into a movie.”

Post the book off to Steven Spielberg at once, Mr Oyston. I can just imagine Tom Hanks as the intrepid Wilson, defying all attempts to dissuade him from flying 5,000 miles to India on his own, with only maps and a compass to chart his course.

The first part of Wilson’s story appeared in the June 1962 issue of the magazine (costing two shillings, or 10p). Lengthy prose stories in comics and magazines were in vogue more than 50 years ago.

This one had a foreword by Eric Shipton (1907-1977), the distinguished Himalayan mountaineer.

With a story-telling style reminiscent of John Buchan or Arthur Conan Doyle, he wrote: “Although it is more than 20 years ago, I still have a vivid recollection of sitting with my companions under a rock at 21,000ft in the upper basin of the East Rongbuk Glacier, while Kempson read aloud from the diary of a the man whose body we had just found on the moraine a few yards away...

“As I listened to the strange, intimate story, I had little doubt of the writer’s sincerity... He believed that he was guided by some kind of divine inspiration to deliver a message to humanity. His implicit faith in his destiny seems to have been with him to the last.”

The last entry written in pencil in his diary on May 31, 1934, sounds like something Captain W E Johns might have put in the mouth of Biggles: “Off again. Gorgeous day.”