Solomon’s Seal by Hammond Innes (1980)

He turned then, facing me reluctantly, his features crumpled by the intensity of the emotions that gripped him. He mumbled something, gripping hold of my arm, but the sound of his voice was lost in the crash of a wave. (p.140)

Roy Slingsby is a typical Innes protagonist, a decent, averagely honest man plunged into a bizarre adventure in a colourful foreign land. The book is carefully divided into five parts, but the following are my own divisions, based on the imaginative settings or backdrops which dominate.

Part one – East Anglia

Roy is 40, he’s knocked about a bit, skippered landing craft as part of his National Service, keeps a run-down sailing boat on the Suffolk coast and makes a so-so living as a contents valuer for an estate agent. A chance call leads him to a routine valuation of the now-empty home in Aldeburgh of one Tim Holland, a man about his own age who became seriously ill while working in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, came home to recuperate but is so poorly he’s been placed in a nursing home.

Roy is shown round by his sister, Perenna Holland, who had been looking after Tim. She is not only attractive but peculiar, showing an unusual interest in the grotesque and frightening native artifacts around the house and then revealing that her brother is suffering from a curse cast by a witch doctor among the islands. If only she could find the man who did it, she would… she would… Roy is startled by her belief in primitive magic and by her anger. Turns out there is one other sibling, Jona, who owns and runs an ex-army landing craft which he uses to trade around the islands.

Roy drives away from this innocuous-looking farmhouse in the flat Suffolk countryside, his mind fired by images of foreign lands, savage customs, the hot sun, the tang of the ocean.

In another plot strand Roy had been advising one of the firm’s clients about a farm in far away Australia. The client now wants to sell up, would Roy – a trusted agent for the firm in their English business – fly out and handle the sale, all expenses paid? In almost the same breath Roy’s employers make it plain he will never be made a partner of their firm and he has a stand-up row with the boss before walking out. Yes, he rings the client to say, yes, he’ll take the Australia job: please arrange the flights, tickets, hotels, tell the agent, the man on the ground who’s been running the farm, that he’ll be coming.

This first section is dominated by the mystery of a pair of old stamp albums Roy noted among the Suffolk house’s contents and which, being a bit of a collector himself, he knew who to pass onto for an assessment. To his surprise the expert says it contains the die for some rare stamps and the whole thing looks like a collection assembled by someone designing new stamps for a colony in the south seas. (The expert is himself a sailor; the scene where they meet aboard the expert’s boat are described with typical Innes gusto for the drift and smell and bob of the water.) The expert arranges a provisional sale and forwards the money to Perenna.

But here there is more complication, for it appears she has left the house – Roy drives there to find it stripped bare and a bonfire of most of its contents, old letters and photos – and some worryingly bizarre artifacts, arrows and barbed knives, carved from wood and painted blood colour – in the garden. Perenna left a message with her solicitor that she has taken a job on a cruise liner, all monies to be sent to the address of her Southampton bank. (Innes’ novels are always studded with the precise details of work, the practical details of everyday life.)

Part two – Australia

Roy flies to Australia, familiarises himself with Sydney before flying to Brisbane and then is driven by the agent out to the farm he’s charged with selling, with the absurd name of Munnobungle (p.85), a dried-up wreck of a place. This only happens for a few pages but Innes packs into it the familiarity with the Australian terrain, and with no-nonsense outback Aussies, which characterised his great book set there, Golden Soak. Just reading about the red soil and the dusty shack and the flaking eucalyptus trees, was pure pleasure.

Roy concludes the deal quickly and returns to Sydney where he spends time tracking down the landing craft of Perenna’s brother, among the huge throng of ships in the harbour. Eventually he finds it, goes aboard to discover the brother, the captain, Jona, pretty drunk, the first mate unconscious in his cabin, the boat crewed by various surly blacks, natives of the Solomon Islands, a typically fraught, tense, male environment.

On the spot Jona offers him a job as crew member who will, when they get out to sea, be promoted to first officer, and Roy, having come all this way, accepts it. What is he doing? Well, he has no ties back in England, his return flight is open-ended, ever since meeting that lonely woman in an empty farmhouse in the flat Suffolk countryside he has been fired by her stories of strange seas and exotic lands. Why not? The next journey is to take some Haulpaks to Bougainville island, 500 miles north-east of Australia, sandwiched between the Solomon islands to the south and Papua New Guinea, of which it is formally part, to the north-west.

Part three – At sea

Once they set sail from Sydney, Roy is a new man, confidently taking his place at the helm and his watch among those of Jona and the first mate, Luke, confidently ordering the sullen black crew about their tasks, worried by the neglect and dirt he finds everywhere, standing up to the alcoholic first officer, Mac. Innes is at sea and his prose shows his total familiarity and spirited enjoyment of the situation.

Roy learns that the ship is scheduled to land at a beach along the coastline, to lower its ramp and let a couple of vehicles drive on board. He is suspicious of this little detour, of the crew’s behaviour, of Jona’s evasiveness. Something crooked is obviously going on, but how crooked? He bullies the Indian radio officer into sending a message to Perenna’s ship, for her attention, due to be docking about now. The rendezvous on the beach isn’t for a few days: can Perenna fly to Australia, then on to this location and join the boat? It will infuriate Jona; but it will fulfil Perenna’s dream of being reunited with her brother and of going back to the islands to find the man who cursed her brother and getting him to repeal the curse.

They reach the rendezvous on the coast of Queensland, beach the landing craft, lower the ramp and the two lorries are driven on board by their surly drivers, who go back down the ramp and into a waiting car and are driven off, the ramp is raised and the landing craft steams backwards and out to sea. When, at the end of his shift, Roy stumbles down the steep metal steps to his cramped cabin, he is amazed to find Perenna in his bed: she got his message, took the first flights and a car out to the meeting place, and paid the first driver to smuggle her aboard in one of the trucks.

She stays in Roy’s cabin for the first day and they find themselves having sex, but it is an uneasy relationship. Eventually she presents herself to Jona who is angry but can live with the situation. Roy and Perenna grow more suspicious about the contents of the crates which came aboard in the trucks. In a tense scene, in the middle of the night, eluding the watchful Buka native sailors, they break one open and discover it is full of guns and ammunition.

Somewhere along the line it is revealed that, when they were living in the islands, there was an outbreak of Cargo fever (related to the religion of Cargoism) and a force of Buka men, worked up into a frenzy, broke into Perenna’s house, hacked her mother to death in front of her and began to attack her, but she fought back with a kitchen cleaver, herself killing one native and driving the others off. Not without suffering a severe cut to the neck. a) Whenever Roy sees the scar he is reminded of this terrible incident b) it explains Perenna’s obsession with native beliefs and fear of violence.

I barely caught Perenna’s words as she said, ‘Are we all going to die – violently?’ Her eyes were wide and staring, full of fear – a fear that was inside her, part of her being. ‘Did he say anything about the curse?’ she said. (p.278)

Part four – the coup

They dock at Anewa Bay to unload the Haulpaks and trucks, and there is some classic Innes research as they are met by an engineer who shows them the extraordinary amount of development which has taken place in the past decade, with the construction of a power station by the Japanese which fuels a vast copper and silver mine up in the mountain as well as power for the new towns which have grown up around it.

Driving round that night, Roy and Perenna see a lorryful of Baku natives go into the District Governor’s office with machine guns. They drive to the nearest houses to call the police but all the phone lines are down. They drive to the huge mine to find the manager is on leave, but are witnesses as the rebels blow a key bridge in the road. Ditching the car, Perenna and Roy make it by foot down the mountainside to the port and to the landing craft, seeking safety from the coup, only to be captured at the last minute.

The coup president is a native named Sapuru but most of the practical details are being organised by Hans Holland, the red-haired cousin of Jona and Perenna, one of the tangled Holland clan. Apparently his father was killed, in his own house, by being surrounded by Colonel Holland, Perenna’s father, and a band of natives who fired flaming arrows into it, causing it to burn to the ground. This was during the war when all elements of Bougainville society were caught in the fighting between Japanese and the Allies: Hans’s father sided with the Japs and that was the reason given out for years why Colonel Holland killed him.

But throughout the book Roy has been learning there may be other reasons, that the twisted history of the Holland clan lies behind many mysteries.

Part five – the haunted house

Hans shows Roy that the landing craft is now full of captured police and local officials under armed guard of the gloating Baku natives, armed with the machine guns Jona smuggled in. Jona has drunk himself incoherent, therefore can Roy captain the ship up the coast of Bougainville to the smaller island of Buka, to drop them with the Buka Co-operative, the organisation of natives which is behind the coup. There they will be safe and can be held as hostages while Suparu negotiates independence with the Papua New Guinea authorities.

So there is some fine Innes writing describing sailing by night around a south Pacific island, marred for Roy, of course, by the extreme anxiety of the situation. Ever since he joined the landing craft relations have been rocky with its 60-year-old first officer, the alcoholic McAvoy, who is kept on by Jona because he served under Jona and Perenna’s father. Now Mac comes into his own as he hexes the Buka insurgent stationed on the bridge with a machine gun to guard Roy. Mac starts using the Buka language, babbling and gesticulating, hypnotising the guard just long enough to step forward and stab him in the guts with a long knife. Taking his machine gun he gets the horrified Roy to call the leader of the Buka men, the swaggering cocky Tualeg, up to the bridge where, with no preamble, Mac riddles his body with bullets.

Invoking the native beliefs in power and magic, Mac tells Roy to display Tualeg’s dead body on the bridge wing to the armed insurgents below. This he does with the result that the four or so insurgents simply drop their weapons, seeing their omnipowerful leader dead, and the hundred or so police and officials swarm up out of the hold and commandeer the ship. They tell Roy to continue steering it up towards the north coast, near to the airport. This they successfully storm and call for planes carrying troops from Papua New Guinea. This is the beginning of the end of the coup.

Meanwhile, Perenna, Mac and Roy, with a newly sober Jona, are recovering for this stressful adventure in the channel between Bougainville and Baku, close to the tiny island Madehas, home of the old Holland clan, location of the house built by Perenna’s grandfather and where her mother was slaughtered before her eyes. Old Mac takes Roy up there in the pouring rain, to enter the big, Gothic house, with its baronial fireplace and grand staircases, all fallen into rack and ruin now, old Mac speculating about the motives and purposes of the legendary figures, Red Holland, Black Holland, Colonel Holland, muddling them up with his adventures during the war, fighting against the Japs.

Mac shows him the house safe under the stairs, opens it and reveals whole sheets of Solomon seal stamps – the stamps whose die Roy discovered in the Suffolk house so long ago, as well as ‘the letter’, the one which drove the old Colonel into such a fury. He repeats the story that the Colonel was so fired up by it that he took his native troops and surrounded the log cabin of Red Holland, setting it aflame. He adds the detail that as the other natives fled, there was a single shot from the flaming house. Red shooting himself.

After returning to the landing craft, chewing things over with Perenna and Jona, and falling asleep, Roy is rudely awoken by the surprise appearance of Hans Holland. He is angry that old Mac stabbed his troops and released the police, but he thinks he can still make the coup work by driving trucks across the nearby airport, keeping the main plotters down in Anewa safe. But while they’re discussing it they hear the drone of planes flying overhead to land government (ie Papua New Guinea government) troops there. The cynical Australian who had been acting as Hans’s help and fixer says, ‘Well that’s that, then’. The coup will fail, Hans’s dreams of running a big shipping empire on behalf of the independent Bougainville organisation are in tatters.

Hans pulls a gun on Roy and insists he accompany him in a dinghy to the shore and then up the familiar path to the haunted house. Here – like many a doomed Innes character – Hans slumps in a chair and mutters fragments of the past, fragments the narrator (and the reader) struggles to put together. He is insistent on the letter, where is the letter? Has Roy shown the letter to Perenna? Again they discuss the complex fates of the Holland family but this time Roy tells him what Mac told him, about old Red shooting himself in the on-fire house.

Hans’ passion subsides and he tells Roy to get out, get out I tell you! Roy goes back down the path, catches the dinghy back to the landing craft and is wondering with Perenna what Hans will do now, how soon before police arrive to arrest him, whether he’ll get a life sentence etc, when one of the crew yells and points up the hill. The house is on fire, yes, flames are leaping up. And then they hear a single shot! History has repeated itself: Hans Holland has killed himself amid his own funeral pyre, just as his father did.

Jona, Perenna, Mac and Roy go up to the now burnt out house to find nothing but a pile of ashes and embers. Jona takes some, puts them in a tin and later carries out a formal burial at sea. Perenna and Roy wonder if Hans really was that depressed, or was it a ruse: has he faked his death and slipped away…?

Part six – savage customs

Jona receives radio orders from the police to sail back south to Anewa bay. Here there is an extraordinary scene, for Sapuru and the other failed coup men have barricaded themselves into one of the offices near the power station. They are surrounded by the armed police and NPG troops but themselves holding a number of white hostages. Standoff. They had been asking, demanding, the presence of Perenna, something to do with her father’s memory, with her influence.

And indeed Perenna consults with the leader of the Chimbu people who are surrounding the office. These native people are local to this place, the south of the island, unrelated to the Buka men from across the strait, and unhappy that their new-found prosperity, working up at the mine, is threatened.

Now they have stripped off their western clothes and painted their bodies with paint, lipstick, cosmetics, oil, whatever they can find, and similarly armed themselves with any weapons to hand, some have even made bows and arrows out of saplings.

Perenna counsels them to make a traditional show of strength outside the blockhouse and this is what they do, advancing and retreating and shouting their haka-like warrior chants. Finally the leader, Tagup, advances forward of his men and shouts for the coup leader, Sapuru, to come out and face him. And he does. Watched by police, army and the painted warriors the two men confer. And then Sapuru gives in and orders his men out, to lay down their arms, to release the hostages. The spirit has left him; he has no power. The coup is over. And later that evening Sapuru lays down and dies, all his strength, power and sorcery gone. It is at this moment, Perenna later finds out, that her brother Tim, back in England, long languishing under the curse of the sorcerer, at a stroke begins to show energy and life again.

Now, the whole coup, all the sailing about and adventures, gun running, shooting and midnight escapes are definitively, finally over, and Roy has a long shower and then sleeps for 12 hours in the lovely clean bed of a motel which the authorities find for him.

Part six – epilogue

Even the epilogue is complex.

The Holland shipping line Jona is arrested by the authorities but let off a gaol sentence for gun running because he pleaded ignorance, but more because of the key role played by his sister, Perenna, in the peaceful end of the coup. Nonetheless, his company turns out to be technically bankrupt. Roy flies to Australia and a) settles the sale of the Munnobungle ranch b) puts in time in Sydney drumming up custom for the last ship in the Holland line.

The Holland curse All the way through the book, on almost every page, running in parallel with the story of the gun running and the coup, has been the much deeper narrative concerning the Holland family and all the stories and rumours involving murder, incest, miscegenation and so on. While in the outback Roy travels to Cooktown to find the aborigine he’d heard about who is famous for killing one of the Hollands. He buys him a few drinks and wangles the story out of him, sort of, it’s still not totally clear.

In the late 1800s two adventurers tramping through the Australian outback came across a gold mine, which they named, because of their exhaustion, Dog Weary mine. One of them, Holland, took all the food and water and slipped away in the night to register the claim, leaving the other, Lewis, to die in the desert but Lewis didn’t die, he was found by aborigines who took him walkabout eventually returning him to ‘civilisation’. Here he discovered that Holland had used the money from the mine to set up a successful shipping line, the Holland line, with fine schooners and black and white photos of men in panama hats which were to find their way into Perenna’s house and the Madehas safe. Lewis, consumed with revenge, concocted a bomb and installed it on one of the line’s biggest ships but old man Holland discovered the plan, had Lewis killed and his body put in the captain’s cabin, then paddled away from the ship, clutching, among other things, his albums of stamps, until the ship exploded and went down with all hands. This man – Red Holland – was one and the same as the Carlos Holland who we’ve heard about throughout the novel, and he fled to Madehas island. And Hans Holland was his son. And the letter which obsessed Hans so much, reveals Carlos/Red’s identity and confirms that he is a callous mass murderer. It was this letter and this revelation which made Mac’s friend, Colonel Lawrence Holland, shake with anger and sent him along with a gang of natives to besiege and burn Carlos’s house. It was the knowledge that he’d murdered his own brother, which, years later, prompted the Colonel to get in his canoe and paddle off into the sea to die, seen by only a few servants whose garbled accounts have added to the legends. And it has been living with the knowledge that his father was a murderer which led to Hans becoming a wrong ‘un.

He was suddenly leaning forward, the red hair blazing in the slanting sunlight, his eyes staring into mine. ‘You marry Perenna, you marry the Holland Line.’ He came towards me, smiling. ‘You do that and you marry a curse. It was built on hate and fear and disaster and it’s done for every one of us – every man that has tried to make his fortune out of it. My father started it and he died an unnatural death. So did the old Colonel and Perenna’s mother, now Tim’s dying, he’s given up and he’ll die hating me, hating his sister, hating everyone, the whole world.’ He pointed his finger at me. ‘You too. You try and succeed where I failed and you’ll never know a minute’s peace. I’ll haunt you, Slingsby. Even as my father has haunted me. I’ll haunt you.’ (p.274)

The Solomon seal Here my understanding gave out and I admit I couldn’t follow why the old seal and the sheet of stamps Roy took from the safe in Madehas house were so important. The last ten pages are filled with astonishing detail around the history and manufacture of stamps and appear – from the author’s note at the end of the book – to be a complex fictional explanation of a historical fact which is that the reputable firm of note and stamp printers, Perkins Bacon, admitted in the mid 1850s to having a thief in their midst.

Precisely how this is related to the Solomon dies I didn’t understand: maybe they are a rare example of the thief in action, the die was stolen, and so the stamps are a very rare example of illegally printed stamps fro the Perkins Bacon stable.

The practical upshot is that Roy and Perenna fly back to England to oversee the sale at auction of the stamps and albums and, because of this unique (but to me incomprehensible) history, they fetch an astonishing £30,000. This is enough to get Jona’s ship out of hock and with some left over to invest in the business. The Holland line is reborn. And brother Tim is well on the way to recovery.

Roy asks Perenna to marry him and she laughingly says yes. After all the byzantine complexity of the plot, and the bewildering detail of much of the background information, it all ends, as do so many Innes’ novels, on what you feel is a psychologically balanced and happy ending.

Maybe this happiness, this joy in life and physical activities like sailing, swimming or skiiing, combined with the baroque complexities of his plots (which generally boil down to ancestral curses and Gothic family tragedies) prevent Innes being given much due or scholarly attention. But it is a gift to entertain, thrill and then leave your readers uplifted and inspired.

The night after the stamp auction, knowing their futures are assured, Perenna and Roy walk around his old farmhouse in Suffolk, and then start fooling.

I was kissing her as I carried her over the threshold. ‘Tomorrow I’ll think about making an honest woman of you.’ We were both of us laughing as we went up to bed. The moon was very bright that night and there were owls hooting – Bougainville and the Pacific seemed a million miles away, and so did reality. What fun life is! What a glorious everlasting struggle to survive and to build something worthwhile! And as I fell asleep I was thinking of that indomitable old man, her grandfather, sailing out in his canoe towards the horizon and infinity. (p.318)

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Related links

• Solomon’s Seal on Amazon
• Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
• Independent obituary
• New York Times obituary
• Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.

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1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.

Posted by Simon on October 26, 2015

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