‘I have to get to a certain farm tonight,’ I said. ‘I’m playing a lone hand against a gang of fifth columnists. They’ve got a plan that will enable the Germans to capture our fighter aerodromes. I aim to stop them.’…
A sudden gleam came into his small, close-set eyes. ‘Cor lumme!’ he said. ‘Wot a break! Like a book I bin reading all about gangsters in America. Will they have guns?’ (p.158)

This is a cracking good adventure yarn in the spirit of John Buchan or, at moments, Biggles. It’s a first-person narrative by Barry Hanson, formerly a journalist on the Globe newspaper, who is now, in the Battle of Britain summer of 1940, one of a platoon or squad manning a 3-inch anti-aircraft gun at ‘Thorby’, a fighter airfield near the North Downs, south of London.

Set-up

We meet the dozen or so men of Hanson’s detachment, their officers, some of the WAAFs, watch them man the gun, rest and sleep and feed at the NAAFI, thus establishing the workaday background.

Rumour has been going round that a Nazi agent was found with detailed plans of Thorby airfield. The crew watch one night as the nearby airfield of Mitchet is heavily bombed by German planes. A few nights later our chaps hit a German bomber and watch it fall to earth and explode. The crew parachute down to land near the field and Hanson is among those who are close enough to talk to the captain. He is a surly Nazi who insists on seeing an officer. When Hanson (who picked up German while working in his paper’s Berlin office before the war) questions him a bit more, the German arrogantly says, ‘The Invasion is coming, the Luftwaffe will defeat the RAF, this airfield at Thorby will be flattened on Friday.’ He is in mid-flow when he suddenly shuts up. Looking behind him Hanson sees the camp librarian, a Mr Vayle, has appeared. Was it his presence which made the pilot go quiet?

Later Hanson hears the pilot was much more circumspect when hauled before the airfield CO and Intelligence officer, downplaying the Friday bombing claim – and  Hanson learns that Vayle was in attendance, chatting to the pilot in German while he was being attended to the Medical Officer and before that interrogation. Can Vayle possibly be a German spy?

Hanson asks a WAAF he’s got friendly with, Marion, to send a telegram to the Globe’s crime correspondent, but the message is suspicious enough for the village Post Office to report it to the camp commandant, and Hanson finds himself hauled over the coals: he is in the Army now, it is forbidden to go off freelancing like this, if he has suspicions he reports them to his CO and goes through proper channels. It is ludicrous to think Vayle is a Nazi spy, the man is Jewish and fled the Nazis in 1934. — Hanson is confined to camp for 28 days.

One man who knows the truth

The result is a classic early thriller situation: one man who is convinced he knows a secret the authorities won’t admit; who is convinced he knows about a spy; is convinced there will be a devastating raid on his airfield; but the Authorities won’t believe him. And even his colleagues turn suspicious of him, since they all saw him having a chatty conversation in German with the downed pilot. They think he‘s the fishy one. Like the protagonist of a Hitchcock film, he is surrounded by suspicion and fear.

I sat there in a numbed state of fear at the thought of what it meant. For it meant, of course, that I was a marked man. (p.78)

In quick succession Hanson finds a folded-up map of the base hidden in his pass, then finds one of the camp workman has reported him to the authorities for asking lots of suspicious questions about the new rewiring of the airfield. The workman suggests the authorities search Hanson, which they do, not finding the map which Hanson burned immediately after finding it – but now he realises that Vayle has this man as an accomplice; there’s at least two of them.

And then he discovers there’s a woman, too: Elaine, a pretty, flirtatious WAAF. Hanson breaks into Vayle’s office and finds a photo of Vayle and Elaine together, with ‘Berlin 1934’ written on it. Are they a husband-and-wife spy team? Will the big attack the German pilot promised for Friday actually materialise? Hanson’s girlfriend, Marion, overhears Elaine talking in her sleep about Cold Harbour Farm: does that place have some significance in Nazi invasion plans?

The pace doesn’t let up, and the setting, in an airfield where everyone is tense with anticipation of the next air raid and overwrought through lack of sleep, adds to the increasingly feverish atmosphere, until Hanson realises he is going to have to go AWOL and nip out of the camp to go in person to this Cold Harbour Farm to find out if it really is the base for some kind of invasion plan. It’s lucky for him that the squadron’s pint-sized cockney, Mickey, picks the same time and place to do a runner, so that they end up forming an unlikely alliance to combat the fiendish Nazi conspiracy.

Historical accuracy

Innes served as a Royal Artillery anti-aircraft gunner at RAF Kenley during the Battle of Britain. We can assume that the description of the geography and layout of RAF ‘Thorby’, along with the officers and men, and the tense and draining life of constant worry, are accurate. And, as with most of Innes’ other novels, you experience the strange sensation of buying into a totally mundane, ordinary, workaday setting, and then slowly getting sucked into the mounting hysteria of an ever-more unlikely plot.

How to create tension

Part of the technique is to put the ordinary bloke protagonist through a succession of scary or tense situations; then to have him mull over at frequent intervals, the nature of fear, of feeling your guts turn to water or becoming aware of your heart beating fast on your chest etc. It helps that the hero only has one other person he can rely on, ideally a dishy, plucky, loyal woman – at least she believes me – in this case the WAAF Marion, who runs up to hug Hansom at the very satisfying happy end of this gripping entertainment.

Innes’ delaying tactics

This early novel also hints at a technique he will really on more and more as the years pass, the tendency for all Innes characters to never quite express their thoughts, never tell each other what’s happening, to bottle up, or not express, or not spit it out. So many Innes conversations feature pregnant pauses, shrugging of shoulders, hesitations or plain silence… Used in moderation, this is a way of increasing tension, but even in this early novel the plot only really exists because Hanson refuses to go to his CO and lay all the evidence before him – at which point things would be taken completely out of his hands and we’d have no solo heroics. Similarly, if protagonists of later novels just said ‘We scuttled the ship’ (The Wreck of The Mary Deare) or ‘We’re looking for diamonds’ (Target Antarctica) the narratives would stop dead in their tracks. Instead Innes concocts two hundred pages from his tactics of delay and non-communication.

Sensations not thoughts

It also reveals the rather low intellectual content of his books. The narrator has a few sentences feeling sorry for the poor buggers in the planes they’re trying to shoot down and which are blown up in the book’s spectacular conclusion, a few trite reflections on the beastliness of war – but these are shallow gestures, clichés, the kind of nostrums you’re expected to utter as ‘a Writer’.

In fact, the text shows no reflectiveness or thought. Its focus is on convincingly describing the boredom and irritations of Army living, interspersed with vivid descriptions of terrifying air attacks, before settling down to shock, thrill and excite the reader with its breathlessly melodramatic plot.

Credit

Attack Alarm by Hammond Innes was published by William Collins in 1941. All references are to the 1980 Fontana paperback edition.

Related links

• Attack Alarm on Amazon
• Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
• New York Times obituary
• Independent obituary
• Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website
• Review of Fighter: The True Story of The Battle of Britain by Len Deighton

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.

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.