I was alone now, intensely, intolerably alone, with only anger and hatred for company. (p.76)
This novel opens with an interesting ‘prelude’ which describes a vast modern oil tanker (a VLCC – very large crude carrier) the Petros Jupiter, losing power in its engines and drifting onto the rocks near Land’s End. What’s interesting is it is done in prose completely unlike Innes’, in a style which is clinical and factual, much closer to the journalistic style of a Frederick Forsyth.
The plot
But turn the page to the next chapter and Innes’ usual ‘adventure’ style begins. Trevor Rodin is a former merchant seaman who has quit the sea to settle down with the woman he’s known and loved for three years, Karen, at a cottage – named Balkaer – on the Cornish coast. The oil slick from the Petros Jupiter washes up right at the foot of their cottage, covering the rocks in thick black ooze, killing countless birds. Keen nature-lover and conservationist Karen collects some, trying to wash and save them, but it’s hopeless. In her rage and frustration, she turns on Trevor and they have a stand-up row, her shouting, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ Trevor says he’s off to a town hall meeting attended by the local MP and the man from the Ministry who, in the event, spout the usual platitudes about doing everything they can to contain and control the spill.
Karen’s self-immolation
Meanwhile, Karen, angry and upset at the ruining of the country hideaway they’ve worked so hard to build, visita neighbours to borrow a flame-based weedkiller machine, then takes Trevor’s powered dinghy out toward the tanker. When Trevor returns from the meeting the neighbour tells him this so he gets the local lifeguard to saddle up and take him out towards the ship. As they approach, through the Cornish mist, they see a light moving about the infrastructure of the tanker, and towards the (fume and oxygen-filled) tanks. They are just saying how suicidally dangerous that is when BOOM! the tanker explodes in a vast sheet of flame.
Quest for revenge
In the aftermath there’s an enquiry, the press and media descend wanting interviews, sight-seers come intruding on his land, and Trevor moves through it all in a daze, devastated by the loss of his beloved and all their plans for a quiet life. Among the other confused incidents of this period, a dubious character, Len Baldwick, comes knocking asking if he’ll need a berth on a ship again, leaving his contact details. Out of the emotional mayhem emerges a plan to track down the crew of the Petros Jupiter and discover whether it was wilfully and maliciously driven onto the rocks, to find who’s responsible for Karen’s death.
Lloyds of London
His quest takes him to Lloyds – described in some detail, presumably after thorough research and visits by Innes – where he learns several of the Petros Jupiter crew had dubious pasts, and might be connected with two other tankers which have recently disappeared, the Aurora B and Howdo Stranger. Rodin is struck to see photos of Len Baldwick mixed in with others of the ships’ crews. He conceives a plan to contact Baldwick and see what his offer of a berth involves and if it leads to the men he’s after. Via Lloyds Rodin is introduced to the firm of lawyers following up the missing ships and to one partner, Saltley, who will become a central character in the story.
We knew from various references that Rodin was not only a sailor, but grew up in the Gulf, raised by his hard-working mother, a nurse and single mum. So the solicitors, realising they have a man who is himself a sailor familiar with the Gulf, and who has a personal interest in the ship disappearances, hire him to investigate. Saltley introduces him to one of the underwriters of the syndicate which has taken heavy losses on the vanished ships, Michael Stewart. Rodin goes for dinner with him and meets his pretty daughter, Pamela, who – in a surprising sub-plot – later writes him a letter telling him how much she admires and, er, fancies him.
Nantes and Parnay
Armed with names and information Trevor sets off to track the suspect crew down. His quest takes him first to Nantes, where he rendezvous with Lloyd’s agent and then drives to the address of the crew member named Choffel. He is, disappointingly, not there but Rodin confronts Choffel’s daughter (oddly named Guinevere), who insists her father is a good man, doing his best for his family. She takes photos of Rodin and threatens him with reprisals if any harm comes to her father. But Rodin hardens his heart and flies on to the Gulf.
Dubai
Here he rendezvous with Len Baldwick and the rest of the crew, all vivid depictions of crooks and scoundrels, before they are shipped on a dhow out to a tanker anchored in a hidden bay, one of the khawrs of the Musandam Peninsula. Once aboard ship they are shepherded into their quarters and, even though nominally the boat’s officers, are forbidden from leaving their quarters by the captain backed up by surly Arabs with machine guns.
But Rodin is more disconcerted to be shoved into the presence of ‘Choffel’ who turns out to be a nervous slender man, not at all the pantomime villain he’d imagined. Morever, Choffel turns out to be Welsh and going by his actual name, David Price. In several encounters, he tells Rodin some his story, about his own wretched upbringing in Welsh poverty, his father the miner dying of silicosis, then his mother getting ill when he was only a 21 year old sailor on his first ship. He has also, Rodin realises, received a letter from his daughter warning him that Rodin is after him. Price is scared of him, trying to exonerate himself, leaving Rodin baffled about what to do next.
In among these scenes Rodin meets the captain, Pieter Hals. This bluff Dutchman reveals that the ship is the Aurora B, a 120,000 ton tanker, one of the tankers that went ‘missing’ in the past few months (causing Lloyds the concern we investigated so thoroughly earlier in the novel) and that he – Hals – is a fanatical environmentalist.
Hals gives a long speech about his lifelong hatred of the oil tankers which void, spill, wash and decant oil into the sea all around the world, destroying habitats at will. Well, now they’re going to do something which will make the governments of the world sit up and seriously address the issue! Hence getting shifty Len Baldwick to do the hiring; hence the men with guns; and hence the appearance of a very hard Arab named Sadeq who looks to be the leader.
Rodin jumps ship
Shaken by the captain’s fanaticism, Rodin is taken under guard back to his cabin where, peering out of his porthole later that night, he sees the crew, who look like Pakistanis and who have presumably been held captive in the hold, brought up on deck by armed guards for some fresh air. But when one of them makes a bid for the side of the ship, he is machine-gunned down. Stunned, Rodin is unable to sleep and, a few hours later, sneaks out of his cabin, down on to the deck, and goes exploring.
This is a very powerful account of him clambering over all the obstacles on an unlit oil tanker at the dead of night. By accident he comes across no other than Choffal/Price, the man he is after, climbing down the gangplank towards the dhow and begins to follow him: what the devil is he up to? Suddenly lights go on, there are shots, he sees the Arabs abandoning the dhow for their escape dinghy just as Price makes a jump for the dhow and Rodin, on the spur of the moment, follows him.
There is a brief view of Sadeq the terrorist firing down at them with a machine gun and then – the engine started up – the dhow reels away from the tanker, and then they are out of range, the shots cease, and Rodin is taken up with the task of navigating clear of the tanker but also avoiding the cliffs at the side of the creek.
On the dhow – backgrounds
As day dawns Rodin finds himself alone, hungry, dirty, in charge of an Arab dhow in the Persian Gulf, and the man he came all this way to confront, now lying bleeding and badly wounded in the scuppers – Sadeq’s burst of machine gun fire hit Price. Now, ironically, Rodin finds himself having to minister to his ‘enemy’, bringing water and listening to him sob out his hard-luck story: his Welsh childhood, the father whose trade of miner led to his early death from silicosis, his impoverished mother struggling to make ends meet and then falling ill; and Price, on his first voyage, presented with the opportunity of big money if he will help scuttle the ship…
All this chimes uncomfortably with Rodin’s own background. Throughout the text he has had flashbacks of his own unusual upbringing, the son of a sailor who married a Pakistani woman and was raised around the ports of Pakistan and who, when his mother, a trained nurse, died from overwork, went on an epic hike up along the coast of Pakistan and then northwards up to the Khyber Pass and into the Hindu Kush. He certainly has been about a bit…
In fact Innes goes to great trouble to present all his characters with full and persuasive back stories. We learn of Michael Stewart, the lead underwriter for the Petros Jupiter cover, that he inherited the role from his father, that the loss of Petros and Aurora B and the third ship, Howdo Stranger, is likely to bankrupt him. Hence his daughter’s perhaps excessive gratitude to Rodin. Of the baddy fixer, the man who goes round recruiting crooked crew for the wreckers, Len Baldwick, we learn that he was a communist shop steward and organiser in Sheffield. Most of the characters have these back stories, just as most of the organisational setups are thoroughly documented.
There is a powerful description of Rodin desperately trying to stay awake as he steers the dhow without compass or chart out of the Gulf, periodically checking on the mortally wounded Choffal, sometimes forced to listen to his meandering, self-pitying stories, until the inevitable happens – Rodin falls asleep at the rudder and the boat crashes into rocks near the coast. There is a nightmareish description of the boat breaking up, water rushing in, the helpless Choffal disappearing beneath the waves, his mouth open in a scream and then – oblivion…
Karachi
Rodin awakes on the shore of Baluchistan, discovered by two children who fetch an elder, who fetches the local policemen, who take him to the nearest station, who take him to their offices at the Gwadar Peninsula. The army officers here evidently don’t believe his story; of a shipwrecked dhow, yes, but the other man – there is no body – and the hidden tankers – well, they institute a search and nothing is found. Rodin had been on the dhow for two days, he realises, long enough for the Aurora B to have steamed out into the Indian Ocean.
The army fly him down to Karachi where the officials – even the man from Lloyds – are just as sceptical. Armed terrorists seizing a 120,000 ton tanker on the high seas? And hiding it? The Lloyds man points out that Rodin better hope Choffal/Price’s body doesn’t wash up because, by his own admission, Rodin had the motive and the opportunity to murder him. He is booked into a good hotel, gets sleep and a shower and new clothes and awakes to find he is being deported back to England. The officials accompany him onto the flight, right into his actual seat. 11 hours later he is at Heathrow.
Back in England
Where no-one believes him. The Lloyds people, Michael Stewart and his daughter, the Forthright lawyers and Saltley, nor the hard-faced man from Special Branch who comes to interview him. In fact the police tell him there’s every risk he’ll be tried for murder if Choffal’s corpse turns up. After holing up at his digs in Stepney, he realises he’s sick of London and catches an early morning train back to Penzance and travels back to the cottage where it all started. He sleeps on the sofa. He stares out to sea, at the mast which is all left showing above water of the Petros Jupiter. He remembers his wife’s flashing eyes and loud laugh and soft touch.
A few days in he receives a message from Saltley, who now believes him. He wants Rodin to take the ferry to France, catch a flight to Tangiers and then the ferry across to Gibraltar. Here he will be met and brought to the yacht – the Prospero – belonging to Michael Stewart’s son, Mark. And so, puzzled, Rodin obeys. He finds that Stewart and Saltley believe him; believe the two tankers are still out there. But where would they be headed and why? Rodin remembers that in one of Choffal’s delirious rants he had kept mentioning ‘the savages’. Saltley points out this could refer to the Selvagem Islands north of Tenerife, off the African coast. Aha.
There now follows a whole section devoted to life on board the Prospero, with the older lawyer Saltley, another sailor, Tony, young Mark and his sister Pamela, who Rodin finds himself rather yearningly alone with on several occasions. The descriptions of sailing in this small-ish yacht the large distance to the islands, the changing weather in the Atlantic and their eventual sighting of the missing ships close to the islands, are all masterly, evocative sea writing.
Thus they confirm the two tankers are indeed the missing ones, though now repainted and renamed and hung with the Iraqi flag. In fact they make themselves a bit too conspicuous, sailing close by to get photographs and – in a thrilling scene – find themselves being chased and nearly run down by the vast tankers.
Having survived these near misses, they sail fast for Madeira, where Saltley and Rodin ring Lloyds, then take flights to Lisbon. They say goodbye to the other three (Tony, Mark, Pamela) who are going to sail back to Blighty. At the last minute there is an excruciating scene between Pamela and Rodin, Shamefacedly she says she was inspired by his bravery and meant it when she wrote him her letter but now, well, she sort of… Rodin tactfully interrupts her, thanks her, says No need to go on. He has had lots of experience being dumped by a woman. She leaves him heart-broken, empty all over again.
The Black Tide
Back in England he finds himself back in hot water. This last section of the novel is packed with various officials whose hands Rodin passes through, from the police who meet him at Heathrow, through the hard-faced Special Branch man (again) and officials from various ministries. He is placed under surveillance in a hotel in Charing Cross, before being urgently summoned to Langdon Battery at Dover, base of HM Coastguards Channel Navigation Information Service. Here, as at the Lloyds centre at Colchester, the writing feels like an eye witness account of a visit Innes must have made, with precise descriptions of corridors and offices and viewing platforms, of map rooms and computer rooms, all of which read as if taken from a magazine article.
Here they are joined by the Secretary of State, to monitor the progress of the two rogue tankers which are now advancing up the English Channel. This whole scene has documentary accuracy, with emphasis on the different maritime law regimes affecting the French and the English halves of the channel, we being the more liberal, and so the rogue tankers steaming up the Channel the wrong way, to remain on our side.
The coastguard chopper Rodin out to the bridge of a frigate which is shadowing the tankers so he can go out on the bridge wing with a loud hailer to try and talk to captain Hals. Once there Rodin sees Hals although, as soon as he starts to parley, he sees the Dutchman being pulled away by dark men with guns. And then just when everyone is wondering where they’re headed and what their plan is, Aurora B turns and rams full steam into Howdo Stranger, ripping it open along its full length, and tens of thousands of tons of crude oil pour out into the English Channel.
So, er, the convoluted attempts of everyone over the previous 200 pages have been completely pointless. Tons of crude oil will blow onto the Kent coastline, devastating its wildlife, the same old same old that Rodin’s wife died trying to campaign against, is happening again.
Epilogue
Rodin returns, an exhausted, lonely, disillusioned man, to the empty cottage in Cornwall. As he opens the door he sees a woman sitting by the fire and for a second he thinks it’s Karen come back from the dead – and this reader thought it might by sexy young Pamela regretting her decision to dump him on the Prospero. But it is neither: it is Guinevere, Choffel/Price’s daughter, come to apologise and seek closure. The crew, freed from the tankers, confirmed Rodin’s report ie that Choffal was shot by Sadeq. Therefore she withdraws all threats against Rodin and apologises; now, will he please tell her about her father’s last days and hours aboard the dhow before it crashed.
And so the novel ends with sad lonely Rodin telling the sorry story of her father’s wretched, delirious, pain-filled, bleeding final hours to the distraught daughter. It is a bleak, comfortless end. What happens to Hals or Sadeq, to the other crew members we’d been (briefly) introduced to? Are they captured, does the SAS storm the ships (as they would in a Frederick Forsyth novel)? We don’t know. Rodin doesn’t care. The story is ended.
Knowledge and expertise
At numerous places the text evidences the research and in-depth knowledge Innes brings to his novels. The first hundred pages are dominated by a very thorough explanation of how Lloyds Insurance of London actually works, with visits to its various offices in London and Colchester (Lloyd’s Intelligence Services), lunch and dinner with underwriters who explain its procedures in detail, and then meeting the lawyers who investigate dodgy claims, descriptions of offices, desks, ledgers, microfiche and visual display unit equipment, all very modern in 1982.
Similarly, once we are in the Gulf, we are in the hands of a master sailor and the text is a supremely confident description of all aspects of sailing and shipping, from a powerful sense of being trapped aboard the Aurora B to a full description of sailing the rickety old dhow, along with precise information about the shipping lanes, the tides, the wind, the lighthouses and navigational aids.
The best bit of the novel is the voyage of the yacht Prospero, the tang of the sea, the changing weather of the Atlantic, the reefing of sails and taking turns clutching a mug of coffee in the dark watches of the night with only the stars for company.
And then the final sequence in HM Coastguard Dover Castle has the feel of a guided tour, complete with a map of the layout of the modern (Innes refers to Star Wars!) building full of computerised maps and charts and information and chaps in white shorts saluting each other. What fun it must have been researching these novels.
Place and atmosphere
The Cornish coast. London at Christmas. Suffolk (location of some Lloyds offices) in the snow. Rural France in winter. And then the bustling cities and the searingly hot open sea of the Persian Gulf. Gibraltar. Madeira. Lisbon. The Atlantic Ocean at dawn. Innes describes them all powerfully and persuasively. One of the great pleasures and strengths of his novels is his sense of place, his ability to create an atmosphere. Nowhere is this truer than of the scores of descriptions of the sea which lace the text. The Cornish sea with its fogs, the metallic flat Persian Gulf, a gale force storm in the Atlantic. The sounds and smells of boats and the sea, this is Innes’ inextinguishable forte.
We were making towards Selvagem Grande then and by the time breakfast was over and everything washed up and stowed, the sun was beginning to burn up the mist and just visible as a golden disc hung in a golden glow. Water dripped in rainbow drops from the gold-painted metal of the main boom and the only sound on deck was the tinkling gurgle of water slipping past the hull. (p.293)
Environmentalism
In one of Innes’ mysterious, almost magical, transformations, Rodin, stricken at his wife’s death, feels himself assuming her mantle, adopting her own passionate concern for the wildlife mankind is endlessly butchering and exterminating. It allows Innes, at a number of places throughout the book, to let rip at humanity’s gruesome behaviour, and at the anger at the destruction of the natural world which fuels the novel.
Greed! Stupid, senseless greed!.. It was a curse affecting us all, the whole human race, harvesting the sea till there was nothing left but oceans and oceans of dead water, drilling for energy, tanking it round the world, feeding factories that poured toxic waste into the rivers, supplying farms with pesticides that poisoned the land, pumping heat and fumes into the life-giving atmosphere until it was a lethal hothouse. (p.117)
Has anything changed in the 33 years since this novel was published?
Related links
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.
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