Hammond Innes

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The Blue Ice

Air Bridge

Maddon's Rock

Dead and Alive

North Star

The White South

The Black Tide

Attack Alarm

Killer Mine

The Wreck of the Mary Deare

Campbell's Kingdom

Wreckers Must Breathe

The Lonely Skier

The Strode Venturer

Excellent...his expertise with volcanoes, avalanches, cave-ins and fire at sea is beyond question

Here is one of the sheerly enjoyable reading experiences of the year

Seamanship, storms, tension galore, money talk and a decent minimum of love - what more could one ask?

Yes! A rip-roarer...those action sequences at which he is so brilliant, the equatorial heat, the bubbling sea-bed, an outworn ship and a drunken skipper - splendid!

What could link the slick world of London boardrooms, an isolated island race in the Maldives and the mysterious voyages of a battered ship skippered by a brooding alcoholic? It falls to Geoffrey Bailey to unlock the mystery, but first he must overcome both family tragedy and the unpredictable treacheries of land, sea and big business.

A fast-moving, suspenseful tale that combines boardroom intrigues with seafaring adventures, from the author of The Wreck of the Mary Deare

Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, on 15 July 1913 and educated at Cranbrook School, Kent. He left school aged eighteen, and worked successively in publishing, teaching and journalism. In 1936, in need of money in order to marry, he wrote a supernatural thriller, The Doppleganger, which was published in 1937 as part of a two-year, four book deal. In 1939 Innes moved to a different publisher, and began to write compulsively, continuing to publish throughout his service in the Royal Artillery during the Second World War. 
Innes travelled widely to research his novels and always wrote from personal experience - his 1940s novels The Blue Ice and The White South were informed by time spent working on a whaling ship in the Antarctic, while The Lonely Skier came out of a post-war skiing course in the Dolomites. He was a keen and accomplished sailor, which passion inspired his 1956 bestseller The Wreck of the Mary Deare. The equally successful 1959 film adaptation of this novel enabled Innes to buy a large yacht, the Mary Deare, in which he sailed around the world for the next fifteen years, accompanied by his wife and fellow author Dorothy Lang. 
Innes wrote over thirty novels, as well as several works of non-fiction and travel journalism. His thrilling stories of spies, counterfeiters, black markets and shipwreck earned him both literary acclaim and an international following, and in 1978 he was awarded a CBE. Hammond Innes died at his home in Suffolk on 10th June 1998.

The Strode Venturer

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Hammond Innes

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