Hammond Innes

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The Blue Ice

Air Bridge

Maddon's Rock

The Strode Venturer

Dead and Alive

North Star

The White South

The Black Tide

Killer Mine

The Wreck of the Mary Deare

Campbell's Kingdom

Wreckers Must Breathe

The Lonely Skier

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Mr Innes is a marvellous storyteller, probably the best we have got

Hammond Innes must be one of the best tellers of the straightforward adventure in a harsh, well-researched setting

Thank goodness for Hammond Innes. He gets better with every book

The British have always been good at producing adventure story writers. Hammond Innes was exceptional even within an exceptional breed..he was...a romantic adventurer in the style of Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling

Summer, 1940. The skies above Britain are criss-crossed with the white scars of dog-fights as fighter pilots clash with the merciless German Luftwaffe. But one air defence gunner suspects the greatest threat to his country's safety might not come from the air, but from a secret plot now unfolding around him on the ground. Can he convince anyone to listen to his fears? Will they hear him in time?

A thriller set against the unforgettable summer of 1940, the finest hour of the British Air Forces

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.

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