Best 1948 Adventures (1)

By: Joshua Glenn
July 5, 2018

One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1948 adventure novels. Happy 70th anniversary!

Hammond Innes’s sea-going/jailbreak adventure Maddon’s Rock (in the US: Gale Warning).

During the final days of WWII, a shipment of silver is secretively shipped to England, on a rust-bucket freighter, from Murmansk; three British soldiers (including Corporal Jim Vardy, and the working-class Bert Cook) are assigned to guard the treasure… but they’re patsies in a hijacking scheme. There’s a pretty girl, a violent storm, and the ship apparently sinks. Jim and Bert are thrown in prison, found guilt of mutiny! Inspired, as the author admits in the book’s dedication, by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Innes’s yarn involves foul-weather sailing, skulduggery at sea, a daring escape from a maximum-security prison (and a flight across England to Scotland), and a final battle — with an unhinged enemy — on an isolated, rocky island surrounded by mountainous waves somewhere in the Barents Sea. It’s a fast-paced thriller, leavened by romance and a bit of humor.

Fun facts: Mac, the Scottish engineer who accompanies our heroes to Maddon’s Rock, is a classic of his type: “But dinna blame me if the whole engine-room falls oot through the bottom of her. She’s no’ jist oot of the yards, ye ken. Ye canna afford to take liberties wi’ a ship in this condition.”

***

Best 1948 Adventures (1)

Categories

Tags