Forgotten authors
WILLIAM COOK wonders whether it’s time for a renewed interest in the ‘bit-too-nice’ travel and thriller writer Hammond Innes
Whatever happened to Hammond Innes? When I was a schoolboy his name loomed large in all good bookshops (and quite a lot of bad ones) but now, half a lifetime later, his byline has virtually disappeared. His thrillers are still in print, but he’s vanished from the high street and the books pages of the posher papers, even though he’s just as good as loads of thriller writers who are still in vogue. So why has he fallen out of favour?
Innes was as much a travel writer as a thriller writer. Although his novels are about men of action, the locations take centre stage. From the late 1940s to the early 70s, he averaged a book a year. His routine rarely changed. He’d spend six months in some remote and perilous location (the Empty Quarter of Arabia, the frozen wastes of Labrador, the Australian Outback, a Norwegian whaling station…), then six months back in his beloved Suffolk, turning this odyssey into fiction. He was fascinated by extreme environments, where men are tested to their limits: deserts, mountains, glaciers... Ostensibly, his rugged characters are battling against each other. Actually, their main battle is against the elements: snowstorms, sandstorms, hurricanes…
His stories also followed a tried and tested pattern. A likeable, classless everyman, usually in early middle age, frequently divorced or bereaved, stumbles into a wild and unfamiliar world where he uncovers a plot to commit some kind of fraud. Along the way he meets a demure but damaged woman (always attractive but never beautiful) with whom he falls in love. Before he can bring the baddies to justice, a tornado or a blizzard or a volcanic eruption intervenes. With the help of an erratic maverick (often an old soak) he survives this ordeal, collars the crooks and wins the girl.
Innes was born in 1913 in Sussex, of Scottish stock. His father was a banker. He was an only child. He was educated at Cranbrook School, where he enjoyed Geography as much as English. He didn’t go to university. Instead he became a financial journalist, which gave him some useful background for his plots, and honed his erudite and effective prose. He published a few potboilers in the Thirties, then served as an antiaircraft gunner in the Battle of Britain, which inspired his lively wartime novel, Attack Alarm.
After the war he moved to Suffolk with his wife, the actress and writer Dorothy Lang. From then on he wrote full time. Dorothy was his muse and soulmate. They travelled together by land and sea. They remained inseparable until she died in 1989. They had no children, and in his later years Innes became increasingly committed to ecology, planting millions of trees as far afield as Canada and Australia. He died in 1998.
The thing that distinguishes his writing is his meticulous research, and his dramatic descriptions of the natural world – especially bad weather and harsh terrain. A keen, accomplished sailor, his best books are about the sea. His seafaring titles ( The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Maddon’s Rock, Atlantic Fury…) bear comparison with CS Forester and Erskine Childers. Sir Francis Chichester praised his seamanship. He’s been likened to Nevile Shute and even Conrad. Daphne du Maurier was a fan.
So why isn’t he revered, like those other masters of the form? Partly because, despite rave reviews from high class critics like VS Pritchett and Cyril Connolly, he was marketed as a middlebrow writer, a purveyor of mass entertainment rather than proper literature. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and it certainly did his sales no harm, but it meant he was forgotten while more ‘serious’ (ie, less entertaining) writers were remembered.
Another reason is, since we’re all so well-travelled nowadays, the adventures he describes have lost some of their old allure. When I first devoured these books in the late 1970s, in my mid-teens, I’d never even been abroad, and nor had many of my peers. For my generation these intrepid journeys were the stuff of fantasy. For my children’s generation they’re no big deal. ‘Very little is known or has been written about the Maldives due to the difficulties of getting there,’ he writes, in the preface to The Strode Venturer, published in 1965. If only a novelist or travel writer could say the same today.
But the biggest problem was, he was simply a bit too nice for modern times. His heroes are impeccably well-behaved and his heroines usually keep their clothes on (on the rare occasions when they don’t, he always leaves us at the bedroom door). Even his villains are relatively respectable. This was fine in the 1950s and 60s, but in the 1970s and 80s his wholesome tales began to feel old-fashioned. Yet what goes around comes around, and now these timeless yarns seem far less dated than the violent thrillers that replaced them. Now that every conceivable depravity is commonplace, there’s renewed pleasure in reading well-made stories by a writer whose bravery and decency shines on every page.
‘Hammond Innes was marketed as a middlebrow writer, a purveyor of mass entertainment rather than proper literature’