Hammond Innes & The High Art Of Adventure Writing
First things first: Fetishes. I have a few.
Steady … It’s not what you think. (Well, it may be, but that’s for my novels, not this blog!)
My two fetishes are Fontana Paperbacks from the ’70s. And second-hand bookshops. The two are weirdly connected (as fetishes always are, I suppose). See, growing up in Yeoville, South Africa, I spent way too much time in a little bookshop called Edna’s Book Swap. And those Fontana trade paperbacks, man, they were just awesome and pretty much everywhere back then. Add Times Monotype font, hand-drawn, action-packed images, and the smell of print, and my fetish was just … well, yeah, you know …
Living in Switzerland, though, means opportunities to kerb-crawl those filthy aisles of second-hand English bookstores are at a premium, sadly. So wherever I am in the world, I’ll always find time to do an “English Bookstore near me” query on the Google and go off to discover a new bookshop (and, more often than not, new neighbourhoods in strange, new cities).
This year I found myself in the UK over Christmas and naturally I made an absolutely pig of my fetish.
In a small village called Wantage, where King Alfred the Great, King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886, was born (in 848, if you’re interested!), I discovered a treasure of a bookshop. Sporting the rather odd name “Regent Furniture and Books”, I hadn’t expected much when I rolled into town on a cold day in late December.
What I found was fetish nirvana and two hours later I was slowly rolling back out of town with all my seedy fetish stuffed into random plastic bags. Naturally, much of that stash was Fontana Paperbacks.
Two weeks later, and I continue to be engrossed and awed in the world of Hammond Innes.
He is, by some measure, the best of all post-war adventure writers.
Innes basically created the template that writers like MacLean and Desmond Bagley would follow almost to the line a decade or two later. The template? Take a guy broken from the war—all Innes’s characters are sullen, cold, hard-drinking men who will, sometimes, remember the war and the brutality of it all—add in an exotic location (like the Maldives before there was even an airport anywhere near the atoll), harrowing natural phenomena, mix with the most beautiful, descriptive prose ever written in adventure yarns, and bundle it into the most exquisite hand drawn Fontana Paperbacks you’ve ever seen.
Did I mention the prose? So good. Whispering menace and I don’t think there’re many writers who have ever mastered the creation of setting and place like Hammond Innes, be they adventure writers or literary writers. Really, he’s that good. Whisker-licking good!
The White South is just one of his masterpieces. From a hero who you’ll want to strangle for his vacuous and constant uncertainty and bad decisions to a “bad guy” who is just … well, really bad in a way that is just so convincing … to survival on an Antarctic ice-float, to page after page of the most beautiful, elegant prose, this book is just simply majestic.
Innes is one of those writers who just never let you down, despite alengthy career, having published his first novel before the war (because he needed money to get married!) and his final one just before his death in 1998.
If you’re in the mood for high adventure, broken, hard men, exotic locales, beautiful prose, and plots that just sweep you along into the most believable of worlds, Hammond Innes is your go-to man.
