Hammond Innes

dead-and-alive

About us

About Us (Header 4)

Kate-Atkinson

James-Baldwin

Marian-Keyes

haruki-murakami-320×320-1

Richard-Osman

Malorie Blackman

Lisa-Jewell

Charlie-Mackesy

Authors (Header 3)

Children&#039;s

Company

Discover

Fiction

Non-fiction

Penguin Classics

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

Work with us

The Blue Ice

Air Bridge

Maddon's Rock

The Strode Venturer

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

Dead and Alive

Penguin Shop: 3 Clothbound Classics for £33

Readers who quicken to the expert tempo of John Buchan's adventure stories will congratulate themselves on finding in Innes such an admirable inheritor of the high tradition

As crisply exciting as Eric Ambler and as convincingly realistic as C.S. Forester

They say people can’t write stories anymore. Tell that to Hammond Innes

Mr. Innes's readers were addicts when it came to his books, which were cinematic in sweep and sold 40 million copies

When David Cunningham returns to the Cornish coast to mourn a wartime love affair, he little imagines the mysterious quest that awaits him: it will lead him to the Mediterranean, to danger and a life of adventure, to the dark world of racketeering in Naples, the bleak hills beyond Tivoli, and a woman with a tragic past.

From a quiet beach in Cornwall to Italy's vice-laden underworld, this is the compelling tale of one man's search for a new beginning

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.

Dead and Alive

Format:

Buy the book from:

About Hammond Innes

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter