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(Ralph) Hammond Innes (1913-1998) - wrote also as Ralp Hammond |
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Highly succesful British novelist, a born story-teller, who published 35 books. Hammond Innes continued the great tradition of well-crafted adventure stories, exemplified in the books John Buchan and Henry Rider Haggard, but added to his work a strong personal narrative voice, a feeling of real experience, and his love of untamed nature, especially the sea. Innes's hobbies, travel and ocean racing, also reflected in his plots. "I have always had a tendency to claustrophobia – a dread of being alone in small, enclosed spaces and a morbid curiosity in any cave or shaft that took me into the bowels of the earth. The result was that I was happiest sweating my guts out in that damned quarry which had provided the stone to build the prison or laboring on the prison farm. I didn't mind the cleaning, the discipline, the work – so long as I was in the company of other human beings. Even now I cannot read the accounts of men who suffered solitary confinement in German concentration camps without feeling panic seizing at me. I think if that had happened to me I should have gone mad. But as long as I had plenty of hard work during the day and a book to read at night, I managed to stave off the feeling of loneliness that I dreaded more than anything else." (Maddon's Rock by Hammond Innes, London: Macmillan, 1995, p. 152; first published in London by Collins, 1948; U.S. title: Gale Warning, New York: Harper, 1948) Ralph
Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, of Scottish
descent. He was the only child of William Hammond Innes and Dora
Beatrice Chisford. His father, a somewhat remote figure in his
childhood, worked
in the Westminster Bank. "There was some sort of an artistic streak on
my mothers side, but not sufficent to explain why I should start
writing stories at the age of twelve." ('"Innes, Hammond" (pen name of Ralp Hammond Innes),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 705) At school Innes's favorite subject was English literature. He was educated at
Cranbrook School, Kent, and graduated in 1931. Instead of following
his father into the banking world, Innes chose the insecure life of a journalist,
when newspapers were trying to survive the great depression. From 1934 to 1940, he
worked as a staff member of the Financial News (later Financial Times). Innes learned to economy of words, to observe and explain in plain language complicated
business and economic issues – skills which he put to use when he
started to write fiction. During these years Innes wrote four books. In 1937 Innes married Dorothy Mary Lange, an actress and a kinswoman of Sir Walter Scott and Andew Lang. They had no children. She died in 1989. They had several shared passions, which included a traditional English garden they created at Ayers End, Kersley, Suffolk. Regular guests at their medieval timbered house were Christina Foyle, bookseller and owner of Foyle's bookshop, and Baron Rolf Beck, chairman of the Slip group of companies. Dorothy did research for his books, joined him on his journeys, and described their trips in her book Occasions (1972). She also wrote several plays. When the war broke out Innes volunteered for the Navy. He served in the Royal
Artillery (1940-46), first as a gunner, witnessing the Battle of Britain from a
gun site at Kenley, and rising to the rank of major in the 8th Army. During this
period his books were serialized in the United States in the Saturday Evening
Post. After the war he abandoned journalism, becoming a fulltime writer.
The Doppelganger (1937), Innes's first novel, was followed by
three other works. Tied down to a bad four-book contract, he wrote these thrillers in the
mornings before going to his work
and in the late evenings at home. All these early books Innes later rejected,
not because of the leftist views he infiltrated between the lines, but because
he considered them more or less clumsy. Moreover, he was paid poorly for the work. Wreckers Must Breathe and The Trojan Horse, published by Collins, came out in 1940. Innes began writing The Trojan Horse just after the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939. A month after completing the book he joined the army, and was sent overseas. Attack Alarm (1941), Innes's war novel, was the only story of the Battle of Britain put down on paper on a gunside under fire. Innes then ended editing army magazines in four countries. He did not return to England for three years. Before World War II, he had finished Dead and Alive (1946), which dealt with black market in Rome and Napoli. This book and the subsequent works he wrote made Innes one of the most popular thriller writers. Until 1953 he also published children's books under the pseudonym Ralph Hammond. Maddon's Rock (1948) focused on Innes's favorite element, the sea. Sunday Pictorial said about the book: "Hammond Innes confirms his reputation as the best contemporary writer of the adventure thriller." The story is again narrated in the fist person, which was a kind of trade mark in his novels. There is a mystery around a ghost ship,
the SS Trikkala. She is listed as sunk in March 1945, but over a year later
the Trikkala radios an S.O.S. as she batters her way towards the Hebrides
through gale-swept waters. What has happened during those missing months? Innes
is at his best when describing the forces of nature: "I turned my head. We
were inside the entrance now, right in the path of the spilling surf. And beyond
the granite base of that pinnacle a wave was piling up. Mountains high it seemed
to rise. Water streamed from its broken creat like white hair in the wind. It was
yellow with foam. The top curled. Then it toppled forward." (Ibid., p. 252) Smuggling was was another of Innes's favorite subjects. In The Strange Land (1954),
set Morocco where Innes himself had also traveled, the hero is a former smuggler who has
turned missionary. The Angry Mountain (1950)
was a story of an attempt to fly out a Czech pilot who had fought in
the Battle of Britain. Its depiction of a volcano in eruption was based
on Innes's own experiences on Vesuvius. ""Any moment that damned
mountain's gonna blow its top," Hackett muttered. His voice trembled
slightly. But it wasn't fear. It was because he was excited. He had
come all the way from America to see this volcano and I think he was as
near being happy as he'd ever been." (Angry Mountain, original illustrations by Hugh Marshall, published by arrangement with William Collins Sons and Co., 1972, p. 178) Innes himself had looked down into the crater of Vesuvius shortly before the eruption in 1944. "The devil of it was the man's enthusiasm was infectious. I can see him now, talking softly in the hubbub of the bar, his eyes glittering with excitement, smoking cigarette after cigarette, his voice vibrant as he reached out into my mind to give me the sense of adventure that he felt himself. The essence of his personality was that he could make others believe what he believed. In any project, he gave himself to it so completely that it was impossible not to follow him. He was a born leader. From being an unwilling participant, I became a willing one." (Air Bridge by Hammond Innes, London: Fontana Books, 1972, p. 111; first published in London by Collins, 1951) Air Bridge (1951) set the pattern for Innes's future work. The book was written immediately after Innes had flown the Berlin airlift in a York transport loaded with coal. Much of his time in Berlin Innes spent in R.A.F. Gatow Airport, listening to the stories of the pilots and the airport staff members. After witnessing the endlessly rolling planes into the Tempelhof, day and night, Innes decided that he would never start on a book until he had personally researched the background. The story begins in England, where Bill Saeton is building a new aeroplane engine and planning to make fortune. He blackmails Neil Fraser, an ex-RAF-pilot to help him. In the 1960s Innes began to spend more time with the background work of his novels and slowed down his publishing speed. He had spent usually six months traveling, taking notes and photograps, examining new settings for his novels, and six months writing. The daily routine began with an early breakfast. He had a walk around the garden, and then went to his study 8 a.m. After a light luncheon and an hour's siesta, he returned to the study to deal with the day's telephone calls, fan mail and diary planning. Innes's working day ended at 6 p.m. The new book was finished by the end of the summer. Usually it would be published in time for the Christman market. "A writer has no business, no land, no factory that he can call his own. His capital assets are all in his head, and one of the very few things that can't be taxed, expropriated, or in any way filched by others, is personal experience." (Hammond Innes in Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson, with a pref. by Walter Allen, London; New York: St. James Press: St. Martin's Press, 1972) After
he stopped sailing, Innes began to purchase land from Suffolk, Wales,
and Australia, in order to protect the nature and plant trees. A member
of the Timber Growers' Association, he once estimated that he had
planted about onee and a half million trees. In the 1950s, sickened by
the death agonies of whales blown up by grenade harpoons, he championed
the idea electrical killing of whales. In the 1980s, he pondered the
ecological questions in some of his books. High Stand (1985) was set in the wilderness of Klondike, The Black Tide (1982) told about pollution. An earlier work, The Doomed Oasis (1960), set in the contemporary Arabia and the deserts of the Empty Quarter, was about saving an oasis from extinction. Innes had been in the late 1950s ashore in the Oman with the first oil expedition on the Arabian coast of the Indian Ocean. North Star (1975), a story of infiltration and sabotage in the North Sea, also focused on oil. It was started while Innes was on board the Shell rig Staflo in the autumn of 1972, but finished two years later. "As a reader who has followed Hammond Innes with heart and mind for many years, my personal opinion is that his stature as a novelist has not yet been fully recognized," said Dorothy B. Hughes. "There is a greatness in his work which should lead to the books becoming classics, to be rediscovered by future generations." ('Innes, (Ralph) Hammond' by Dorothy B. Hughes, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly, London: St James Press, 1985, p. 496) Innes's other books, translated into over thirty languages, include The Lonely Skier (1947), Blue Ice (1948), Campbell's Kingdom (1952), The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956), Innes's best book, a story about a ghost ship and an
insurance fraud, Atlantic Fury (1962), and Levkas Man (1971). Atlantic Fury took place during World War II. Iain Ross has been disgraced, and then drowned at sea or so his family believed. A mission takes his brother Donald to the Hebrides to meet a Major Braddock, who is running the evacuation of the army base on the island of Laerg. Donald finds his brother living a new life in a dead mans name. Winter is closing in, and Braddock has his own reasons for wanting the army and Donald Ross off Laerg as quickly as possible, even in the face of a furious storm building out in the Atlantic. Australia, at the time when the great mineral boom of 1969-70 began to collapse, provided background for Golden Soak (1973). Innes travelled the backtrack through the Ophthalmia Range from Mt Newman to Mt Robinson. The central theme in Innes's work is man against the forces of nature. In several stories the main character is searching the past in a remote location. Innes traveled into many parts of the world to ensure the authenticity in his works. However, the film version of Campbell's Kingdom, which was set in the Canadian Rockies, was shot near the tourist resort Cortina d'Ampezzo. Before writing The White South
(1949), Innes lived for a time at a Norwegian shore station on the islands off Bergen and participated in a whale hunting.
Traveling become for Innes a vehicle satisfy his curiosity, but telling
stories about his experiences to his readers was his ultimate goal. His
friend Michael Wynne-Parker recalled him as a man who "spoke with
clarity and intensity, never wasting a word and leaving his listeners
spellbound." (If My Table Could Talk: Insights into Remarkable Lives by Michael Wynne-Parker, AuthorHouse, 2011, p. 61) Innes sailed for the Antarctica for The White South, to the islands of Greece for Levkas Man, and to the Indian ocean for The Strode Venturer (1965), a story about an English adventurer in the Maldive Islands. Many of Innes's travel pieces appeared in the American magazine Holiday. A collection of them, Harvest of Journeys, came out in 1960. It was followed in 1967 by Sea and Islands. As in the novels of Andrew Garve, Innes's knowledge of the sea and ships, and his own experiences provided material for his books. He was also vice-president of the Association of Sea Training Organization. Innes's first ocean racer was Triune of Troy, ten tons and thirty-eight feet long. "After seven years I said good-bye to my beloved Triune. She was a little too tender, a little too wet, and she had no selfdraining cockpit, which scared the life out of me whenever there was a gale forecast . . . She taught me most of all I know about sailing, for I bought her when I barely knew how to reef, let alone how to navigate." (Harvest of Journeys by Hammond Innes, London: Collins, 1960, p. 307) With the boat named Mary Deare, he explored the coasts of Europe from the Baltic to the Bay of Biscay. Innes had bought the 42ft ocean racer with the money he received from selling the rights of The Wreck of the Mary Deare to MGM. Innes's historical works include The Conquistadors (1969) and The Last Voyage
(1978), a fictionalized account of Captain Cook's voyage. Playing a
game with the reader, Innes explained in the introductory note that the
manuscript of Cook's diary "only recently came to light in the cellars
of the old St James' Club." His final novel, Delta Connection (1996), included all the familiar elements of a Hammond
Innes book: daring escapes, cliffhanging situations, and overpowering forces of
nature. In the story an English mining engineer escapes from Romania with a
young mysterious woman. Their adventures lead to Afghanistan and to struggle
for survival among the word's highest mountains. Innes was awarded a C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire)
in 1978. He received Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement award in 1993.
Hammond Innes died of cancer on 10 June, 1998, at Ayres End. The
greatest part
of the fortune of nearly £7 million he had earned from his books Innes
left to the Association of Sea Training Organizations. His London house
he bequethed to the actress Celia Imrie; they had first met at a party
in Suffolk in the late
1980s. "The press tried to make a big deal of this, implying all kinds
of lewd things," she later wrote in her autobiography. "For me, I would
have to say that true friendship is the most
important thing in my life, and sex often comes quite low in the
catalogue." (The Happy Hoofer by Celia Imrie, Leicester: Charnwood, 2011, p. 267) Several of Innes's works have been adapted into screen. An interesting but unrealized production was Alfred Hitchcock's version of The Mary Deare. The book belonged to MGM, and they got the director interested in the work. Hitchcock liked the powerful opening image of a ship drifting, deserted, in the English Channel. The rest was a coutroom drama in manifold flashbacks explaining the mystery. Hitchcock continued to develop ideas with his scriptwriter Ernest Lehman, but finally gave up the project. Eventually the company hired Michael Anderson. "The film definitely lacks (as more than one leading critic has pointed out) the intense, page-turning suspense of the book," said George Addison. (quoted in CinemaScope One: Stupendous in Scope by John Howard Reid, Lulu Press, 2004, p. 116) Gary Cooper played the victimized sailor of the wrecked vessel in his second last movie. Innes's friend Eric Ambler wrote the screenplay. For further reading: Harvest of Journeys by Hammond Innes (1960); Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson, with a pref. by Walter Allen (1972); Occasions by Dorothy Hammond Innes (1972); '"Innes, Hammond" (pen name of Ralp Hammond Innes),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); 'Innes, (Ralph) Hammond' by Dorothy B. Hughes, in Twentieth-century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly (1985); 'Innes, Ralph Hammond [pseuds. Hammon Innes, Ralph Hammond]' by Eleri Larkum, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); Ralph-Hammond Innes,' in If My Table Could Talk: Insights Into Remarkable Lives by Michael Wynne-Parker (2011); 'Hammond Innes ja taustatyön voima' by Pekka Turunen, in Ruumiin kulttuuri 4 (2018); 'Hammond Innes's The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1956)' by Matt Lynn, Thrillers: 100 Must-reads, edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner (2010) Selected bibliography:
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