Hammond Innes's Maddon’s Rock

Maddon’s Rock is a 1947 Hammond Innes thriller and it’s a textbook example of his approach to the writing of thrillers.

Hammond Innes (1913-1988) had a writing career that lasted almost sixty years (his first novel came out in 1937, his final novel appeared in 1996). In the postwar era and right up until the end of the 1970s Innes was one of the most popular of all thriller writes. After his death he pretty much vanished into obscurity. He was a very fine writer but his type of writing was no longer fashionable.

Innes wrote books with heroes. Heroes became progressively less fashionable. Writers and publishers preferred anti-heroes, or heroes who were so deeply flawed as to almost anti-heroes.

Innes was one of the writers who established a template for thrillers that was used with enormous success by celebrated thriller writers like Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley and Gavin Lyall - thrillers that were not pure spy thrillers but incorporated elements of crime, adventure and espionage.

Innes also followed in the Eric Ambler tradition of having heroes who were not necessarily professional spies or policemen. They were more likely to be ordinary guys who found themselves caught up in situations of danger, intrigue, espionage and crime. The reluctant hero tradition.

In 1947 when Maddon’s Rock was published Innes was really hitting his stride, having had major successes with novels such as Killer Mine, The Lonely Skier and The Blue Ice. He was already established as a reliable writer of bestsellers.

Alistair MacLean took the basic Hammond Innes formula but increased the pacing and added more action. MacLean was also a bit more daring when it came to narrative structure, experimenting with both fist-person and third-person narration and with unreliable narrators. MacLean was the greater writer but Innes provided the foundation on which he built.

Hammond Innes pioneered the thriller in which the landscape itself becomes a character. The landscape is as deadly an enemy as the bad guys. This was something that Alistair MacLean would bring to a point of perfection (especially in his masterpieces Night Without End and Ice Station Zebra). Both authors had a particular fondness for two types of setting - freezing wastes of snow and ice, and the sea. MacLean was clearly influenced by Innes but I think the truth is that both men had a genuine natural affinity for such landscapes, which is why they were able to use such settings so very effectively.

Maddon’s Rock is the story of the SS Trikkala which sank in March 1945 when it hit a mine. A year later a distress message is picked up - from the SS Trikkala.

In March 1945, with the war clearly almost over, a British Army corporal named Vardy and two other British soldiers are in Murmansk (where they had been assisting the Red Army in the war against Hitler) waiting to be repatriated to England. They board a nondescript freighter called the Trikkala. They are assigned to guard a special cargo. The crates are labelled as containing obsolete inoperative aero engines. Why would clapped-out obsolete aero engines need such security? The answer of course is that those crates do not contain aero engines. They contain bullion.

Vardy is a very ordinary guy. His fiancée has been pressuring him to get a commission but really Vardy has had enough of the Army. He just wants to go home, marry Betty and resume an ordinary life. He was an enthusiastic sailor with a deep and abiding love for the sea but was unable to get into the Navy. He’s not the stuff of which heroes are made. He’s no fool and he’s no coward, he’s just an average man doing his best.

There are things happening on the Trikkala which arouse Vardy’s suspicions. He overhears some odd conversations. He hears some extraordinary stories about the Trikkala’s captain, stories involving murder and piracy in the South China Sea before the war. Maybe they’re just tall tales that sailors tell each other in waterfront bars. There’s the fact that those crates do not contain aero engines.

Vardy is worried, but he doesn’t realise just how much he should be worried. He is headed for a nightmare.

There are three parts to the story, with the first and third parts taking place at sea.

How he responds, and how his relationship with Jenny Sorrell (the Trikkala’s only civilian passenger) develops are things that you’ll have to read the book to find out. What Innes does is to to take a relatively straightforward crime plot and add some very devious and very original twists. It becomes a story of suspicion, betrayal, love, revenge and survival with an extraordinary and unexpected action finale at Maddon’s Rock. It’s one of the great maritime adventure tales.

Innes also gives us an exceptionally memorable villain, a failed actor turned sea captain who quotes Shakespeare incessantly. When he’s quoting Hamlet you don’t have to worry but if he starts quoting Macbeth it’s time to be very afraid. Vardy is a fine hero, an unremarkable man who is forced to do remarkable things. There’s also a fine feisty heroine and some wonderfully colourful and eccentric minor characters. And there’s the rock itself, and the sea.

A great adventure story. Highly recommended.