A race to find valuable mineral ore leads a group of men far into the icy and treacherous mountains of Norway
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.
One of the century's great yarn-spinners...marvellously
evocative...another manifestation of the Innes genius
*Sydney Herald*
Hammond Innes… surely the doyen of the well-made modern
thriller
*Daily Telegraph*
Mr Innes' work stands in a class by itself
*New Statesman*
Hammond Innes deals magnificently with disaster
*Observer*
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