The Wreck of the Mary Deare

"Again, Innes is a great adventure writer. I write boy’s own adventure stories and am inspired by people like Innes. I’m not sure anyone reads him anymore, but Innes was huge in the 1950s and 60s. He’s really the missing link between writers like John Buchan and the modern thriller. We are at sea again. Innes wrote a lot of stuff about the sea. What’s good about this one is the way he plunges an ordinary person into a conspiracy to see how they respond and cope. Buchan did a lot of that too but Innes perfected it. He also takes the ordinary and makes it frightening. We think of the Channel as a placid, dull bit of sea between Dover and Calais in which your ferry might sometimes sway a bit. But towards Brittany it’s very rough and sailors think of it as a particularly nasty sea. So, this man is on a little boat out there and he spots an abandoned ship. There has been a terrible storm and only the captain is left and he’s gone completely mad. This sea we think of as so dull is suddenly really scary and he was, I think, the first thriller writer to do that, to take something humdrum and make it terrifying. Hitchcock was doing it in the cinema so it was entering the mainstream by the 1950s."