Best Adventures of 1956 (5)
By:
August 1, 2016
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1956 adventure novels. Happy 60th anniversary!
Hammond Innes’s sea-going adventure The Wreck of the Mary Deare.
When salvager John Sands boards an enormous, rusty and leaking freighter — the Mary Deare — which has been set afire, and abandoned by its crew in a dangerous section of the English Channel, he discovers the ship’s first officer, Gideon Patch, trying to run the ship on his own. The harsh, exhausted, half-crazed Patch has stayed aboard, or so he claims, in order to prove that the ship was deliberately sabotaged, by its owners, in order to collect insurance on cargo that had secretly been off-loaded at Rangoon. (What was loaded into the holds, and why did the captain first appear covered in coal dust?) Patch needs help running the ship aground on rocks to the south of the Channel Islands. Although doing so will void his salvage claim, and although Sands decides to help. When they return to London, Patch is brought before a board of inquiry to determine what happened. Finally, there’s a race to return to the ship, in order to prevent the ship’s owners from destroying the evidence of their fraud.
Fun fact: The novel was adapted in 1959 as a movie of the same title, starring Charlton Heston as Sands and Gary Cooper as Patch; Michael Anderson directed. Thriller author Eric Ambler wrote the screenplay.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1956 adventures that you particularly admire.