First published 1946. Fontana paperback, 1975, pp158, c.50,000 words.
This is the first post-war Innes and marks something of a transition work from his pre-war cheap shockers and his war novels, to his mature thrillers. Here, there is much excellent description of the natural world, especially the sea, the coast and the weather. There are also some wonderful set pieces, most notably in the first third set on the Cornish coast. However, the overall plot is thin, and the links between changes of scene slender. Some of the significant characters are exaggerated to the point of caricatures, becoming cardboard villains and heroes. This is also a short book compared to his later works, less than half the length of The Golden Soak (1973), The Black Tide (1982) and The Delta Connection (1996) all of which are around 120,000 words. The slimness of this book might have been favoured by British publishers in the post-war paper shortage.
The protagonist, Cunningham, is a very typical one of the period: a man who had had ‘a good war’, and now being de-mobbed, is dissatisfied with the world around him. He has no close relationships, being too distracted by the war. He was of that upper-middle-class strata of society that had automatically become officers, with a little capital but not enough to live comfortably on. They had grown up in houses with at least a few servants and had been treated with deference. Post-war society was much less class-bound, less easy for the privileged, and much duller. The old order had failed the country in the two great wars, and was paying the price: politically and socially. Not that this book goes into that very deeply, other than it being the (assumed) psychological hinterland of the protagonist.
The plot concerns Cunningham joining up with Stuart McCrae, another dissatisfied ex-serviceman, who had come across a naval landing craft, wrecked in a Cornish cove. Both become excited by the prospect of refloating the vessel and using it for trade in war-torn southern Europe. This passage is excitingly written, and Innes has clearly given much thought to the technicalities of the recovery; plus he throws in the vicissitudes of the weather and the curiosity of local people and tourists. It also leads to the second critical plot element, the receipt of a letter by Cunningham which resulted from an article written in a newspaper about the recovery of the vessel. A woman asks that, as he has plans to go to Italy, he finds out what has happened to her daughter who became stranded there during the war. The device of a stranger reading a newspaper article and writing to the protagonist has been used elsewhere; For example, in Green River High, Duncan Kyle uses the same plot driver.
The remainder of the book is set in Italy, and Innes’ experience at that time allows him to describe well the atmosphere of the barely recovering country, even if he has a very jaundiced view of it. Rome is described as being rotten, cynical and lacking any decency or sense of purpose [p86-87]. However the Italian characters seem less realistic, with good hearted poor people, ruthless communist partisans and ultra-wealthy fascist mafia types, one of whom is described as ‘a tall rather saturnine man with extravagant gestures and black hair, sleekly oiled’ [p70], ooh, don’t we just know he must be a baddy? Such people no doubt existed, but somehow these seem to have been drawn from a Hollywood shocker rather than the real world. Perhaps it is realistically the blinkered view of a former British officer, pigeonholing people without a lot of thought. The plotting also seems less credible in this section: for example, why would the former fascist offer twice the market rate for their ship [p74], when he could presumably buy one elsewhere for the market rate?
There are some fine bits of observation here, especially of the poor parts of Naples. For example, to quote Jim Morrison: ’people are strange when you’re a stranger’, and to quote Innes, ‘My sense of loneliness made the throng of life in the back-streets more vivid…’ [p127]. There is also the public-school boy’s ‘type’ of woman: ‘…gave her a boyish look. It was then that I realised that she was an extremely attractive girl.’ [p116]. One can tell this was written by a young man as breasts feature rather prominently [e.g. p86, p131, p145]. Sometimes Cunningham comes across as an up-tight prude, afraid to sully himself with low-life Brits, e.g. the forger [p129].
This is the world of the late 1940s, and despite all the work that women did in the war, men’s expectations of them hadn’t changed. As soon as a woman comes into contact with the men, she is ushered into the kitchen to prepare their meals [e.g. p31]. Class still abounds: a recruit to crew the vessel immediately calls Cunningham ‘sir’, whereas he is called ‘Boyd’ [e.g. p69], similarly Cunningham stays in a hotel while Boyd is placed in a pensione across the street. The men engage in a lot of hard drinking and smoking, often of pipes [p13].
Despite all its flaws, this is short and entertaining when read as a straightforward thriller.
Wikipedia biography of Innes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Innes
Obituary of Innes: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-hammond-innes-1164546.html
Wikipedia Summary of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_and_Alive_(Innes_novel)
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141593750-by-hammond-innes—dead-and-alive-1970-02-02-paperback?ref=nav_sb_ss_3_26 (No readers reviews at the time of writing)
© William John Graham, November 2023