Description
Book SynopsisRalph 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 succes
Trade Review
John Buchan, Stevenson, Henty and Rider Haggard would all, I think, look benevolently upon Mr. Innes -- Elizabeth Bowen
A fast and expertly managed story... the Rockies, the squalid 'ghost towns', the dam-building - alll memorably represented * Sunday Times *
The British have always been good at producing adventure story writers. Hammond Innes was exceptional even within an exceptional breed..he was...a romantic adventurer in the style of Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling * Guardian *
Mr. Innes's readers were addicts when it came to his books, which were cinematic in sweep and sold 40 million copies * New York Times *
