Between 1946 and 1950, Hammond Innes wrote seven books. Of these postwar adventure thrillers, five had as their setting either Cornwall or Italy. In the case of the first of those novels, Dead and Alive, the locations for the story are both Cornwall and Italy. This plot creates something of a template for Innes in the immediate postwar years. He doesn't decisively break with it until writing Air Bridge in 1951.

But, here, with Dead and Alive, the author displays a postwar maturity that gave every indication of a writer who could grow with his material. And that is what he would do, shifting to ever more exotic locales in the Mediterranean, Africa, the Pacific, Canada, North Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia.

A couple of things emerge as well: Innes' fondness for employing World War II surplus landing craft in his stories, his dislike of despotism and petty tyranny--to the point that even his somewhat indifferent protagonists are willing to lift themselves into action and become better persons for it--and the exquisite pacing he employs in nearly all his works. There is hardly room to catch your breath before David Cunningham, this story's hero, is dragged into a steadily cascading series of dangerous situations.

With Innes, it's not so much the resolution of the story that matters. (He tends to end things with a quick nod to bringing about a conclusion.) It's the course of the story itself that matters. He would manage to keep up this unsurpassed ability to constantly advance his storylines for the next fifty some odd years until his death. ( )