Well written and enjoyable reading. A good brief reay.

I'm pretty sure I read this one and liked it after seeing the old movie with Gary Cooper. ( )

Ripping good yarn of men and the sea, with lots of technical jargon and nautical excitement. The author kept the tension and suspense going even through the official courtroom enquiry portion. The romance did seem to be casually tacked on, but it didn't ruin the story for me. ( )

Very much a male adventure story from the 1950's. As such it was well written. ( )

The Wreck of the Mary Deare is likely Hammond Innes' most famous and successful work, helped in part by the feature film made just three years after the novel's publication. It opens with thrills and adventure and never really stops. Even a lengthy courtroom scene covering the middle of the story works only to enhance tension and suspense. And all the while, it is probably Innes' most intense character study, in particular of Gideon Patch through the eyes of John Sands, who boards the Mary Deare, an ancient dead in the water wreck of a freighter, only to find Patch as the sole survivor of a mysterious incident in which the entire crew has abandoned the ship.

Innes' own love of the sea comes through in this work. His writing leaves just enough detail and use of nautical descriptions to attest to his expertise, while not alienating readers with only a cursory knowledge of the sea and ships. Some of the imagery is startling. I doubt there is another sea story that will ever match Innes' description of Patch's and Sands' escape through the Minkies, the shelf or rocks that dot the English Channel just south of Jersey. Sucked into this maelstrom at high tide, the water level then drops 30 to 40 feet, forcing the pair out of their dinghy and into a wild rush across the now dry patch of sand, gravel, and stone--only to be caught just six hours later by the rising tide and made to swim one last desperate mile to safety. I don't think Innes ever managed a better passage.

A note about the film version: it brought together two major stars, Gary Cooper as Patch and Charlton Heston as Sands, along with a third soon-to-be major star, Richard Harris as the villainous Higgins. It is also notable because the film had Eric Ambler as its screenwriter. Thus was Britain's preeminent postwar adventure writer, Innes, teamed up in a way with its most important writer of political thrillers and adventure mysteries, Ambler. But for the unsatisfying turn to a scuba diving story at the end, in place of the race across the Minkies, the film holds up well as a comparison to the novel. ( )