Jack Finney

One of my pick-me-ups at the Raynes Park platform library earlier in the week was a thriller by a new-to-me writer called Jack Finney, famous for the invention of body snatchers. A thriller of the month called 'Assault on a Queen' published by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1960, a year after first publication in the US.

The Queen in question being the Cunard liner 'Queen Mary' and the assault being conducted from a patched-up first world war German submarine recovered from shallow waters off Long Island, more specifically off Fire Island, the spit of sand running east and west a little to the south of Long Island proper, right in the snap above. The story is set after the second world war.

An easy enough read, although I did skip a little, particularly in the second half, a little over 220 pages arranged in a prologue and fifteen chapters. The prologue sets the scene, the next fifty pages puts the assault team together and hundred pages after that lovingly chronicle putting the submarine back together again. Lots of toys for the boys. Then thirty pages for the assault and thirty pages for the subsequent escape.

One of the toys for the boys, which gets quite a lot of space, is something called a Kingston, named for a British engineer and used in early submarines if not later. But confused by the existence of a company called Kingston Valve. And I have been unable to find a satisfactory diagram of one. Is it any different from a big tap? Does it make a difference if you want to get at it, from the inside, without putting the submarine in dry dock? Lots about how and where they are used at reference 3, but not much on the things themselves. Important because, inter alia, they control the passage of water through holes in the bottom of the submarine to and from the main ballast tanks. Not the sort of thing you want to get wrong.

A very modest amount of violence, fisticuffs over a woman, this last being introduced to provide a very modest amount of love interest. Sex interest would be a bit strong by today's standards.

The actual assault was conducted on very gentlemanly lines, which goes some way to excusing the story being told in the first person by one of the assault team, by a criminal, not to say a pirate. The sort of person strung up in Execution Dock in the olden days - for which see reference 4 below.

And they don't get away with the dosh - although I was left wondering how the captain of the liner was going to manage divvying up the recovered money to his passengers. Gentlemanly did not go so far as to issue receipts.

An interesting reminder of the sort of thrillers that were on offer when I was young. Straightforward and uncomplicated, easy reads, written just before Bond and his more complicated successors kicked in. With this story being made into a film with Frank Sinatra in the lead, taking the role of the narrator in the novel. I leave comparing and contrasting the novel with the film for another day - there being lots of changes if a quick look at Wikipedia is anything to go by.

PS: while the author is visible enough on the Internet, the short biographies I have been able to track down say nothing about what he did during the second world war, despite being of military age, in his late twenties at the start. Did he wangle some kind of exemption or does the gap in the record hide something more honourable?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Finney.

Reference 2: https://www.kingstonvalves.com/.

Reference 3: http://rnsubs.co.uk/dits-bits/br-3043/part-two/chapter-23.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_Dock.