Dead Calm

By Charles Williams

On the open waters of the Pacific, a couple encounters a stranded madman.

Rae and Ingram are nineteen days out of the Panama Canal, sailing slowly across the wide, flat Pacific on the Saracen, when they find Hughie Warriner in his dinghy. He was on a pleasure cruise in his yacht, the Orpheus, he says, when food poisoning killed his passengers and his ship began to sink. After an alleged ten days of desperately fighting to stay afloat he spied the Saracen, and rowed to his salvation.

Finding the stranded yacht, against Warriner's wishes, Ingram boards the stranded Orpheus. There he finds Warriner's passengers -- very much alive, and hungry for revenge against the man who attacked them and left them to drown. Ingram tries to get back to his ship, but is too late. Warriner escapes with his yacht, taking Rae hostage, and Ingram hasno means to save them but tattered sails, a sinking ship, and rage that burns hotter than the merciless Pacific sun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089412

Charles Williams

Charles Williams (1909–1975) was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years before leaving to work in the electronics industry. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime. Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay. Williams died in California in 1975. 

Reviews for Dead Calm

[encephalical · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great suspense. As a landlubber Midwesterner, I needed to look up quite a few nautical and boat terms. Quite different from the Kidman/Zane film. The quasi-Freudianisms struck me as dated.

[someguyinvirginia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

More gothic than noir. Ends by a large body of water, as all good gothics must. Williams has a knack for giving his characters strong, individualized voices that help to firmly etch them in the reader's imagination. Strong beginning.

[davewilde-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What happens when four unstable personalities are trapped together in a tiny cabin on a boat lost and without power in the middle of the South Pacific? How does those four individuals deal with the constantly worsening situation as the boat starts to take on water and rot away? Do the couples wrap themselves up in petty jealousies and bickering? Do they blame each other when things start to go wrong? What happens when one of these people was a bit off his rocker to begin with? Can he really be blamed for what goes wrong? Consumed by paranoia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, what if he abandons the slowly sinking ship and climbs onto another small sailing vessel? Will the couple on that vessel take him away from there - from where his wife was possibly plotting with another man to drown him in that mighty ocean?

In 1960, Charles Williams published "Aground," a novel about a search for a stolen sailing ship, a ship that had run aground, gunrunning criminals holding a couple at gunpoint, desperation, and a romance that bloomed between an older sea captain with a gimpy leg and a twice-widowed blonde who was tougher than anyone could ever have imagined. In 1962, Charles Williams published "Dead Calm," a novel in which he took these two characters, Captain John Ingram and Rae, had them trade the big vessel they recaptured in "Aground" and trade it for a smaller, sleeker, two-person sailboat and set them off on a months-long honeymoon jaunt around the world. At one point in "Dead Calm," Rae actually sits down and tells the entire tale of the novel "Aground" to explain how she first met her husband and how neither one really like the other at first, but fell in love after five adventurous days in the Atlantic.

"They were nineteen days out of the Canal, bound for Tahiti and the islands to the south, tied to no schedule, free of the frustrations and annoyances of life ashore." They found Warriner floating in a dinghy, who tells them his boat over there is sinking and everyone else on it succumbed to food poisoning. Ingram doesn't quite buy everything this young man is selling. Something doesn't feel right about things he says, how he says them. When Ingram goes to the other boat to look around, Warriner takes off with Rae still on Ingram's boat, leaving Ingram behind on a leaking, sinking boat to pick up the broken pieces of what went on that second boat, marooned for ten days in the middle of nowhere with four people at each other's throats. Ingram was "more scared then he had ever been in his life, and the whole scene came to him through the winy haze of a desire to get his hands on Warriner and kill him, but there was no time to give way to futile emotion." He is told that Warriner is a lunatic, a crazy man, that there is no telling what he will do.

The descriptions that Williams gives of the sea and sky and the emotions running through Ingram and Rae are just perfectly written: "This might be the last time he would ever see her," Ingram thinks, "this dwindling spot of color fading away toward the outer limit of binoculars, but that was something he couldn't think about. If he lost his head, there was no chance at all." "The air was like warm damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated, unmoving. Perspiration didn't evaporate. It collected in a film over the body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of insects crawling across the skin." You can really feel how Williams has matured as a writer in reading this - how he creates a feel for what it was like out there in the middle of the ocean with the sun burning down and no rescue anywhere in sight.
This is not a story of good and evil. Warriner is dangerous, but he is not just some mean, nasty criminal. Ingram and Rae already dealt with those types in "Aground." Instead, Warriner is a crazy person. He is out of his mind. Part of the book is how Rae deals with someone who she just can't reason with and how the people in this book choose whether or not to assign blame to someone who is out of his mind with paranoia. The characters here and how they relate to each other are extremely complicated.

It is one terrific, top-notch piece of writing and is a solid thriller. Great reading.

Most people are familiar with "Dead Calm" because of the Nicole Kidman movie that came out thirty years after the book. I can't emphasize enough how different the book is from that movie and how much of a license the screenwriters took with changing the story and the characters. The book fleshes out all the characters (including the ones who never appear in the movie), their histories, and their complicated relationships. The movie makes the Warriner character just a simple bad guy, instead of a complex guy who is half-out-of-his- mind and perhaps not fully responsible for his actions. Rae is not young and helpless like the Kidman character and she doesn't seduce the bad guy. Read the book. Skip the movie.

[bnielsen_30 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

John Ingram 44 år og hans kone Rae Osborne på 35 er på bryllupsrejse i hans sejlbåd. De ligger i vindstille rigtig langt ude på havet, da de får øje på en anden båd. En ung mand, Hughie Warriner ror hen til dem og fortæller at han er eneste overlevende af fire ombord. De tre andre er angiveligt død af madforgiftning og desuden er båden synkefærdig. John er dog ikke overbevist og checker efter.Ganske velskreven thriller