And the Deep Blue Sea

By Charles Williams

A sailor stranded in the Pacific Ocean finds there are a million ways to die.

His life in pieces, Harry Goddard buys a thirty-two-foot sloop and sets out to sail the Pacific. He is a thousand miles from anywhere when his craft strikes an unseen object, and begins taking water. For all his desperate efforts, he cannot save her, and Harry is forced into his life raft, to drift without food, water, or shelter from the sun. He is near death when the Leander rescues him. But by the time his trip is over, he'll wish he'd taken his chances in the open water.

A tramp freighter sailing under the Panamanian flag, the Leander is en route to the Philippines when its crew spots Harry and takes him aboard. But as he regains his strength, Harry uncovers a murderous conspiracy that could destroy the ship that saved him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Head of Zeus
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781784089443

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 And the Deep Blue Sea

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

After his sailboat went down, leaving him with nothing but a rubber dinghy and a bottle of whiskey, Harry Goddard should have known it was all over. There wasn’t much left. Once a renowned movie producer. He was now forty-five, divorced, childless since his only daughter drove her Porsche over a guardrail, seeing her parents’ lives fall apart. His luck had just plumb wore out. “The only hell was the certainty that it was coming.” “Well, he thought, you wanted solitude; you’ve got it.” After thirst and the sun beat him down for days, rescue finally came in the form of a freighter, but, after getting on that doomed, cursed freighter, perhaps Goddard wished he had just taken the easy way and drowned.

This was a cursed freighter straight out of hell and with the craziest cast of characters you’ve ever seen. Besides the movie producer who had decided to all by his lonesome cast off around the world, you had a sick Polish crazy man who never left his cabin, Madeleine Lennox, a fifty-year-old widow with such a thirst for male attention that she booked passage on freighters where there would be no other competition- “No woman could be that unsubtle”, Karen Brooke, a thirty-four year old blonde whose very sight might cause havoc among the crew, Eric Lind, the giant mate, who ran the ship with an iron hand, and Captain Steen, known among the crew as Holy Joe, a booze-hater and a nickel-squealer. Shipping tons of cotton bales and booze to Manila with a crew of thirty men, the freighter seemed to have problem after problem with its engines and that was before there was a murder on board in front of five eyewitnesses, a burial at sea, a political conspiracy, two figures with a past history who never imagined they would meet again or under these conditions, and a mutiny the likes of which had never been seen.

Charles Williams apparently enjoyed writing nautical thrillers cause he wrote quite a few of them and wrote them well. “And The Deep Blue Sea” is a terrific story that takes the reader from the brink of one disaster to another. Goddard is the perfect hero, a bit of a Humphrey Bogart type who never meant to get involved, but now that he’s involved, well, that’s another story. Set in historical context, it is just a terrific load of fun, particularly given Williams’ knowledge of ships and the sea which comes through in his writing. It is such a good novel that is hard to put down once you start reading it. Good luck with that.