Hammond Innes Books in Order

An early thriller built around a revolutionary way to make cheap oil from coal. As rival interests close in, Innes turns industrial secrecy and Cornish settings into a tense prewar chase.

A London lawyer decides to help a German inventor who is suspected of murder. What follows is an early Innes thriller of suspicion, hidden motives, and a dangerous invention at the heart of the case.

On the Cornish coast at the start of the war, an ordinary man uncovers a secret U-boat base hidden in old mine workings. It is a fast, atmospheric blend of spy story and sea adventure.

In the summer of 1940, a former Fleet Street journalist serving in an anti-aircraft battery begins to suspect a plot on the ground more dangerous than the Luftwaffe overhead. It is one of Innes's closest-to-home war thrillers.

Innes's first postwar novel draws on the rackets and black-market world he saw in Italy. It follows an ordinary man into a dangerous mix of crime, corruption, and unsettled wartime aftermath.

Army deserter Jim Pryce returns secretly from Italy to Cornwall and is left robbed, beaten, and wanted for murder. His only way out lies through the dangers of the mine country and the truth someone wants buried.

Recently demobbed Neil Blair takes a strange job at an isolated Dolomite ski resort and stumbles into a hunt for buried Nazi treasure. Snow, deception, and narrow mountain chances drive the suspense.

A year after a convoy ship was sunk and its crew disgraced, the supposedly lost vessel sends an SOS from the winter sea. Innes builds a superb ghost-ship mystery out of wartime guilt, bad weather, and unfinished business.

A mystery around George Farrell draws the narrator into a hunt for a rich ore deposit in the Norwegian mountains. Innes takes the chase into snow and ice, where the search itself becomes a struggle to stay alive.

When the great whaling ship Southern Cross is crushed in Antarctic ice, hundreds of men face a fight for survival. Innes turns the frozen sea into the true antagonist, with shipwreck, hunger, and bitter divisions on the ice.

Johnny Keverne heads for Cocos Island in search of buried treasure and a chance to clear a dead man's name. It is a brisk children's adventure of maps, sea passages, and danger on a remote island.

An Englishman still marked by the war becomes caught up in intrigue that runs from Czechoslovakia to Italy. The crisis builds beneath an erupting Vesuvius, giving the book one of Innes's fiercest natural backdrops.

Set during the Berlin Airlift, this thriller follows a former RAF pilot now in trouble with the law. His route back into the air becomes tangled with postwar suspicion, danger, and the vast effort to keep Berlin supplied.

Facing a terminal diagnosis, Bruce Wetheral travels to the Canadian Rockies to prove his grandfather was right about oil beneath Campbell's Kingdom. Dam builders, harsh country, and a race against time drive the story.

A children's adventure about boys caught up in the search for oil on the Double Diamond ranch. Rival interests and rough country turn the prospect of sudden wealth into real danger.

A remote mission station in the far south of French Morocco waits for a new doctor, and little is as simple as it seems. The desert setting turns this into a tense story of suspicion, isolation, and divided loyalties.

Salvager John Sands boards the drifting Mary Deare and finds only one man still aboard, Captain Gideon Patch. The mystery of why the ship was abandoned grows into a taut story of wrecking, fraud, and obsession at sea.

After a plane crash in remote Labrador, a British engineer goes looking for the truth behind the radio messages his father overheard. The frozen wilderness and a half-built railway make every step harder.

A collection of travel pieces that shows how Innes researched the worlds behind his novels. Ships, remote landscapes, and working lives are all here, observed with a reporter's eye and a novelist's curiosity.

A solicitor helps a young man cross Arabia in search of his father, an oil prospector who has gone native in the desert. The journey becomes a race through tribal conflict, family tension, and the scramble for oil.

Donald Ross investigates the death of his brother after a military disaster near a remote Hebridean island. The result is a storm-lashed mystery about guilt, memory, and men trying to survive the Atlantic.

An illustrated survey of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark that looks at landscape, history, and modern life. It is less a thriller than a guided tour through a region Innes knew well.

Geoffrey Bailey is asked to find the black sheep of a shipping dynasty and ends up far from London in the Indian Ocean. Family rivalry, corporate intrigue, and a remote island dream make the search increasingly perilous.

Part sea book and part travel journal, this nonfiction volume follows islands and coasts from around Europe and beyond. Innes writes about harbours, local history, and the stubborn appeal of places reached best by boat.

Innes turns the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru into a fast-moving work of narrative history. It follows the men, ambitions, violence, and sheer risk behind Cortes, Pizarro, and the fall of native empires.

A travel book that moves beyond postcard views to the scale, distance, and rough energy of Australia. Innes writes with an eye for landscape, roads, coastlines, and the people shaped by them.

A trip to the Greek island of Levkas begins as an attempt to prove a theory about prehistoric man. Before long, scientific obsession, family strain, and Cold War tensions make the search far more dangerous.

With his Cornish mining business failing, a man fakes his own death and heads for Western Australia. The outback promise of copper riches soon turns into a hard-edged tale of greed, deception, and survival.

A man trying to rebuild his life finds himself caught in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig. The book blends offshore danger with political suspicion and family shadows from the past.

Television director Colin Tait goes to Kenya looking for ancient rock dwellings and walks into a fierce fight over elephants, land, and power. Drought, culling, and rival visions of the country turn the trip deadly.

A broad sampler of Innes's fiction, bringing together representative adventures from different points in his career. It is a handy way to get a feel for his sea-going tension, remote settings, and practical, everyman heroes.

Innes imagines a private diary from Captain Cook's final expedition. The book follows the long Pacific voyage, the northern seas, and the pressures that built toward Cook's death in Hawaii.

Set against political unrest on Bougainville, this thriller follows an outsider into local loyalties, family mysteries, and sudden violence. Innes mixes island atmosphere with a slow-building struggle over power and identity.

After his wife dies in a desperate protest against an oil spill, Trevor Rodin is pulled into a wider conspiracy. Innes turns grief, environmental anger, and sabotage into a tense coastal thriller.

Solicitor Philip Redfern follows the trail of a vanished millionaire into the Yukon and British Columbia. What begins as a search soon takes in timber theft, gold, smuggling, and the hard pull between profit and wilderness.

A richly illustrated look at East Anglia's coast, countryside, churches, historic houses, and hidden corners. Innes writes it like a traveller who knows the tides, the weather, and the pull of the sea.

An illustrated sailing anthology drawn from the Royal Cruising Club Journal. It gathers adventurous cruising pieces, maps, and photographs, with Hammond Innes providing the introduction.

Mike Steele's quiet life on Menorca unravels when political violence, marital strain, and a Royal Navy officer's search for his half-brother collide. Soon he is caught between island separatists, smugglers, and the aging frigate Medusa.

This unusual biographical work follows Van Gogh's life through narrative, poetry, and the author's own travels in Europe. It pairs the painter's childhood, preaching, art, and breakdown with a personal journey across the places he knew.

Peter Kettil joins an expedition to inspect and recover an icebound nineteenth-century ship tied to a mysterious South American family. The voyage from London to Peru and the far southern seas becomes a hunt through obsession, kidnapping, and buried secrets.

Ex-RAF pilot Ed Cruse is offered a bizarre job, fly an abandoned Hercules off an Antarctic iceberg. What looks like salvage turns into a cold, high-risk mission with hidden motives and old grievances riding along.

A killing in Constanta starts a trail that stretches far beyond Romania. As the search for missing Vikki unfolds, Innes ties political upheaval, old loyalties, and dangerous travel into a late-career thriller.

A reflective nonfiction volume built around the author's meetings with writers and other public figures. Part memoir and part portrait gallery, it turns remembered interviews into brief character sketches and personal essays.