Ian Hamet introduced me to Nevil
Shute by encouraging me to read A Town Like Alice. I read it
and loved it, and looked for more, and discovered that Shute is mostly
out of print. So while I was scouting about the many used bookstores in
New Orleans’ French Quarter some while back, it occurred to me to look
for some Shute, and this is what I found. It’s an early novel, and it
shows, a little; it’s clearly intended to be something of a spy novel,
and yet more than anything else it turns out to be a romance.

The book is set in England in the late 1920’s, and (having been published
in 1932) belongs to that small set of books that can look back to the Great
War without any conscious overtones of the greater war to come. We think
of them as the years between the Wars, but Shute and his characters do not.

Malcolm Stevenson is a war hero, having served in the Royal Navy, and consequently
is now given the courtesy title of Commander. He owns a shipyard and a
small fleet of merchant ships, and he spends most of his time designing
ships and boats. He’s unmarried, and not by choice; he has asked many
women to marry him, and all have turned him down. It’s not clear why,
mind you; he’s wealthy, good-looking, well-mannered, and friendly. In
any event, he remains an essentially lonely man, buryied in his
work.

Early in the book Stevenson is asked to help with a police investigation–
some group, probably Communist, is running guns into England in order to
foment an uprising. During the course of things, Stevenson
becomes acquainted with a hired dancer at a Palais de Danse in Leeds.
Her name is Mollie, and she turns out to be the key to the investigation;
her brother has been driving a lorry for the gun-runners. But as he
comes to know her, things change between them.

And as I say, the romance between Stevenson and Mollie becomes the
centerpiece of the book. She’s a smart, capable girl from a lower class
family, doing the best she can; he’s a smart capable older man of means.
Each of them have expectations about the other that turn out to be wrong;
and amazingly, these differences are allowed to unfold naturally rather
than being turned into dramatic plot contrivances. It’s touching, and
ultimately heartbreaking, and well worth the trip.

Oh, and they find the gun-runners too.