Ian introduced me to Nevil Shute’s books some years ago now. The trouble is that while Shute wrote a fair number of books they can be a little hard to find; so far as I can tell, only A Town Like Alice and On the Beach are in print. Used book stores are a must, then; and since we’re blest with a number of excellent large book stores in our area, I’m not often in a used book store.

Yes, I know, lots of used books are available via Amazon. I’ve gone that route, on occasion; but frankly, it’s much more fun to go hunting. The thrill of the chase, you know. The problem is, most used book stores I’ve checked will have only one or two books by Shute–the books I named above. To date, I’d found only one by this route: Lonely Road.

So Jane and I were out on a date, and happened to stop by a used book shop I’d not previously entered. And they had not one, not two, but eight (!) books by Shute, with multiple copies of several, none of which I’d previously seen. I bought four of them (carefully eschewing the first editions in favor of lower price and increased durability), and this is the first of the four. It’s a doozy.

When writing about Shute’s books, I always wonder what to say. The plots are always rich and involved; the characters always have the breath of life; and nothing I come up with really seems to capture the essence. But I’ll try.

The book concerns a British scientist, the quaintly named Mr. Honey, whose life work is studying metal fatigue in airplane structures. As the book opens, his current research involves the tail section of the Rutland Reindeer, a new trans-Atlantic passenger liner which has just gone into active service. His calculations suggest that the tail plane might fracture due to metal fatigue after about 1440 hours of service. Being the absent-minded type, Honey hasn’t considered the practical aspects of his research–that is, if he’s correct the Reindeer which have just begun carrying passengers might start falling out of the sky. His boss inquires discreetly, and discovers that all of the Reindeer but one have flown for 200 hours or less; the one exception is the prototype, which crashed in Labrador after about 1300 hours. Ominous, yes–but it appears they have a little time to think before grounding the fleet. Honey is sent to Labrador to investigate the crash and look for signs of metal fatigue in the tail section. He’s flying (naturally) on a Rutland Reindeer–and he discovers that contrary to what his boss had been told, this Reindeer already has 1400 hours on its clock….

This probably makes the book sound like a disaster novel–something like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno, which is far from the case. And what I remember most are the characters: Honey himself, and his daughter; Honey’s boss, and his wife; the aging movie actress from Terre Haute, Indiana; the stewardess. And in the end, the story isn’t really about planes and metal fatigue; it’s about people, and courage, and redemption.

On top of being a good story, the book is guilty of precognition. There’s a disclaimer at the end of the book that says that the Rutland Reindeer bears no resemblance to any actual airplane. However, No Highway was published in 1948 as the world’s first jet-powered passenger liner, the DeHaviland Comet, was being designed and built. (“Comet”‘s one of Santa’s reindeer.) The Comet first flew in 1949. In 1951, Shute’s novel was filmed as No Highway in the Sky with Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Honey, Marlene Dietrich as the movie actress, and Glynis Johns as the stewardess. In 1952 came the first Comet crash; more would follow. And investigation revealed that the culprit was, naturally, metal fatigue.

Shute was out in one way: the tail wasn’t involved. Rather, the Comet had large rectangular windows; and it develops that large rectangular openings diminish the structural integrity of a sheet of metal by quite a bit. Later Comets were designed with small round windows, and the crashes ceased.