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We’re out in the Pacific Ocean. A newly wedded couple are here on their small yacht, cruising up the west coast of Africa on their way to the mediterranean. Not a breath of air, so they’re becalmed. To save gas, they’re not using their auxiliary engine. Out in these waters they might expect to be very much alone…but there’s someone else out there…another boat.
Orson Welles on The Deep/Dead Calm
It’s interesting to me that Charles Williams—not Charles Willeford, but the author of The Hot Spot—went from writing terrific smalltown noir to novels of high seas peril.
The Sailcloth Shroud, Aground, and, Dead Calm all display a familiarity with seamanship lingo, specifically yachting, and the dangers peculiar to that world.
In all three of these novels and in their film adaptations, the main character is a weathered and capable sailor to whom unforeseen and very bad things happens. In Sailcloth Shroud his name is Stuart Rogers; in Aground and it sequel, Dead Calm, he’s John Ingram. It’s a variation on the tough competent sailor characters from Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream, great on the water but suffering a run of bad luck. Williams’s characters have more depth than the average action hero, with strong motivations, and all three novels are great.
Dead Calm is the best known because of the film adaptation. But the books first.
Sailcloth Shroud concerns a burial at sea—Gordon loses a crew member to a heart attack, and when he reaches land, learns that the dead man wasn’t who he said he was, and worse, was carrying something precious and illegal. And since the body was disposed of at sea, nobody buys that he’s actually dead, or that Gordon wasn’t involved.
Aground has a similarly tough luck scenario, when John Ingram finds himself the last person to inspect a sailing yacht that disappears. The rich owner of the boat, Rae, dislikes Ingram, but hires him to find it. They eventually team up to retrieve the boat and find out what happened, falling in love in the process.
Dead Calm begins with Rae and Ingram now married and on honeymoon. In the middle of the ocean they run across a man named Hughie Warriner in a dinghy abandoning a sinking yacht. Something about Hughie’s story bothers Ingram. When he goes back to inspect the vessel, he finds another couple on board. Warriner takes off in Ingram’s boat with Rae, leaving Ingram and the bickering pair to drown.
…the thought of Rae poured suddenly through the defenses of his mind again, leaving him shaken and limp. No matter how you barricaded yourself against the fear, it lurked always in ambush just beyond conscious thought, ready to catch you off guard for an instant and overwhelm you. What chance did she have? Did she have any at all? Lay off, he told himself savagely; you’ll run amok. Do what you can do and quit thinking about what you can’t.
These later novels are strikingly different from Williams’s early work, less noir and perhaps more commercially targeted. Of the three, I liked Sailcloth the best since it was more of a mystery novel. Aground and Dead Calm are technically part of a series, but seem very different from each other. Dead Calm is self-contained, split between the two boats, while Aground involves Ingram spending more time on land or in a plane, looking for the missing yacht.
The films
In 1989 Dead Calm was adapted by Philip Noyce. It’s a good but different setup, leaning into the sexual tension between Nicole Kidman’s Rae and Billy Zane’s Warriner. Zane is very good, as are Kidman and Sam Neil as Ingram.
In the book, Warriner is a psychotic man-child, a painter who’s been coddled by older women. When he gets on a boat with his fortyish wife and a bullying, Hemingway-esque writer named Bellew, the pressure causes him to snap. In the film he’s much more predatory, and Zane plays him as a virile threat to the May-December couple. Straw Dogs at Sea.
Orson Welles actually directed a self-financed adaptation of Dead Calm called The Deep, starring Laurence Harvey as Warriner, but lost the funds to complete filming before Harvey died. Footage of The Deep is kicking around in a documentary called One Man Band:
Also neat: there’s a 1975 version of Sailcloth Shroud starring Dorothy Malone called either Target in the Sun or The Man Who Would Not Die:
A link to my review of the Hot Spot below:
The Hot Spot
Thanks to everyone who's checked out A Lonesome Place for Dying, my small-town mystery set in Blaine, Washington. There was a very nice review in Mystery Scene:
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Thanks for sharing, Sam. Great analyses, as always. I've not read any of these, so heading to the library now. :-)
Nice piece, Sam. I’ve read that Williams drove himself to suicide, in effect, by refusing to write series novels at a time when standalones had fallen out of favor. His royalties dried up. (Though a big part of his decision to end his life was missing his wife, who died before him.) He just wanted to write what he wanted to write, on his own timetable.