John and Rae Ingram decided to get away from it all, taking to the sea in their luxury yacht Saracen. Unfortunately for them, they ran afoul of a lack of wind and were becalmed, pretty much stopped at sea. Neither of them was a stranger to such things, and neither of them was terribly put out. The Saracen has an engine, but they don’t mind waiting where they are. The supplies are good, the company is better, and the fuel is probably not enough to reach the port they are aimed for. So better to wait and let Mother Nature take its course. John is an old hand at sailing, Rae is no slouch when it comes to an awareness of how the sea can behave (or misbehave). They are wildly in love, enjoying some together time in their salad days … And then they spy another becalmed vessel, the Orpheus out of Santa Barbara.
Their neighbor is not nearby, however. It’s far enough off that binoculars are needed to see it, and the view they offer is pretty well useless until they happen to spot activity. A dinghy is puttering on its way over. When it delivers its lone occupant, Hughie Warriner is dehydrated, weeping at the loneliness of his last few days. He’d gone sailing with his wife and another couple, but a bad tin of salmon introduced botulism to his companions. They died one at a time, and now his damned boat is sinking, and he thought he was going to die. John and Rae welcome him aboard. However, something about his story doesn’t quite add up—especially since he refuses to let anyone go aboard his old vessel, claiming there’s nothing to salvage and no reason for anyone to go. This last really gets under John’s skin. So when a wind finally manifests, and they have the opportunity to get to land, he instead turns toward the other ship and boards her.
When he discovers a plethora of useable equipment onboard, his suspicions are vindicated. When he discovers two survivors, Mr. Bellew and Mrs. Warriner, locked in a cabin aboard the sinking ship, his dread intensifies. Especially when the Saracen‘s engines roar to life with Warriner at the helm, carrying John’s wife and yacht toward distant land.
What follows is a taut tale of John and the survivors struggling to get their boat seaworthy again—or as close as possible—and then setting after Warriner’s trail. Will John catch up in time? Will Rae figure out her own plan to take control of the ship and return for her husband? Or will Warriner wind up committing cold blooded murder to save his own hide?
Charles Williams clearly has experience with sailing. It shines through every page of Dead Calm, giving readers a sense of verisimilitude that is hard to deny. The novel itself is a blend of high seas adventure and crime yarns (a specialty of the author’s), and while the language is meticulous and infused with both deft details, sharply observed dialogue, and lush descriptions, the book still maintains a pretty good sense of pace once it shifts from a becalmed experience to a race against time. Nevertheless, there is a more languid quality to the exercise than, say, in the two-fisted detective yarns or taut heist stories that populate the public eye as the length and breadth of the crime and thriller tradition. This is a thriller in the old sense, a book that actually offers the joy of adventure in an exotic location, peopled with more or less normal folks who have specialized skills that have nothing to do with killing other people. It’s a tale of everyday folks caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and Williams’ narrative is a wildly propulsive one as well as a beautifully controlled. The book is written with joy, but the craft is solid as well.
In fact, Dead Calm is a sequel to one of Williams’ earlier works. 1960’s Aground told the story of how John Ingram and Rae Osbourne met and had an adventure. She hired him to help recover a vanished schooner, which turns out to be a lure into suspenseful adventure. Having read that book offers more insights into the characters of the two protagonists here, of course. However, Williams is a canny enough writer to know how to write a book that works double duty, first as a cracking tale of tension and suspense that can stand on its own two legs and secondarily as a sequel. There is a brief recap of their earlier adventure in Chapter 10, more or less of a tease that invites readers to seek out that other book.
One of Williams’ nicest touches is his presentation of female characters. We never get the sense that Rae is a damsel in distress. She’s in trouble, sure, but she has the cleverness and grit necessary to find some ways to get herself clear. Likewise, the lone female survivor on the Orpheus. Mrs. Warriner has a past with Hughie, and she fulfilled his yearning and need for a mother figure. But she is canny, capable. Not necessarily in the sea environment the find themselves in, but she’s got strength and character to spare. There’s not a single femme fatale in this entire book, which is a refreshing change.
The villain of the piece could easily have been another Norman Bates-type character (particularly as it appears in the wake of Bloch’s successful Psycho and Hitchcock’s wildly successful screen adaptation). Instead, he’s psychologically troubled man who is much more infantile. Hughie refuses to take responsibility for any of his actions, claiming others force him to behave the way he does. He’s not an evil man, he’s just a broken one, and presented with the right notes of sympathy. Rae soon discovers that the only way to defeat him is actually to understand what makes him tick and use his weaknesses against him.
Williams’ novel certainly has both legs and a cinematic quality. Orson Welles started the process of a film adaptation to be called The Deep in the late ’60s, but he was unable to complete the picture (which would have starred Welles, Jeanne Moreau, and Laurence Harvey). It would have made a swell source for a Hitchcockian flick in that era, as well. However, it would not be until 1989 when the book saw a cinematic release. Dead Calm stars Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, and Billy Zane, rewriting the thing to be a three-person story and therefore excising the other survivors. I remember when the movie came out (though I didn’t see it at the time) because the back covers of all the Marvel comics I read at the time featured the movie poster, with Nicole Kidman’s face half submerged and gazing in fright …
Dead Calm is a cleverly constructed thriller with a real sense of stakes, a good head for the kinds of dangers to be found on the open sea, and a steady narrative. A solid read in the Hitchcockian tradition of thrillers …
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Dead Calm is available in eBook and audiobook editions. It is also included in Crime Novels: Five Classic Thrillers from 1961-1964, which is available in eBook and hardcover editions.
The title for this piece comes from the song, “Man Overboard” by Puscifer, which is available on the Conditions of my Parole album.
Next, we will take a look at Dorothy B. Hughes’ noirish novel, The Expendable Man., which tells the tale of a young Black doctor stopping for a hitchhiker and winding up to his neck in troubles. In addition to its inclusion in the aforementioned Library of America volume, it is available in eBook and paperback editions.
“Poseidon’s On a Mission/About to Turn It Up to Eleven: Charles Williams’ Dead Calm” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Cover image taken from the Library of America hardcover omnibus edition, released in 2023. Cover image taken from the Viking hardcover edition, released 1963.
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