HMS Surprise- The movie version

For that matter, I'd love to see a kit of the Interceptor from Pirates of the Carribean.

 I could go for that kit, "Pirates" was one of the more enjoyable movies of the genre.

I just might print out this whole thread, and keep it with the finished model. In reality there were too many "surprises", and, as has been mentioned here and elsewhere, there was more than one "surprise" in the movie, each with some detail variance. While it makes building a model difficult, it also makes criticizing difficult. I guess I could be accused of taking the easy way out, bulding the ship based on the movie. I am about to begin masking the hull so I can shoot the second color. This will not be easy.

Pete

Pete,

You know what might be fun? Make the Surprise the way she looked after her first encounter with the Acheron! I'll bet the battle damage would be (if you'll pardon the pun) a real blast to do.

I've always thought it odd that most people consider weathering practically mandatory for tanks and war planes, but wooden sailing ships get a free pass -- they are expected to look almost pristine.

Oh well. Enjoy the build and please post some photos.

Regards,

You know what might be fun? Make the Surprise the way she looked after her first encounter with the Acheron! I'll bet the battle damage would be (if you'll pardon the pun) a real blast to do.

  OK, if it doesn't turn out to my liking, I'll take it out to the range, and see if my Dad's .22 rifle is still accurate.

sumpter250 wrote:

You know what might be fun? Make the Surprise the way she looked after her first encounter with the Acheron! I'll bet the battle damage would be (if you'll pardon the pun) a real blast to do.   OK, if it doesn't turn out to my liking, I'll take it out to the range, and see if my Dad's .22 rifle is still accurate.

Ha! That's one way to do it.

What I had in mind was a bit more subtle than that. I've read a number of articles in FSM about simulating bullet holes and battle damage in planes and tanks. I think simulating damage to the hull would be difficult, but not impossible. There's an excellent video of a reproduction of part of the Brig Lawrence getting shot up by a real cannon here. It looks like hole in the outside of the hull are pretty small. Notice too the damage caused by grapeshot.

Damage to masts, spars, and rigging would probably be easier. I love how, in the movie, the Surprise is listing and looking oh so forelorn.

It would be an interesting project -- one that I may try someday.

Regards,

  For me it was first the Hornblower books when I was in junior high and then I discovered Bolitho by Alexander Kent ( Douglas Reeman ) and I was hooked. Hornblower , Bolitho, Ramage, Drinkwater all are carbon copies of each other character wise but each story is excellent. Right now I`m leaning to Dudley Pope`s Ramage ,story wise, as they are excellent stories. O`Brian`s Aubrey is a different character in the fact that he is after prize money and is willing to be a little on the sly side where the other characters are the more honorable kind who wouldn`t do anything to bring dishonor on their name, ship, or crew...... something sorely lacking today. The O`Brian books are great in that they bring a different kind of captain and it`s refreshing to read them. I read the first book in the series in anticipation of the movie only to be totally confused in the story because it didn`t match what I had read. Both my son and I were wondering what this story was only to find out later it was the tenth story in the series, not the first. The movie , for me, was excellent and my wife and family loved it. I can only hope they make more of them. The Hornblower movie of the 50`s was excellent , for it`s time. Yeah, they fudged a little on the story line, but that was Hollywood in the 50`s. ( A good example is "Captain from Castille " ...... it`s only half the story, the book is one of the best I`ve ever read !!! ) So give them a break...... times have changed and be glad they made an effort. It`s a job well done.,......

I agree with Armchair Sailor on all points - with the tiny caveat that Hornblower appeared a generation before Bolitho, Ramage, and Drinkwater.  The first Hornblower book, Beat to Quarters (British title:  The Happy Return) was published, I believe, in 1937.  If I remember correctly, the other series started in the sixties.  Forester, of course, was by no means the founder of the Napoleonic naval fiction genre.  I think that title goes to Capt. Frederick Marryat, who was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars himself.

I'm a big Dudley Pope fan.  My only regret is that, probably for financial reasons, he wrote so much more fiction than non-fiction - because his non-fiction books are pretty terrific.  I particularly recommend Decision at Trafalgar, The Great Gamble:  Nelson at Copenhagen, The Black Ship, and At Twelve Mr. Byng Was Shot.  Pope's World War II books are good, too.  Graf Spee:  The Life and Death of a Raider (British title:  The Battle of the River Plate) ought to be required reading for anybody building a model of that ship, and 73 North:  The Defeat of Hitler's Navy is a remarkable story of a decisive convoy action between British destroyers and German heavy surface units on the Murmansk run.  First-rate stuff.  Pope knew how to do his research, and he knew how to write - a regrettably rare combination of skills.

           I have to agree with that also . My father had a collection of the Hornblower books on the shelf ( remember the teak colored hardbacks ? )  when I was a boy and I also read "Beat to Quarters"  first. For me , I read " To Glory We Steer " by Kent after the Hornblower series.... found it by accident in a pharmacy book rack.( late 60`s ). What a great movie that would make........  a mutinous crew and a second officer who doesn`t trust you........... ah the story good movies are made from. The next 4 books are some of the best in the series and some of the best ever written. Just my opinion.

A couple of new pics, with paint:

 a port bow shot,

 

and the transom.

yeah, I got the waterline climbing up under the counter. I'll get that corrected before I shoot the bottom color.

Very nice!

Thanks for sharing the photos.

Regards,

Peter,

This is turning into a beautiful model. It would impossible to guess its pedigree from the photos.

Have you figured out what you are going to do for deadyes and lanyards yet?

Dude, you da Man! Those gallery windows are beautiful! Please keep posting pics, this is really inspirational!

 

Weasel

Have you figured out what you are going to do for deadyes and lanyards yet?

  I currently plan on using the cast deadeye/lanyard from the kit, removing the cast shrouds, and rigging new ones around the cast upper deadeye. Likewise, I can attach the chainplates to the lower deadeyes, and fasten the chainplate to the hull with escutcheon pins, or brass wire. I'll try to take pictures of the process and post them.

Pete

Hmmmm, The "chainplates" on the cast deadeyes, are just a bit brittle. Go to plan "B", build new chainplate connections to the lower deadeyes...........Plan "C"?.....scratchbuild all new deadeyes. One of the things that's come to light is the placement of the deadeyes, and chainplates, on the rail,and hull. The original kit had the chainplates, in some places, bent around the gunports.....They cannot be "bent", and they can't interfere with the opening of the gunports. Looks like I will have to move them...Ahhh, the joys of kitbashing.

I got my copy of " The Making Of Master and Commander, the far side of the world". I didn't get all that I could have wanted, but there is a lot of good information there, and a lot of detail can be gotten out of the photos..   The piece of copper I've had soaking in a sea salt solution for the last week or so, hasn't shown any sign of discoloring yet. There is a nice color photo, in the book, that shows the full size tank model of "surprise" on its gimbal, while the tank is being filled. The copper bottom is turning the typical "green". Unless my little experiment shows other, I will probably weather the bottom according to this photo. The book also indicates that "lefthand laid", or "cable laid" line is used in the rigging. There is one photo where this line can be seen. I'll have to very carefully search all the photos, to see where it has been used.....I might have to finally build a "ropewalk", so I can build the "cable laid" rigging lines.

Pete

Pete:

A word of warning about the rigging line. Be careful to note how the thread is laid up before you use it to make rigging line. I am not certain, but I think that the commercially available prewaxed thread that is commonly available is already left hand laid.

Russ

 

 

Russ,

   I'll have to check that out. Your caution is well worth noting. If you are going to "make rope", you have to be aware of the "lay" of the material you are using. Right laid line requires left laid strands, and vice versa.

Pete

In the British navy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cable-laid rope was generally used for standing rigging.  (Cable-laid rope is spun up left-handed; that is to say, if you look at a piece of it running vertically, the strands go up and to the left.)  The shrouds, lower stays, and some other extremely large lines were shroud-laid, which is the same as cable-laid but with four strands instead of three.  (To the modeler that's not terribly relevant, unless the observor can see and count the ends of the strands.)  Running rigging, with some exceptions, was generally hawser-laid (i.e., right-handed)Almost all the commercial thread I've encountered is hawser-laid.  At least one specialist company produced cable-laid linen line specially for ship modelers a few years ago; I'm not sure whether it's still available or not.

I've made a considerable amount of rope over the past thirty years or so (using a couple of incredibly crude but perfectly workable "rope-making machines), and I've never worried much about the lay of the raw material.  If the lay of the individual strands is wrong, the first thing that will happen is that the "rope-making machine" will unlay them and twist them up in the other direction.  The amount of time for making an individual piece of rope will thereby be increased a little, but the result will be fine.

I used to use silk thread, which was available in a couple of diameters from good sewing stores back in the Goode Olde Dayes, but I haven't been able to find a good source of it lately.  On my last model I used the "cotton/poly mix" stuff from Model Shipways, and was pretty satisfied with it.  It has a nice, rope-like texture and a believable color.  It's hawser-laid (at least all the spools of it I bought are). 

Patrick O'Brain may not have been entirely consistent in everything he said about his fictional Surprise.   But it is worth noting that he repeatedly came back to one absolute distinguishing characteristic of his fictional Surprise:

The fictional surprise was a 28 gun frigate of French build.   She however had a standard 32 gun frigate's main mast.  This made her profile highly distinctive and somewhat lopsided.    O'Brian went out of his way to describe how Jack Aubrey had it installed off South America shortly after he first took command of her, during a trip to the East Indies,  in the book HMS Surprise.     From that time onwards, the fictional Surprise would carry the big main mast until she sails into the sun set in Blue at the Mizzen.

In between, he came back to this point again and again.   It was there in the Ionian Mission, where even the landlubber Maturin, who was normally unable to distinguish a frigate from a sloop, or a Brig from a Snow,  swiftly distinguished the joyful Surprise from any other vessel by her oversized main mast, despite the fact that the Surprise was  now under someone else's command, painted blue and otherwise looking totally different from when he say her last.
 
The lopsided Main Mast was there again in The Far Side of the World, and the NutMeg of Consolation, and the True Love, and the Blue at Mizzen.   On several more occasions, temporary characters were able to instantly recognize the Surprise by her unforgettably oversized main mast.  Clearly, the lopsided mast was not merely a plot device concocted to add color to one book.    It was meant to set forth a defining characteristic of Aubrey's favorite ship throught out the entire serie.

Now let us look at where O'Brain may have gotten the idea for this lopsided main mast.   Surprise!   The is only one real HMS Surprise that also had a lop sided 34 gun frigate's main mast.   In fact that real surprise was the only British frigate we know of that permanent shipped a non-standard, outsized mainmast belonging to ships one rate above her own.

Given that O'Brain chooses to endow the fictional Surprise with a extraordinary trait shared by just one ship of exactly the same name from the real Royal Navy, can there really be any doubt about which was the Surprise O'Brian meant to protray in his masterful serie, despite occasional artistic licenses and accuracy lapses?

"Geoff Hunt Cover Art:

 The Truelove

 1. Shows ship’s boats on davits at stern and on starboard quarter (and, presumably, larboard quarter), ca. 1813-1814"

In several books leading up to the True Love, O'Brain explicitly said the shape of Surprise's quarter precluded the installation of the new fangled quarter davits.

BTW, Historical events would place Fortunes of War at 1812, and the hundred days in 1815.    Does anyone besides me think Patrick O'Brian lost track of time between those two books?   Come on.   In those 3 years from 1812 and 1815, Aubrey, Maturin and the Surprise circumnavigated the world twice, morooned on a East Indies pirate island once, marooned on a uninhabited south sea island once,  mounted a land expedition in Arabia once, deployed to the Baltic once, captured by the French and sent to imprisonment in Paris once, escaped from France back to England once, got deployed to the Mediterranean twice, deployed to the red sea once, and Aubrey got struck off the list once, elected to the parliment once, and reinstated onto the navt list once.   It is not every century when all these things can be accomplished in just under 3 years!

Just exactly in keeping with the recent post in this thread stating that the Surprise of these novels is only a feature built in O'Brian's and our imaginations, time is also kidnapped in these novels.

In the Author's Notes opening "The Far Side of the World", O'Brian discusses how much history he packs into 1812, and how he is populating an 1812, an 1812a and an 1812b.

Yup - he sure does get more than twelve months out of each year, but it's only fiction, and we like it, don't we?

Rick

jtilley wrote:

O'Brian was a novelist - an intensely knowledgable but highly eccentric one, to say the least.  I'm not the least surprised (oops) that he changed some details of the ship to suit his own purposes.  What does surprise me, in fact, is that he picked an actual ship to put in his fictitious stories.  C.S. Forester didn't do that.  Real ships occasionally poke their bowsprits into the Hornblower books (Hornblower was court-martialed on board H.M.S. Victory), but the Atropos, Hotspur, Renown, Lydia, Sutherland, Witch of Endor, etc. are all purely fictitious.  (Somebody may find one or more of those names attached to a ship somewhere in the history of the Royal Navy, but Forester clearly didn't intend any such association.)

Actually, before he was a noted novalist, Patrick O'Brain was first an outstanding science historian, and a noted biographer of the great British naturalist Sir Joseph Banks of that same era.    You can detect traces of this in in the Aubrey/Maturin novals through his repeated references to Sir Joseph Banks .   You might suspect that O'Brain knows more about the Royal Society and sir Joseph Banks than mortal men should by his casual references to the entire network of social contacts amongst the learned societies of Europe.

This first interest of his easily account his insistence on weaving his plot through as much real history as possible.  It can account for the odd digression into such historical obscurities as Sir Edmond Halley's diving bell.   It can also easily account for his evidently considered decision to make Maturin's natural philosphical interests such a cornerstone of the entire series, and his clearly awesome knowledge of the state of  biological, medical and taxonomical sciences in ~1800.    This is also what distinguished his work from those of CS Forester's.   O'Brain is first a keen and erudite historian and natural observer by temperment, and is second a philosophical analyzer.   Only a distant third is he a historical fantasicist.   This is the reverse of Forester, who is above all a historical fantacist.  Even to his imaginary world of high sailing O'Brian applies an natural philosopher's universally observant eye.   Even for the readers reading about his imaginary sailing world, he leaves nothing to imagination.    The imaginary literay world he creates in above all immersive, and riven through and through with subtle and hsitorical details.   Only secondarily is it very memorable and exciting.   

QUOTE:

BTW, Historical events would place Fortunes of War at 1812, and the hundred days in 1815.    Does anyone besides me think Patrick O'Brian lost track of time between those two books?   Come on.   In those 3 years from 1812 and 1815, Aubrey, Maturin and the Surprise circumnavigated the world twice, morooned on a East Indies pirate island once, marooned on a uninhabited south sea island once,  mounted a land expedition in Arabia once, deployed to the Baltic once, captured by the French and sent to imprisonment in Paris once, escaped from France back to England once, got deployed to the Mediterranean twice, deployed to the red sea once, and Aubrey got struck off the list once, elected to the parliment once, and reinstated onto the navt list once.   It is not every century when all these things can be accomplished in just under 3 years!

Many O'Brian fans refer to this as the LONG year of 1813. O'Brian notes in the preface to The Far Side of the World that if he had known he would end up writing a series (and FSOTW is only #10 of 20) instead of just one novel he would have made better use of the historical time scale, e.g. started earlier. He stays historically accurate up till about 1812, but then necessarily departs from from it after. It is, after all, fiction.

P.S.: How does one quote somebody in the yellow box on this board? I can't figure it out.

 

I respect O'Brian and I've enjoyed the five or six of his books that I've read.  I do not worship him the way some of his readers do.  He was an expert in the use of the language (on a certain level), and extremely knowledgeable about many, many aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European history.  He also was a supreme egotist and an extreme eccentric.  His books strike me largely as exercises in self-indulgence.  He apparently would get an idea (about a character, an event, or some concept that for some reason to appealed to him - like a man walking around in a bear skin, or a three-toed sloth getting drunk), and would spend page after page writing about it until he happened to get tired of it.  Then he would drop the subject and go on to something else.  Characters sometimes appear in and disappear from O'Brian novels almost arbitrarily.

He also had a fascination for long-winded sentences.  I've counted the words in a few of them; the totals sometimes exceeed 150.  Apparently he had the notion that the "eighteenth-century cadence," as I've heard it called, was advanced by such linguistic monstrosities.  Maybe it was, in the hands of Jonathan Swift or Daniel Defoe.  O'Brian was neither.  To my ear his page-long sentences are nuisances.  If one of my students turned in such a thing I'd hand it back and tell him to start over.

On more than one occasion, though, I've been on the verge of tossing an O'Brian book aside when he's opened a new scene - a storm at sea, for example - that really grabs me with its eloquence.  There are some examples of outstanding literature in those books.  I just wish they weren't puncuated with so much ideosyncratic silliness.  Some of O'Brian's readers admire him so much that they're willing to go along for the ride wherever he takes them.  I just haven't been able to do that.  I'm sure his description of what it feels like to walk around for several days inside a bear skin is accurate, but I don't think that knowledge has added much to my life.

O'Brian was a good writer and an expert on his subject matter; his books certainly are worth reading.    But I just can't join those who worship him as a near-deity.  I've read repeatedly that comment from the New York Times critic who called the O'Brian books "the best historical novels ever written."  I have to wonder how many historical novels that critic had read.  Had he ever heard of Sir Walter Scott?  Or Arthur Conan Doyle?  Or Leo Tolstoy?  Or, for that matter, Charles Dickens? 

C.S. Forester lived in a different era, and had to appeal to a different audience.  (Most of the Hornblower books were first published as serials in the Saturday Evening Post. )  In my opinion Forester handled the English language far better than O'Brian did; you won't find 150-word sentences in any Forester book.  Forester also made his share of mistakes.  (The bomb ketches in Commodore Hornblower didn't resemble anything in use by the Royal Navy in 1812.)  Many of the books that O'Brian obviously consulted didn't exist in Forester's day.  But Forester knew how to develop characters, he knew how to construct a coherent plot (better than O'Brian did, in my opinion), and he knew how to tell a good story in a way that entertained his readers while simultaneously educating them.  And Forester never crammed two years' worth of events into one calendar year. 

I wouldn't want to label either of those authors "better" than the other overall; they represent extremely different, and, I suppose, legitimate approaches to the genre.

I'm firmly one of the O'Brian camp. I truly enjoy his characterizations of the main characters in the books. I love how he handles their relationships, changes of fortunes, and foibles.

I read Forester's Flying Colours and agree with Mr. Tilley that it was well-written. My major problem was that I just didn't like Hornblower. His constant internal dialog and self-doubts got old pretty quickly. After a while, I started to hope that the French would find him and execute him PDQ.

Then the way the novel wrapped up the situation with Hornblower's wife, child, and lover left a very bad taste in my mouth. At least Aubrey suffers some nasty consequences when he strays.

Oh well, Amazon.com states that this is the "most introspective of the Hornblower novels." Maybe I picked the wrong book to introduce myself to the series.

The other thing that I like about the Aubrey/Maturin books is that they make me laugh out loud. Few novels do that for me.

Regards,

   The only authors, whose writings pertained to the sea, that I've read are Melville, and Robert Louis Stevenson. My love of the sea, and ships, has been with me since earliest memory. I learned to swim in the surf on the south shore of Long Island, and learned to sail in an eight foot yacht dinghy. I had the distinct pleasure of taking the helm of a 68 foot 77 ton coastal schooner, built in 1871 (and still sailing), and handling her sails (going out on the sprit footropes, and taking in the jib is still one of my favorite memories.....right up there with the look on that engineer's face when I started, and stopped his steam locomotive, after he'd challenged me to do so).  My twentyone years in the Navy were only natural for me, there was much about being at sea that was, for me, enjoyable. There's something to be said for standing on a 376' X 40', 2200 ton sliver of steel in the middle of the Atlantic, and watching "mountains" being thrown at you. The canopy of the heavens, threehundredsixty by onehundredeighty degrees, on an otherwise dark night, every star shining brightly and clearly. The tops of the waves, blown wavetop to wavetop, so that the sea looks flat, while beneath what the eyes see, the violence of a full blown Atlantic gale can only be felt in the pitching and rolling of the ship. In a full dark, overcast night, approaching, and steaming through a single vertical column of silver light made by the full moon shining through the only hole in the clouds. Even in the midst of the most violent and destructive force, the sea posseses a beauty that has to be experienced to be truly appreciated. Rarely have I read anything that conveys that overwhelming feeling, that "being there" can bring. A novelist's words, however finely crafted just don't quite compare to what I've experienced. Cinematography comes close. Master and Commander, as a motion picture, rekindled many of my memories of the sea. Yes, I could pick nits, but rather, I'll simply enjoy the positives, and forget that some of the nuances were not there. So it is, that the ship I know from the film, is the ship I'll build in miniature........too bad that so much cannot be "built", and has to be imagined by whoever should see the finished model.

jtilley wrote:

His books strike me largely as exercises in self-indulgence.  He gets an idea (about a character, an event, or some concept that seemd for some reason to appeal to him - like a man walking around in a bear skin, or a three-toed sloth getting drunk), and would spend page after page writing about it until he happened to get tired of it.  Then he would drop the subject and go on to something else.  Characters sometimes appear in and disappear from O'Brian novels almost arbitrarily.

O'Brian is a reflective observer, someone who fleshes out the world to the smallest details with reveries and elaborate, ruminating prose rather than leaving it a purposeful skeleton of single minded staccato sentences.   His caters to different tastes than that which would appreciate a Tom Clancy novel.

O'Brian clearly devoted more to the first 7 books than he did to the rest.    The first seven books seems individually planned, carefully paced, and meant to be able to stand alone.    From Ionian Command onwards, one could detect that less and less careful thought went into each books.   The books became increasingly just installments in a long running story that prepetuates itself heedless of the passage of time around it.  He was increasingly relying on his linguistic grace and knowledge of the times to churn out more books.   He became more willing to take digression (like the silly episold of Aubrey and Maturin falling overboard and being rescued by a Canoe full of Polynesian women) just to revel in how much of that world he knows.   By and large, even those books still stand high next to any sailing naval advantures ever written.    But the first 7 were clearly core of the series.

By the time O'Brian got halfway through the series he was an elderly man (he was 86 years old when he died, with the last novel in progress), with a massive following of worshipful groupies and a publisher who, presumably, was prepared to offer him an enormous cash advance for anything he wanted to write.  Under such circumstances it's certainly understandable that he indulged himself. 

 Lufbery - Flying Colours is probably my least-favorite of the Forester novels.  The plot and characters probably wouldn't have much appeal to anybody who hadn't read at least the preceding book in the series, Ship of the Line.  If I had to recommend one to start with, it probably would be Beat to Quarters (British title:  The Happy Return), the first one he wrote.  On the other hand, there's a great deal of pleasure to be gained by reading the books in "series order," in which case one would start with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.  That one reads like a series of short stories (which is how it was originally published in the Post), but it's great fun and a fine introduction to the subject.  The second book in the series, Lieutenant Hornblower, is one of my very favorites.

One other big difference between Forester and O'Brian:  O'Brian was notoriously reclusive (to the point of inventing a past history for himself), and revealed scarcely anything about how he happened to write the books.  Forester, late in his life, published a book called The Hornblower Companion, in which he gave lots of interesting insights into how the mind of a novelist in those days worked.  (A childhood encounter with a family friend from the Continent who wrote the numeral 7 with a bar across it, for instance, led to an encounter with a French privateer in Hornblower and the Atropos.)  And he announced, with tongue firmly in cheek, that Hornblower was the first adulterer to appear in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post.   Apparently Commodore Hornblower's one-page rendezvous with the Russian countess caused something of a stir among the Post's editors.

For what it's worth, I am not a fan of Tom Clancy.  I read The Hunt for Red October during a hospital stay, and it was just the thing to keep my mind occupied under some rather unpleasant circumstances.  And I rather enjoyed Red Storm Rising - especially the conclusion, wherein the Soviet military professionals are revealed to have a clearer understanding of the horrors of war than the politicians do.  But Clancy doesn't  belong in the same category as either Forester or O'Brian.

On the strength of that recommendation, I'll give Forester another try (or two).

Regards,

Sumpter 250 - you owe it to yourself to try Joseph Conrad.  Of the nautical authors with whom I'm familiar, he ranks at the top.  Unfortunately for us, sea stories actually make up only a small portion of his output.  But the imagery in Typhoon, Youth, and The Nigger of the Narcissus is unforgettable - and I think any trained literature expert (which I'm not) would agree that they outclass any of the works we've been discussing in this thread.  I venture to predict that a hundred years from now, neither Forester, O'Brian, or Clancy will be on the required reading lists for graduate literature courses.  Conrad will. 

What makes Conrad's style especially remarkable - if not downright unbelievable - is that his native language was not English but Polish.  He adopted the English nation, and the British merchant marine, as his home in his adulthood; how he managed to acquire such an ear for the subtleties of his second language I can't imagine.  And he did it without writing 150-word sentences.

jtilley wrote:

For what it's worth, I am not a fan of Tom Clancy.  I read The Hunt for Red October during a hospital stay, and it was just the thing to keep my mind occupied under some rather unpleasant circumstances.  And I rather enjoyed Red Storm Rising - especially the conclusion, wherein the Soviet military professionals are revealed to have a clearer understanding of the horrors of war than the politicians do.  But Clancy doesn't  belong in the same category as either Forester or O'Brian.

 

I agree with about that.  I have read all his Jack Ryan books, but they got to be so ridiculous that I just gave up on his ability to create a worthwhile story (Case in point:The Bear and The Dragon).  I did like Without Remorse and Clear and Present Danger though.  Rainbow 6 is also one of my favorites, if he ever picked up on writing a novel exclusively about the Rainbow 6 unit, I would pick that one up.  My dislike of Clancy however stems from a phone call when he was on some show and taking questions.  I had the (mis)pleasure of trying to get through for an hour to ask a simple question about his empire other than novels.  Well he didn't want to go in that direction and completely blew me off by just cutting the line with a "I don't know anything about that." 

I came to the conclusion that unless one has a military background or celebrity status, he doesn't want to give a fan the time of day.

Sumpter 250 - you owe it to yourself to try Joseph Conrad.  Of the nautical authors with whom I'm familiar, he ranks at the top.

Thankyou John, I will have to do that. I have found little to disagree with you on, so I look forward to what should prove excellent reading. Now let's see, library card.......oh yes, there, under that fifty pound pile of cob webs, along with most of my unbuilt kits.

Pete