The Shelf No One Has Filled

I was twelve years old when my father pulled a book off a library shelf and changed everything.

He was worried I read only non-fiction — history, mostly, which I devoured. So he handed me Beat to Quarters by C.S. Forester and told me to try it. I could not put it down. Within weeks I had consumed everything Forester had written about Horatio Hornblower. Then came Patrick O'Brian, whose Jack Aubrey novels redefined what nautical fiction could be. Then Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, spare and devastating. Then Richard McKenna's The Sand Pebbles, a story of a gunboat and the men who loved her more than they understood.

I became, in other words, exactly the kind of reader I now hope to reach.

Here is what I noticed, decades later, when I began thinking about writing my own naval fiction: the shelf is not evenly stocked.

The Age of Sail is beautifully covered. Forester and O'Brian alone could occupy a reader for years. World War II is well-served — P.T. Deutermann has done excellent work there, as have Edward Beach with Run Silent, Run Deep, and the novels that gave us Das Boot and The Enemy Below. The Cold War has Tom Clancy, whose The Hunt for Red October remains the gold standard for submarine fiction.

But World War I? The naval war of 1914 to 1918, with its cruiser hunts and wireless intelligence and colonial outposts and the last gasps of an older kind of warfare — that shelf is nearly empty.

That is not because the war lacked for drama. The destruction of German Pacific squadrons, the cat-and-mouse of commerce raiding, the early experiments with wireless telegraphy as both a weapon and a vulnerability — the material is extraordinary. It simply has not been written, at least not in the way it deserves.

The Morse Chronicles is my attempt to fill that shelf. If you loved Hornblower and Aubrey, if you have read everything Deutermann has written and are looking for something set a generation earlier — I am writing for you.

The war of 1914 is waiting. Come find it.