ALEXANDER FULLERTON novels

NOT THINKING OF DEATH

Blurbs

"It is regretted that hope of saving lives ...
must be abandoned"
Admiralty signal to C-in-C Plymouth at 16.10 on 3.6.39

As the shadow of Nazism descends on Europe, and Britain at last begins to prepare her defences, trials for the first of a new class of submarine are taking place in the mouth of the Clyde.
Royal Navy submariner Rufus Chalk, on board as an observer of the trials, has one or two misgivings. The bow-cap indicators in the torpedo-tube compartment have been playing up during construction, and on this first dive in the open sea with twice the boat's normal complement on board - shipbuilders' representatives and technicians as well as naval observers like Chalk - if there were an accident the air supply would last only half as long as normal.

NOT THINKING OF DEATH is a novel stemming from historical fact - the loss of H.M.Submarine Thetis in Liverpool Bay in 1939, with 99 men inside her. Salvaged and refitted, Thetis went to war as H.M.S/m. Thunderbolt - and was sunk with all hands in the Mediterranean in 1943. Alexander Fullerton's story is a vivid evocation of those pre-war and early wartime years, and of the effects on the lives and loves of characters intimately involved in a tragedy that shook the nation.

The author

Alexander Fullerton is well-qualified to write novels with a naval background; he comes from a naval family, and went to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at the age of 13 in 1937. He went to sea as a midshipman at the end of 1941, serving first in the Mediterranean — in the battleship Queen Elizabeth, cruiser Orion and destroyer Hero, before joining submarines at Malta — and later in the North Sea and Far East; he ended the war as a lieutenant with a mention-indespatches for distinguished service. He resigned from the navy in 1949, and worked for ten years in South Africa. During this period, he had his first novel published — SURFACE! — based on his experience as gunnery and torpedo officer on the submarine Seadog. SURFACE! has so far sold nearly a million copies around the world. Since his return to England in 1958, he has published other kinds of fiction — including the novels CHIEF EXECUTIVE, THE PUBLISHER and OTHER MEN'S WIVES — but is now `back at sea' for good.