If there's a gun, someone gets shot.

If there's a ship, much of the time it sinks.

It's a WEIRD book. BUT the "All people are connected" theme was 60 years ahead of it's time. In the 1990s we got six or seven movies with that interconnected story line structure.

It relates directly to Yondering and has to be seen as a "Yondering Universe" book. It's LL doing the OPPOSITE of everything he did later in his career. Yondering was a continuum of stores that were all theme and character and atmosphere but short on linear plot; the sort of plot where you read to find out the next thing that happens in the plot.

I don't think that LL could have made a living writing this sort of stuff (in fact he DIDN'T make a living doing it and that's why he started with the pulp stories) BUT before the paperback original took over in the 1950s, to write novels you had to produce work that was more "literary" than the stuff that sold to the pulps to get published as a novelist. So this was a step in the right direction.

Dad wrote a lot of characters that you SUSPECT are interesting ... but the details are sketchy. That is typical of paperback original writing and writers in the 1950s to 1990s era (though it's a tendency more typical of old pulp guys who worked the beginning that time period). In NTR Dad wrote a few, Con O'Brien for one, who have real, carefully spelled out, depth and are, let's face it, interestingly odd. He never came back to that as fully and it's too bad.

That said, I was part of making that work but the bones of it, the ambition to write those very different and carefully delineated characters was there in the original manuscript. In 1938 I don't think Dad had the background to connect with a professional race car driver whereas I'm kind of a gear head and had a professional driver for an uncle.

A lot of what I do on these projects is take an idea of Dad's and make it RICH, then make it serve the story in some deeper way. Dad ended this novel with "S.K." instead of "The End." I had no idea what that meant and he didn't explain it. Doing some research I discovered it can stand for Silent Key ... though whether Dad meant it that way I do not know for sure. Typical of what I do in these cases, one of the things I did was to expand the "Silent Key" aspect (it's a term Radiomen use like "R.I.P.") and invent the character of Fritz Schumann's son, who is radio telegraph operator on the Matson Liner. I worked in that though no one spoke English on his home island Schumann sent him a Boy's Book of Morse Code. Eventually, he became an RTO and very nearly witnessed his father's death but missed it, finally shutting down the station, and the novel, with an S.K.

It's inaccurate in that I suspect marine RTO's on passenger ships never went "off the air" while at sea but it allowed that nice idea of ending with S.K. instead of The End to work and have some connection to the larger "all people are connected" theme.

It's a book that gives you a lot to think about if you take the little bits seriously. Dad would mention things like machine learning, synchronicity, how people around the world are connected by cargoes and radio and X many degrees of separation. But he never really PLAYED or OPENLY EXPLORED ideas as completely again. For a casual reader it's a middling novel from a past century. For a LL fan it's a unique exhibit!

Relating to the various quandaries we find ourselves in today -- events like the disaster that ends the story are what MEN are FOR. Slug doesn't so much "man up" as get focused into his role as a sailor. Though some of this crew are not exemplary characters I wanted to express something that was likely not ever a question when Dad wrote this -- the men who do this sort of work are there to manage a crisis. Even the scumbags know their job.