On the Beach

My mind often wanders these days and alights on all sorts of random memories. Perhaps it was that we were actually walking on one that brought back Nevil Shute's late 1950s novel 'On the Beach'. At a time when we were all expecting that the world might end in a cataclysm at any day, it was a profoundly disturbing book. For those who haven't read it, the story described the thoughts and actions of a group of Australians at the end of World War III, when all the rest of the human world had been destroyed and a huge radioactive cloud was heading their way.

I read all of Nevil Shute's novels, of which 'A Town Like Alice' is probably best know, and many of which were turned into films. He, Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean became my favourite novelists and, when I began writing novels, I tried to write as they had done, with uncomplicated story lines and honourable heroes in an often rotten world, but with more vivid description.

It is a regret that the books I wrote which were most like those of these three authors weren't published while two much more graphically violent ones were.