Hammond Innes

For a start, the author of 35 thrillers and adventure novels was essentially a journalist, who meticulously researched the material for his books and whose characters, while they got into all sorts of dreadful trouble, were very human.

He was also an enthusiastic environmentalist, or more accurately tree planter, an interest which, a number of observers have pointed out, sat rather oddly with someone whose book sales must have been responsible for mass tree slaughter.

He once said that books were ''nothing but timber with squiggles on'', adding that he had no idea how many trees he may have been responsible for destroying, and

didn't want to know. The point was he tried to do something to replace the forestry his thrillers consumed, covering large areas of Wales, Suffolk, and Australia with plantations.

Ralph Hammond Innes was born in Horsham, Sussex, the son of a bank manager, and began his career as a journalist on the Financial News, which later became the Financial Times. He wrote children's books under the name Ralph Hammond, while adopting Hammond Innes for his thrillers.

His writing career began in 1940 when he joined the army, serving in the Royal Artillery until 1946, first as a gunner, rising to the rank of major in the 8th Army.

His first novel, Attack Alarm in 1940, was loosely based on the

Battle of Britain. Among his early successes after the Second World War were the sea story Maddon's Rock and The Lonely Skier, a thriller published in 1947 and filmed as Snowbound the following year.

Many other novels were to follow, including The Land God Gave to Cain in 1958, Harvest of Journeys in 1959, The Doomed Oasis in 1960, Atlantic Fury in 1962, North Star in 1974, and The Black Tide in 1982. His final novel, Delta Connection was published in 1996.

In 1959 his Wreck of the Mary Deare, about an insurance fraud on the high seas, was made into

a Hollywood film starring Charlton Heston, Gary Cooper, and Michael Redgrave.

Other films made from his books included Hell Below Zero in 1954 and Campbell's Kingdom, in 1957.

Innes was an avid traveller and sailor. His own boat, the Mary Deare, inspired his most famous book. He and his late wife, Dorothy, sailed around the coasts of Britain and Europe.

His agent, friend, and former publisher, Ian Chapman, said of Innes that he worked very hard and was very thorough, travelling all over the world and never setting a book in a country without visiting it first.

This was amply demonstrated by his novel The Big Footprints, which was about a clash between two white hunters. For this, Innes spent several months in the East African bush questioning game wardens and hunters, and he took a safari through the bush, just as his fictional characters would do.

To write a novel, as one commentator put it, Innes would spend a year or more in the most primitive and uncomfortable corners of the world, and the one thing that stayed the same in every Hammond Innes novel was that his characters always had the most terrible weather. It was written of him in 1980: ''Innes, who is a keen sailor, has the knack of making his readers feel seasick. It never rains, it buckets down.''

There was Scottish blood in him, too, and his late wife, Dorothy Mary Lang, was a kinswoman of Sir

Walter Scott. His Scottishness came to the fore in the summer of 1981 during the row over the takeover bid for Glasgow publishers William Collins, when Innes wrote: ''Collins should never have become a City shuttlecock. It is essentially a Scottish institution, a great cultural dynamo largely created by the last generation of the family.

''In saying this I am not being racist, I am speaking as an author who has been part of this grand publishing house most of my working life. A publisher is not like a soft drinks factory or a producer of canned beans.''

He was no producer of canned beans either, more of decent wine, which the book-buying public devoured by the gallon.

His wife died in 1989. There were no children.