Blochman, Lawrence G. Midnight Sailing.

Pre-World War 2 Pacific setting. Murder (actually, three murders), espionage and an art theft aboard a second-rate Japanese liner en route from San Francisco to Honolulu. Blochman’s plot is more than a little confusing, as is the heroine’s rather rapid transfer of her affections during the course of several turbulent days at sea. The jazzy repartee à la Nick and Nora Charles between Blochman’s hero (a newspaper report) and the heroine (a young heiress that the reporter is tracking) is one of the novel’s highlights. The espionage angle has something to do with stolen plans for U.S. Navy anti-aircraft guns being smuggled to Japan. There’s also an interesting denouement when a Korean steward sets the ship afire in an attempt to destroy the vessel’s cargo of nitrates which had been destined for the Japanese war machine. Blochman is decidedly anti-Japan in his writing and he seems to go out of his way to summon up just about every ‘thirties Japanese stereotype. One amusing shipboard detail: Blochman’s ship had no hot water. When a passenger wanted a hot bath, he or she filled a tub in the bathroom with cold seawater, and then inserted a loose steam pipe into the bathtub: the hot steam bubbled through the water and heated it up to bathing temperature. Blochman describes the process with such authority that one accepts the idea that such a strange system very well may have once existed aboard steamships! For another look at the pre World War 2 “espionage-aboard-a-Japanese-ship” genre, see Robert Carson’s 1941 Saturday Evening Post serial “Aloha Means Good-bye.”