Booth, Charles Gordon "Mr. Angel Comes Aboard."

Set in the Fall, 1942. A MARY CELESTE-like mystery involving the American freighter EMMALINE QUINCY, found abandoned at sea in the Caribbean with no sign of the her crew (but with fresh-dried blood stains on her decks). Brought to Havana port by Johnny Angel and his salvage crew, the mystery deepens when a young newspaperwoman is revealed to have been aboard the ship during the QUINCY’s aborted trans-Atlantic voyage from the Vichy French-controlled port of Dakar in French West Africa. The young woman eventually reveals that the ship had been attacked in the Caribbean by unknown men from a yacht who were aided by rogue QUINCY crew members. During the ensuing melee, the ship’s captain had been murdered – along with most of the rest of his crew – and a secret cargo of $8 million in gold had been seized. Salvager Johnny Angel’s grandfather was the QUINCY’s master, and despite the elder Angel’s evident murder, the old man is implicated as an accessory to the crime — so of course Johnny has to clear the family name. As in all serials, this one boasts a very tangled plot. And the World War 2 angle? It seems that the gold being transported by the QUINCY had been part of a stash secretly sent to Dakar by the French government just before the 1940 capitulation of France to the Nazis. The Free French underground had, in turn, gotten hold of $8 million worth of the gold horde and, with the connivance of the U.S. State Dept., was attempting to move it to the relative safety of the New World. The story was subsequently published as a full-fledged novel (see following entry) and then later turned into the 1945 film “Johnny Angel,” starring George Raft, Clair Trevor and Hoagy Carmichael.