Coffin, Geoffrey The Forgotten Fleet Mystery.

Published in the United States under the pseudonym “Geoffrey Coffin”(actually the prolific American author F.Van Wyck Mason), with Helen Brawner serving as co-author. Later (1943) published in Great Britain with F. Van Wyck Mason listed as author. The Times Literary Supplement of June 26, 1943 notes of Mason’s mystery novel: “Four old German liners, moored off the mouth of a river in Maryland, are haunted, and the spooks are distinctly homicidal in tendency. With this as its setting, The Forgotten Fleet makes an instant appeal to the amateur criminologist whose interest in detectives is not so strong that he objects to the rough-and-tumble of adventure. Watchmen have died or disappeared on these ‘old dowagers of the Atlantic,’ and new hands are wanted. The prospects scare off able-bodied men even though the skipper’s beautiful daughter, and a still more beautiful woman novelist with purple eyes, have fearlessly taken up their quarters aboard. The stranger in a faded military uniform is not in a position to pick and choose, for rumour says that he has escaped from Devil’s Island. The moment he signs on there are two more murders, and from then on the spooks become more and more active, and more and more tangible.”

The four “mothball” ships in question in are the real-life pre-World War I German liners AMERIKA, GEORGE WASHINGTON, KAISER WILHELM II (under her U.S. government name, MONTICELLO) and KRONPRINZESSIN CECILIE (also under her U.S. government name, MT. VERNON), and, after being taken over by the United States government and seeing service as World War I American troopships, all four were moored in the middle of Maryland’s Patuxent River from the late 1920s until the beginning of World War 2. Though Coffin’s plot is far-fetched, involving as it does crime (murder and a fortune in jewels hidden aboard one of the moribund liners) and espionage (the formula for a chemical breakthrough that can turn water into gasoline is also aboard one of the ships, with American, Italian and “Imperial Nipponese” agents skulking about looking for it), he does very credibly evoke the sad, eerily suspended state of these four former Atlantic greyhounds as they slowly rotted away in Tidewater Maryland.