Marmur, Jacland Andromeda

Set in early 1942, with the “slow, weary” tramp steamer ANDROMEDA the last civilian vessel to flee Singapore before the city’s rapidly approaching takeover by advancing Japanese troops: “A steel-shod horde was marching down on Singapore, casting its old familiar omens of flame and smoke before it in the sky. The signs of it were all around ANDROMEDA” (p. 2). Marmur’s plot has the ship headed across the Pacific for the safety of America, with her lights out and in radio silence, in an ultimately futile attempt to outrun the Japanese. Aboard are an experienced American crew as well as two unlooked for “consular” passengers, fellow-Americans trapped by events in Singapore. An espionage-related subplot involves one of the passengers (character Alexander Berkhard Bane, an Addison De Witt stand-in if ever there was!), with a romance between passenger Nancy Paget and the ship’s Chief Officer tossed in as a second subplot.

Marmur writes well, and his merchant mariner characters are particularly well-drawn. The real hero of the tale is Mr. Wainright, the ANDROMEDA’s Chief Engineer. In a sly tribute to then well-known nautical writer William McFee, Marmur has his Chief Engineer engrossed in a McFee novel throughout the ANDROMEDA’s adventures and also being a writer himself, albeit in secret, à la McFee. Not all the book’s characters, though, are as enamored with McFee as Wainright, for his good friend, Chief Mate John Flemming joshes him at one point after picking up the book Wainright’s reading with a “That one! He writes like an engineer.” To which Wainright replies, “ He is an engineer.” It is clear that Marmur’s sympathies are decidedly with marine engineers (another great quote: “Engineers are an hardy race, with obstinate notions of their own”--p. 160), though he writes admiringly of deck officers and crew, too.