Scott, Douglas The Burning of the Ships

Political intrigue, espionage and sabotage in Vichy-controlled West Africa (chiefly Senegal) and North Africa (Algiers) during 1942 and 1943. Scott’s hero is English ship captain John Laidlaw Rennie who is held briefly as a prisoner of the Vichy French in Senegal after the ship in which he had been traveling was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Back in England sometime later Rennie runs a foul of real-life turncoat spy Kim Philby after an encounter with Charles De Gaulle. Rennie’s unhappy Senegal interlude serves as prelude for much later unpleasantness (some of it caused at least indirectly by Philby) when the English captain is forced to take his injured freighter (the fictitious Canadian ship FORT DARLING) to Algiers for repairs. There Rennie runs into a murky world of pro-Vichy versus pro-Resistance French violence, none too well controlled by the Allies who had only recently taken control of North Africa. The novel’s double climax has a Nazi saboteur nearly blowing up the entire waterfront of Algiers (à la Halifax, 1918), followed shortly thereafter by a failed Vichy-led putsch which aimed at deposing General De Gaulle.