Thompson, Ray The Watery Hell

Creative Books appears to be a vanity press. Thompson’s novel is a heartfelt look at freighter life during the War, focusing on the lives of three members of an East Coast maritime family working as bos’n (Jim Davis, the family patriarch), Captain (Jim’s younger son Frank) and Engineer (Jim’s older son Billy) aboard a variety of vessels including a T2 tanker and two Liberty ships. Despite amateurish writing and an over reliance on lengthy, expository passages, Thompson‘s voice is an authentic one and should be of great interest to contemporary readers. His plot line reads rather like a riff on Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, but from a merchant marine – rather than Navy – perspective. And he definitely has an ax to grind (albeit a justified one): the shameful treatment that U.S. merchant mariners received from their government both during and after the War. Thompson’s prose is perhaps best in his physical descriptions of ships and in also in passages describing convoy duty (on the Murmansk Run, in the North Atlantic and in the Mediterranean). He writes extensively, too, on crew interpersonal relations, with interesting insight into life at sea aboard a cargo boat during the War.