Steamship Ebooks: 19 books

Early 1941: the 'Happy Time' for Hitler's U-boats; the most savage, punishing time for the North Atlantic convoys. A time when antiquated merchant ships, mostly unarmed, invariably slow and with pathetically few escorts crawled doggedly in fixed lines like iron ducks in a shooting gallery across what...

Bill Walker is a veteran Royal Military Police staff sergeant: something of a legend within the Corps, albeit a tarnished one. But Walker carries a dual burden. The first is to maintain his hard-as-nails Redcap image; difficult enough considering he's a reluctant hero by instinct. The second, even...

Winter gale force ten off the North African coast. Tactician, a battered old deep-sea salvage tug with a fruitless trip behind her and the UK bailiffs waiting ahead, claws her way through mountainous seas. Now only a miracle, and a pretty profitable miracle at that, can prevent this from becoming...

Within fourteen minutes the fatally-stricken cargo vessel Lycomedes will plunge forever beneath the storm-shredded waters of the North Sea with fifty four men, a limpid-eyed dog and a foul-beaked parrot aboard. Into that agonizingly brief span is packed a lifetime of turbulence and tragedy: moments...

December 1941, some two hundred miles off the Brazilian coastline. A time of war at sea and sudden death, of prowling U-boats and Kriegsmarine surface raiders. A time of nerve-rending anticipation for the crew of the British merchantman *Maya Star * with her cargo of  explosives … until the anticipation...

The first of two Callison thrillers featuring First Mate Brevet Cable, the most unorthodox merchant seaman ever to sail during the Cold War. It is just before dawn in a remote Scottish glen. At the main gate of what appears to be a hydro-electric station lounge two bored watchmen count the minutes...

The second of two Callison cliff hangers featuring Brevet Cable, reluctant hero of 'A Plague of Sailors' and the most irregular merchant seaman ever to sail during the Cold War, as he plunges yet again into a further calamitous adventure. Tension reaches breaking point in the Norwegian Sea...

Considered by many reviewers to be Brian Callison's finest and most poignant novel, THE SEXTANT presents a gripping mix of war at sea and contemporary mystery ashore: of terrible events, and courage and fortitude made only bearable by a love that transcends even damnation. In 1941 the British...

November 29, 1941: 0530 hrs. At sea, three thousand yards off the blacked-out coast of Occupied Norway two ditched Luftwaffe air crew toss in a yellow dinghy. One is dead, his companion close to death. As their rubber coffin roller-coasters crazily to the crest of yet another curling sea a river of...

A heart-stopping drama based on fact - the realisation of every sea traveller's worst nightmare. The passengers boarding the Orion Venturer have no idea that the seemingly sturdy-looking ferry that is to transport them overnight across the North Sea is a disaster waiting to happen. That all...

To the layman's eye, the supertanker Calauria seems almost invulnerable. Longer than two football pitches, wider than a ten-lane highway, higher than a seven-story office block the colossus is deep-laden with crude oil - enough, once refined, to keep a typical family car running for fifty thousand...

The myth of the Stollenberg Convoy is one of the most enduring of World War II. As the Third Reich crumbled, orders were sent from Berlin to hide countless art  treasures looted from all over Europe. According to the legend, the most precious shipment of all had been entrusted to a hard-bitten SS...

TRAPP'S WAR heralds the first of five rollicking, rumbustious and utterly deplorable adventures that comprise Brian Callison's best-selling saga of the unapologetically amoral Captain Edward Trapp, his appalling sidekick Gorbals Wullie, his equally degenerate succession of crews and ever-more decrepit...

Twenty years ago he'd been Captain Michael Crofts, Parachute Regiment - before the mercenary recruiters had bought him and his ideals had expired along with the blood of too many men. Now he's retired … or he thinks he's retired. So determinedly retired that he hasn't merely hung up his faithful...