Trustee from the Toolroom

Keith Stewart builds model engines in the basement of a converted house in Ealing and writes them up, week by week, for a magazine read by model engineers. The money is tiny and he does not mind. His sister and her husband, forbidden by post-war currency law from taking capital out of Britain, put their fortune into diamonds, set them into the concrete ballast inside their yacht, leave their daughter with Keith and sail for the Pacific. The yacht goes onto a reef in the Tuamotus and both of them are killed.

Keith is the girl's trustee and the trust is on the bottom of the Pacific. He has no money and no standing, and getting there is the book. The magazine opens most of the doors, among them a timber millionaire in the American northwest who is building one of Keith's designs, a Congreve clock, in a workshop of his own. The leg that matters is the one the magazine does not open: his passage across the Pacific comes from Jack Donelly, who cannot read a word and built his own boat by eye. Keith cannot navigate. A ship's officer and an airline navigator teach him a noon sight, and the aircrew find him a second-hand sextant, before he sails.

It lands for a reader who wants competence in an unimpressive man to count for something. The reservation is that almost nothing goes wrong. There is no villain, every stranger is decent, and each obstacle dissolves into somebody recognising good work. Shute's last novel is a wish: that quiet skill and plain honesty are seen everywhere and repaid in kind. As a thriller it has no tension at all.