Midnight Sailing is a 1938 mystery/spy thriller written by Lawrence G. Blochman. The copy I have is a Dell mapback, with an illustration on the back cover detailing the inside of the Kumo-Maru freighter bound for Hawaii and Shanghai.
Hours before sailing, word leaks out that Dorothy Bonner, the charming daughter of a silk millionaire is aboard the Kumo-Maru. She has been in hiding for weeks after her father's suicide, and foreign correspondent Glen Larkin is assigned by his paper to trail her on the journey for the real story. Travelling aboard are the Japanese Captain, Doctor and a crew of Eastern and Southern Indians; an important chemist; a detective; a Peruvian General; a Korean patriot; and a thin wrinkled dealer in early Japanese colour prints - known here as chromoxylographs - $80,000 worth, in fact. It's an exotic locale in 1938, so you have to excuse some pigeon english (such as "Notto very understando Ingurish". Which is sometimes the case, sometimes not.)
There is also Mrs. Greeve, an older lady with brassy orange hair who travels freighters a great deal and likes to hang out below decks in third class drinking with Peruvian girls of ill repute. Soon they discover a mysterious stowaway roaming the decks at night - a morphine addict who not only stowed away in a shipment of coffins (!), but is Dorothy's long lost brother.
As the freighter (which began in San Fransisco via Peru) continues on to Shanghai without the scheduled stop in Hawaii, and several attempts at murder - some successful! - tensions and finger pointing increase. Not to mention the discovery that the cargo holds are not stocked with rum but deadly nitrates for bomb production. It all revolves around some secret blueprints for war machines that keep changing hands, munitions orders, blackmail, double crosses between governments - lots of hair raising escapes from the bowels of the ship - and yet there is still time for romance on the upper deck.
It's fun thriller written just as war was breaking out, with an international cast of suspects, heroes and villains. Dorothy and Glen make a great couple with their romantic verbal sparring. At times there was a little too much plot, bordering on convoluted, but things evened out by the end. Of course by then the ship was on fire, but...
Lots of intrigue and an exciting few days enroute to Shanghai.
My other Lawrence Blochman reviews:
1938 / Paperback / 240 pages
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