Early Novels: Death under Sail, New Lives for Old and The Search

Abstract

Death under Sail, C.P. Snow’s first published novel, is a detective story set on the Norfolk Broads. It is a competent and enjoyable example of the genre which also anticipates in some respects Snow’s subsequent non-genre fiction. Its focus on the ‘play of forces’ (37) among a small knot of characters in an enclosed environment both conforms to one of the conventions of the classic detective story and announces an interest in group dynamics ‘in a self-contained society’ (118) which Snow will pursue in the ‘Strangers and Brothers’ series, especially The Masters and The Affair, and in his post-‘Strangers and Brothers’ fiction, particularly The Malcontents. Death under Sail also resembles the ‘Strangers and Brothers’ series, and the early novel The Search, in having a first-person narrator who speaks with the ‘voice of experience’. Indeed, although Snow himself was 26 when he wrote the novel, his narrator, Ian Capel, is ‘a fattish man well on in middle age’ (18) — in fact, he is 63, older than Lewis Eliot in the final ‘Strangers and Brothers’ book. As a young writer, Snow seemed drawn to much older protagonists, who feature in both Death under Sail and his next novel, New Lives for Old, although the latter is told in the third person.