Gone to Sea in a Bucket

Like all young men of a certain age, Harry Gilmour had his own notion of how a naval battle should be. This wasn’t it.

Norway, 1940: Sub Lieutenant Harry Gilmour’s first encounter with battleship action is not the adventure he had hoped for. Faced with a thankless task and ill equipped to handle it, Gilmour’s inexperience leads to a damning allegation. His future hangs in the balance.

But then Lieutenant Peter Dumaresq steps in to offer him a lifeline—an advanced navigation course that will take him aboard a crack submarine, HMS Pelorus, under the command of a Royal Navy hero. Faced with a possible court martial, Harry chooses life underwater. Once aboard, however, Harry is confronted for the first time by the full horror of submarine warfare. If he can just overcome his fears, it will be the making of him.

Because survival itself is the challenge now. For Harry and the rest of the crew, the next depth charge could be the one that sinks them.

David Black is a former Fleet Street journalist and television documentary producer. He spent much of his childhood a short walk from the Royal Navy Submarine Memorial at Lazaretto Point on the Firth of Clyde, and he grew up watching the passage of both US and Royal Navy submarines in and out of the Firth’s bases at Holy Loch and Faslane. As a boy, the lives of those underwater warriors captured his imagination. When he grew up, he discovered the truth was even more epic, and so followed the inspiration for his fictional submariner Harry Gilmour and a series of novels about his adventures across World War Two. David Black is also the author of a non-fiction book, Triad Takeover: A Terrifying Account of the Spread of Triad Crime in the West. He lives in Argyll.