A terrible and striking piece of work Observer C. S. Forester is a splendid storyteller Guardian I recommend Forester to every literate I know - Ernest Hemingway The unsung godfather of English noir - Andrew Taylor

Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (27 August 1899 - 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He began his career with the crime novels Payment Deferred and Plain Murder, now reissued in Penguin Modern Classics along with The Pursued, which was lost for over 60 years.