Fox #01 - The Press Gang

The first 'Fox' book by Kenneth Bulmer, writing as Adam Hardy, is about British seaman George Abercrombie Fox isn’t quite a traditional novel, as there’s no particular plot. It’s more like a sequence of incidents. Unlike a 1930s hero pulp, the incidents aren’t necessarily action sequences (although certainly many of them are). They illustrate what life was like for this sullen bulldog of a sailor: the brutality of Navy discipline, the hazards to life and limb during sea battles, the many small humiliations from the Navy’s command hierarchy, and so on. The author does a superb job of bringing Fox to life, so much so that it often feels more like a biography than a maritime adventure novel. The attention to historical detail is also very effective, but I’ll admit I was sometimes lost in a stew of nautical jargon related to the features of old sailing ships and archaic military procedure. If the author assumed I was already familiar with the architecture of 18th-Century British naval frigates, he was mistaken. But while the book is occasionally challenging, it’s also rewarding, and I’d like to sail with Mr. Fox again.