The Better Part of Valor

Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1964. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. [8], 324, [4] pages. DJ has some wear and soiling. Some endpaper discoloration. Private collector's bookplate inside the front cover and embossed seal on fep. Basil Heatter (1918-2009), the son of radio commentator Gabriel Heatter. He attended schools in Connecticut, then went abroad when was 16 for a two year travel stint through Europe. Returning to America, he went to work for a New York advertising agency. He enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and during WWII served as a skipper on a P.T. boat in the Southwest Pacific. Besides being a news commentator himself, Heatter wrote twenty novels of intrigue and adventure—beginning with The Dim View in 1946, the story of a young PT boat skipper—as well as several non-fiction works revolving around his love of the sea. In fact, he lived for years off Key West on his own self-built sailboat, The Blue Duck. This is the saga of the men who manned the PT boats in the dark early days of the war with the Japanese. And it is the story of an odd Mark Hammond, a war correspondent; Wynn Savage, an insanely, compulsively brave PT boat officer; and Lud, the lovely girl who married Savage-out of pity-and then fell in love with Hammond.