Customer Reviews

Under Enemy Colours

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In the wake of the fictional Horatio Hornblower, Jack Aubrey, Richard Delancey, Nicholas Ramage, Richard Bolitho, Nathaniel Drinkwater, Thomas Kydd, William Rennie, and Kit Killigrew - and the real historical officer Michael Fitton, whose equally amazing career was novelised by Showell Styles - yet another hero of the age of fighting sail takes to the quarterdeck.

In this book Sean Thomas Russel introduces the half-English, half French officer Lieutenant Charles Hayden.

To follow in the footsteps of writers of the calibre of C.S. Forester, Patrick O'Brien, and C Northcote Parkinson must take a great deal of courage, and to make a new naval hero stand out from them is quite difficult. While I don't think Russell's first book is quite up to the standard of those three, it is as good or better than most of the more recent crop of historical naval fiction.

Charles Hayden is the son of an English father, long dead, and a French mother who has remarried, to an American ship-owner, and re-located to Boston. At the start of the book, in 1793, Hayden has distinguished himself as a lieutenant under the command of Captain Bourne, one of the Royal Navy's most succesful frigate captains, and as a commander of smaller ships, but is currently without an appointment. Hayden is summoned to the Admiralty to be interviewed by the secretary of the board, Philip Stephens, and offered the post of First Lieutenant of the new frigate HMS Themis - but with secret orders that make the job a poisoned chalice of the worst kind.

HMS Themis is not a happy ship - there had been a murder on board during the previous cruise, and Stephens is worried both that something is not right on the Themis. The captain, Josiah Hart, has obtained the position because he and his wife have considerable political influence, but there are doubts about his abilities. Hayden is to send secret reports about what is going on aboard HMS Themis: he regards the order to act as the Admiralty's spy with horror, but without influence he has no choice but to accept the appointment.

From the day he arrives on board Hayden finds that Philip Stephen's fears about the Themis were justified. Between the internal threat on the ship, and that posed by the French, it looks like Chales Hayden will have to face every stock cliche in historical naval fiction ...

Russell includes an author's note which gives some details of which characters are real (Stephens, Admiral Duncan) and which were fictional but inspired by real people (for example, Captain Bourne was inspired by Nelson's favourite frigate captain, Henry Blackwood.)

I enjoyed reading this and can recommend it.