Dead and Alive Author:Hammond Innes "Find out what has happened to Monique," the letter said. — Pinned to it was a worn and faded photograph of a long-legged girl with an oval face and eyes and mouth that had a suggestion of laughter. I stared at it for some time, seated on the half-completed bridge as the slanting rays of the dying sun threw the shadow of the ship on the wet sand... more »s.
I was thinking of the docks at Naples, of the narrow dirty streets below the Castello San Elmo, of Terracina, Cassino, Formia, and all the other towns where the rubble had been ground fine in the jaws of war. This photograph might be the likeness of a beautiful girl--or the memory of a skeleton buried beneath a shattered building...
NOTE: Hammond Innes wrote this novel towards the end of World War II and that is why he uses as a background war-time Italy and its underworld.« less