 Well, the bad news is they aren't coming back. The good news is we can finally have that quiet swim. 
We read Charles Williams' seagoing thriller Dead Calm a couple of months back, and it was good enough to send us searching for more of his work. We found that he wrote several novels set on the ocean, and settled on reading 1971's And the Deep Blue Sea. Basically, what you get here is a murder thriller aboard a tramp steamer, with the killings all connected to an escaped Nazi. The story is entertaining, but the plot is baffling in one respect—the hero ends up on this deathship because his yacht sinks and, in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, he's rescued. A one-in-a-million chance. That's why we kept waiting for the moment where this becomes crucial to the plot, but it never does—he could have been a ticketed passenger on the steamer and the book would have progressed exactly the same way. We found that strange, to say the least. But Williams was a highly experienced writer by the time he got around to And the Deep Blue Sea, his penultimate novel, and he's surehanded with both the long prose passages and the dialogue. For us, it isn't quite as good as Dead Calm, but it gets the job done.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1967—First Space Program Casualty Occurs
Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when, during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere after more than ten successful orbits, the capsule's main parachute fails to deploy properly, and the backup chute becomes entangled in the first. The capsule's descent is slowed, but it still hits the ground at about 90 mph, at which point it bursts into flames. Komarov is the first human to die during a space mission. 1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.
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