Hammond Innes · 1952 · survival

Hammond Innes's 1952 novel, researched on his own travels through the Canadian oil boom. A man given months to live inherits a valley in the Rockies from a grandfather everyone remembers as a fraud, along with his conviction that there is oil beneath it. A dam under construction will flood the whole place, and the contractor has every reason to finish first.

1. 1
   London

   Bruce Wetheral, told by his doctors that he has a few months left, learns he has inherited a tract of the Canadian Rockies from a grandfather convicted of fraud for selling shares in oil that was never found.

2. 2
   Calgary

   He crosses to Alberta into the middle of an oil boom, where his grandfather's name is a byword for swindling and every lawyer, banker and driller he meets advises him to sell the claim quietly and go home.

3. 3
   Come Lucky

   Come Lucky is a half-dead mining town below the valley, hostile to the name Campbell and dependent on the dam being built above it - and nobody there wants a sick Englishman reopening a question that was settled years ago.

4. 4
   Campbell's Kingdom

   Up in the Kingdom itself, snowed in and racing a rising reservoir, Wetheral hauls in a rig and drills - because his grandfather was right, and because a dying man has very little to lose by proving it.