Word: shuting
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...After two wars I have been in danger too often to bother very much about being killed," Novelist Nevil Shute once wrote, "and when it comes, I would prefer that it should happen in an aeroplane, since aeroplanes have been the best part of my life." Death did not oblige 60-year-old Nevil Shute last week, for it came prosaically in a Melbourne hospital bed, after a stroke. It was an ending the hero of any of Shute's 21 novels would have understood, for each of them faced up dutifully to the enormity of life...
Their creator was far from commonplace. Though he was acclaimed as the top bestseller of all contemporary British authors, and his annual royalties topped the $175,000 mark, Shute insisted that he wrote novels "for fun." Aviation was his ruling passion, and he pursued it as a flyer, aeronautical engineer, and founder of his own manufacturing firm, Airspeed Ltd. Out of his craft and his passion, Shute fashioned an exciting double life...
...Hook for Soloists. Born Nevil Shute Norway in the London suburb of Baling on Jan. 17, 1899, the future novelist was the second son of a postal official who turned vacations on the Continent into competent travel books. Like another famed storyteller, Somerset Maugham, the boy suffered from an agonizing stammer. Sensitive Nevil played hooky, haunting the London Science Museum with its glass-encased models of the pioneering planes of Blériot and the Wright brothers. At the end of World War I, he entered Oxford as an engineering major. Young Norway was an indifferent student but a line...
...does not print the word 'bloody' "). The author, whose collected works probably do not contain a four-letter word, changed '"bloody" to "ruddy" and dropped his last name for fear his bosses would regard an off-hours fictioneer as "not a serious person." The peak of Shute's engineering career was his work on the airship R. 100, in which he made a triumphant transatlantic crossing to Canada and back in 1930. Short weeks later, an ill-fated sister ship, the R. 101, crashed and burned. Shute chalked the tragedy up to bureaucratic bungling, for which...
Evil Is Inefficient. A fulltime novelist from then on, Shute clung to his methodical engineering habits. From 9:30 a.m. to noon, he typed at his manuscript, seated at a secondhand rolltop desk that his father had given him. A year was par for a novel. As critics and readers quickly learned, his characters behaved with a realistic mixture of human strength and frailty. Storyteller Shute was peculiarly immune to the lilt and color of prose, but he fashioned his sentences with pane-of-glass clarity...