Monsarrat made a fortune from the book and from the movie version, which starred Jack Hawkins. Lederer, writing in a front‐page review in The New York Times Book Review, said “Monsarrat is superb when describing his personal impressions of war” and called the book “a fascinating story and a compelling one,” though one that was badly flawed by inexpert character portrayals. a kind of small warship used to guard other vessels.

Monsarrat lifelong fame was the power of the firsthand writing about naval action in “The Cruel Sea,” which was the story of a British navy corvette. He had been working on the second volume of what was planned as a two‐novel work, but Lawrence Hughes, the president of Morrow, said yesterday that it was not yet known whether the manuscript was in publishable form. Monsarrat's last completed volume, the novel “Master Mariner: Running Proud,” which was published by Morrow last March, is about the British Navy from the 1500's to the 1800's. All told, it sold more than 11 million copies.

Monsarrat's love of seafaring and the sea began in his boyhood in the great port of Liverpool and ran through his life and work he drew on his experiences in the British Navy in the North Atlantic during World War II in writing “The Cruel Sea,” which came out in 1951, soared on the best‐seller lists here together with Herman Wouk's war novel “The Caine Mutiny” and was a phenomenal success in England. He was 69 years old and lived on the Mediterranean island of Gozo, off Malta. Nicholas Monsarrat, the British amateur sailor turned author who wrote the best‐selling novel “The Cruel Sea” and two dozen other books, died of cancer Tuesday in a London hospital.

The cruel sea novel