At the age of twenty-four, S.S. Forester wrote his first bestseller - “Retribution in Installments” (Payment Deferred, 1926), which is considered one of the hundred best detective stories in the entire history of the genre. Over the next forty years, he became one of the most successful English-language writers. He has written detective stories, historical novels, plays and much more. The film based on his The African Queen (1935) (which starred Humphrey Boggart and Katharine Hepburn) won an Oscar (1951). However, the ten books about Hornblower stand apart both in his work and in his life. They were never intended to be a series, but Forester returned to his beloved hero again and again for more than twenty years. During an expedition to the Bering Sea, Forester fell ill with arteriosclerosis. He became a cripple, and only the desire to write brought him back to life, and to what an active one at that - he could not walk, but he drove a car and sailed a yacht! Forester wrote “Hornblower in the West Indies” while he was seriously ill, so each chapter there is a completed short story (the writer calculated that if he died without writing the last line, at least stories would remain). He actually died without finishing the book, but another one (“The Wind of Trafalgar”), and eight years later. “Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies” is the tenth book in the series. The time of action is 1821. Hornblower receives the post of Commander-in-Chief of the naval forces in the Caribbean.