A passenger ship carries all kinds of passengers in the early 1930s as it navigates the coasts of West Africa towards Europe: first and second class passengers - colonizers, adventurers, officers, men and women in search of fleeting and opportunistic love affairs, people whom fortune did not smile upon in the colonies - as well as a cargo of Chinese in the holds.
The tension rises along with the temperature. "45 in the shade," written on a ship in 1934, is one of the first novels signed by Simenon under his real name, at the beginning of his richly fruitful writing career.
"The ship was asleep. Approaching Tenerife, the calm was complete, and the sea, unwrinkled, rose and fell in large silent waves coming from a heavy sea in the open Atlantic. The lamp was off. The air coming from outside spread the heavy fumes of opium into every corner of the cabin.
But what mattered was something else. Donnadier, lying on his back in the bunk, had his gaze fixed on the blue disc of the porthole. Was he breathing? Did he have a pulse? He was living another life, not his own. He was living ten lives, a hundred lives, or rather a multiple life, that of the whole ship.
He knew the scene. It was no longer an African night but a night almost Mediterranean. And the passengers, after all, stayed up late talking on the deck of the bar. Half an hour later, Donnadier heard whispers and suppressed giggles and knew it was Mrs. Basso searching the dark corners of the ship accompanied by one of the lieutenants. He could predict that the couple would end up on the upper deck with the lifeboats, because all journeys are alike, and the same people do the same things in the same places."
