Maddon's Rock is a 1948 thriller novel by the British writer Hammond Innes published by Collins.^[1] The following year it was released in America by Harper with the alternative title of Gale Warning. To research the novel Innes crewed on a friend's yacht in the Fastnet Race.^[2]

A merchant ship is torpedoed and sunk during a winter return convoy from the Soviet Union in 1945, and several members of her crew are court-martialed and jailed for their conduct during the evacuation to the lifeboats. Another regrettable yet unremarkable incident of war seems set to be forgotten, until a year later, during a gale on another brutal winter night in the northern seas, when a ship that everyone knows to be sunk sends an SOS calling for help.