Johnnie Miller is a cargo pilot ferrying small planes around the deserts of North Africa. On landing at Bizerta in Tunisia he meets his erstwhile lover, Nicolle Navarra, who has thrown him over to marry a Frenchman four years before but is now widowed. She begs him to take him to the (fictitious) town of Bir Djemel where her brother Maurice, a friend of Johnnie's, lives. Reluctantly he agrees. They crash land in a sandstorm at an intermediate town, Fort Salah. Johnnie must wait for spares.
While waiting he agrees to work for Madame Oberlin, boss of a phosphate mine at Bir Djemel. They all drive there. The next day Maurice returns from a trip in the desert and before he can talk to anyone is stabbed to death by an Arab with a scar, who escapes. The local commandant, Captain Vimery, makes a perfunctory investigation, and begins flirting with Nicolle. Johnnie sets about seducing Maurice's Arab girlfriend, Sora, partly to annoy Nicolle, partly to find out what Maurice had been doing. Sora gives him a tin that she had received from Maurice. Johnnie analyses the contents in the laboratory of the local French doctor, and discovers it is cobalt ore. If he can find out where it came from, he can become very rich. But there are a few more hazards to negotiate before the happy ending.
This is one of the longest and most elaborate of Cannings's novellas. As in the others, a simple boy scout code of ethics has to be followed. Just when the furious Johnnie is about to take aim at the Arab driver of the bulldozer, ready to kill him since the Arab would have killed him in turn, he takes a bullet in the shoulder, so he finishes the story innocent of killing.
Part of Victor Canning's war service in 1943/44 was spent in North Africa.
First published as a serial in Everybody's, 3, 10, 17 March 1956.
This was the longest story of the collection Young man on a bicycle and other stories published by Hodder in paperback in 1958.
It was the title story in the American edition of the collection published by W. Sloane in 1959.
"Oasis Nine" also appeared in comic strip form as "Oasis of Mystery" in Super Detective Library No 109, 1957.