Alistair MacLean Biography and List of Works

Scottish writer who became known for his well-crafted adventure thrillers. The sea or the icy north was MacLean's favourite setting, from H.M.S. Ulysses (1955) and Ice Station Zebra (1963) to his late collection of short stories, The Lonely Sea (1985). A number of MacLean's books gained huge success as films, among them Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, and Breakheart Pass.

"Gangsters and hoodlums are notoriously the world's worst marksmen, their usual method being to come within a couple of yards before firing or spraying the landscape with a sufficient hail of bullets to make the law of averages work for them and I had heard a hundred times that those boys couldn't hit a barn door at ten paces. But maybe Larry had never heard of this, or maybe the rule applied only to barn doors."
(from Fear Is the Key, 1961)

Alistair MacLean was born in Glasgow as the son of a minister. The family spoke Gaelic and English was MacLean's second language. The family moved north to Daviot, near Inverness, and MacLean spent his early years in the Scottish Highlands. His father died when Alistair was 14, and he returned to Glasgow with his mother. He left school at 17 and at the age of eighteen in 1941, MacLean joined the Royal Navy. He served during World War II as a torpedo man in Home, Mediterranean and Eastern Fleets. Much of the time he served on Russian convoy routes, and from these experiences he drew heavily for his novels about the sea. MacLean was captured by the Japanese and tortured, and in 1946 he returned home.

After the war, MacLean gained an English Honours degree at Glasgow University, and became a teacher at Gallowfleet Secondary School. During his spare time MacLean began writing short stories. In 1954 he entered a Glasgow Herald short story competition with the 'Dileas.' It won the first prize of £100. The depiction of the force of the sea was from a born storyteller: "The Dileas would totter up on a wave then, like she was falling over a cliff, smash down into the next trough with the crack of a four-inch gun, burying herself right to the gunwales. And at the same time you could hear the fierce clatter of her screw, clawing at the thin air. Why the Dileas never broke her back only God knows - or the ghost of Campbell of Ardrishaig."

With encouragement from the publishing company Collins, MacLean wrote his first novel, H.M.S. Ulysses. It was based on his experiences on a navy ship escorting merchant vessels in the Arctic Ocean and became a bestseller. H.M.S. Ulysses is regarded alongside The Caine Mutiny and The Cruel Sea as one of the classic maritime novels. It deals with a convoy in the North Atlantic battling during World War II with submarines and foul weather. The emotional power at end of the story, when the doomed Ulysses turns against the heavy German cruiser, has not been surpassed in any other naval war novel.

From 1955 MacLean devoted himself entirely to writing and with a great success. His next books, Guns of Navarone (1957) and South by Java Head (1957), were war stories. Guns of Navarone depicted a five man sabotage team sent to destroy two giant guns at Navarone. The book was filmed in 1957 and won an Academy Award for special effects. In its sequel, Force 10 from Navarone (1968), a mixed group attempt to blow a bridge vital to Nazis. With The Last Frontier (1959) MacLean left war stories behind for a while. The novel was a spy adventure in which an agent is sent behind the iron curtain with one Belgian automatic and silencer, one rubberised torch and one flick knife, to rescue an English scientist. In the early 1960s MacLean wrote two novels under the pseudonym of Ian Stuart. The Satan Bug, dealing with the disappearance of a deadly toxin, and The Dark Crusader, about a tough secret agent on a Polynesian island, were both Cold War thrillers.

"But -" I paused. "Good God, Gregori, no sane man, not even the most monstrous criminal in history, would ever dream of such, of such - In the name of heaven, man, you can't mean it!"
"It may be that I am not sane," he said.
(from The Satan Bug, 1962)

Between the years 1957 and 1963 MacLean lived in Geneva. He owned Jamaica Inn, on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, and in the 1960s ran hotels in England for four years. During that period, nearly all MacLean's novels were adapted onto the screen. Among them were Where Eagles Dare (1967), in which a team of special soldiers are commissioned to destroy the headquarters of the German alpine corps, and Ice Station Zebra (1963). In this espionage story a British weather-monitoring station on a polar ice cap is almost totally destroyed by an oil fire. The United States nuclear submarine Dolphin is sent to rescue the team. The narrator and the protagonist is a doctor, but later it turns out that he is not simply a doctor and Ice Station Zebra is not just a neutral research station. In fact Dolphin's quest is to recover a capsule from outer space containing a long-range, top-secret reconnaissance camera and its films.

Usually MacLean's heroes are calm, cynical men who carry some kind of secret knowledge. They fight against incredible odds and of course there are the evil opponents, a wide variety of humourless villains, Nazi agents, Communists, drug dealers, and foreign agents. During the course of the story, the protagonist is pushed to the limits of his physical and sometimes mental endurance. Nature is a central element in MacLean's work, especially North Atlantic Seas, ice mountains, deep gorges, desert quick-sands, frozen Arctic tundra.

"I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing. I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished."

Typical in MacLean's novels are highly dramatic settings and sudden plot twists. He allows nothing to hold up the action - there is not much sex in MacLean's books because according to him it hinders the action. The protagonist often hides his knowledge, and sometimes one of his closest associates turns out to be a traitor. In MacLean's Western, Breakheart Pass (1974), the federal agent John Deakin poses as a thief, a murderer, and a coward. In Fear is The Key (1961), a novel of revenge, the hero pretends to be a gangster. The story starts when he shoots his way out of a courtroom, takes a hostage, and starts his escape. In fact he has conceived an elaborate plot to track down those responsible for killing his wife and family in a plane crash.

MacLean's later books were not as well received as his earlier ones. The Way to Dusty Death (1973) was set in the world of racing cars, and The Golden Gate (1976) was a kidnapping story, in which the President of the United States and two Arab leaders are taken hostage in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the 1960s and 1970s MacLean was one of the best selling thriller writers in the world. He had retired as a tax exile to Switzerland and published books, in which the characters play with very high stakes as in Goodbye California (1978). It dealt with the threat of a major earthquake along the San Andreas Fault, an event that would wash much of state of California into the sea. In Santorini (1986), a plane carrying hydrogen and atom bombs is knocked out of the air into the sea in an area subject to volcanic eruptions - and one of the bombs is ticking.

MacLean had started his career as a short story writer and a few years before his death he published The Lonely Sea, a collection of stories, in which he proved again his skill in describing the power of the sea. The book included his very first prize winning achievement, a tale of an old seadog who takes a fishing boat out in a storm in order to rescue his two sons. MacLean died of heart failure in Munich on February 2, in 1987. He left a number of story outlines, commissioned by an American film company, to be written by other authors. He was married twice, first with Gisela MacLean; they had three sons, and then with Marcelle Gorgeus in 1972.

"I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique."

For further reading: Alistair MacLean by Robert A. Lee (1976); Alistair MacLean by Jack Webster (1991); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996)

H.M.S. Ulysses, (1955)