Alistair MacLean

• Born: April 28, 1922
• Birthplace: Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland
• Died: February 2, 1987
• Place of death: Munich, West Germany (now in Germany)

Types of Plot: Espionage; thriller

Contribution

Alistair MacLean was a writer of thrillers in the tradition of John Buchan, though without Buchan’s depth. Although a few of his books, such as H.M.S. Ulysses (1955), may be described as straight adventure stories, most of MacLean’s novels involve international intrigue or espionage. In contrast to a writer such as Robert Ludlum, however, whose lengthy novels of intrigue and espionage feature tortuously complicated plots, MacLean crafted taut narratives that move at breakneck speed from the first chapter to the last. The hero of a MacLean novel faces one apparently insoluble problem after another, leading to a final confrontation fraught with peril. Formulaic but vividly realized, many of MacLean’s novels have been adapted for the screen.

Biography

Alistair Stuart MacLean was born in Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Scotland. MacLean approached authorship as a business and apparently considered himself a businessman rather than a celebrity. Many facts about his early life are not generally known. He was educated at Glasgow University. During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy, an experience that he later put to good literary use. Many of the adventures in his novels occur at sea, and several of his best-known works are set during World War II.

After the war, MacLean taught English and history at Rutherglen, a secondary school in Glasgow. In 1954, he entered a literary competition in the Glasgow Herald, and his sea story “The Dileas” won the hundred-pound prize over nine hundred other entries. His first novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, appeared in England in 1955 and in the United States the next year. Thereafter, despite his initial doubts that he could succeed as a writer, he produced a book virtually every year until his death. In 1961, he adopted the pseudonym Ian Stuart while continuing to write steadily under his own name. He became an accomplished scenarist—in fact, he first wrote several of his novels in the form of screenplays.

Of MacLean’s first marriage, like much of his private life, little is known except that it produced three sons. His second marriage, to Mary Marcelle Georgeus, a film production company executive, took place in 1972. He lived in England for a time, operating a small chain of hotels until he lost his taste for that business. He eventually took up residence near Geneva, Switzerland. His interest in science and astronomy, especially science as applied to technology, is apparent in his fiction. While visiting a friend in Munich, West Germany, he suffered a stroke. Three weeks later, on February 2, 1987, he died of heart failure in a Munich hospital.

Analysis

Alistair MacLean was a writer who found his niche at the very beginning of his writing career. Having made a successful debut with H.M.S. Ulysses, he proceeded to turn out thirty-three novels in the next thirty years. He worked very quickly, completing a screenplay in about two months and a novel in even less time. That he set a demanding schedule for himself can be inferred from his output. He was a formula writer, whose formula was exceedingly successful, and he would not have claimed to be anything else. To MacLean, writing was a business, and his responsibility as a businessman was to please the customer (that is, the reader).

As noted above, MacLean’s fast-moving narratives and their often rugged settings are eminently filmable, and several of his early books were adapted for the screen. By 1967, MacLean was ready to try his own hand at screenwriting. His first effort was the script for Where Eagles Dare, which had been published as a novel that year. He enjoyed solving the technical problems associated with screenwriting and went on to adapt several more of his novels: The Guns of Navarone (1957), Caravan to Vaccarès (1970), When Eight Bells Toll (1966), Puppet on a Chain (1969), Force 10 from Navarone (1968), and The Golden Rendezvous (1962). MacLean novels adapted for the screen by others include Fear Is the Key (1961), Ice Station Zebra (1963), The Last Frontier (1959), South by Java Head (1958), The Satan Bug (1962), Bear Island (1971), H.M.S. Ulysses, and Breakheart Pass (1974). These films have been vehicles for action stars such as Clint Eastwood (Where Eagles Dare) and Charles Bronson (Breakheart Pass), as well as other major stars, such as Richard Burton (Where Eagles Dare), Rock Hudson (Ice Station Zebra), and Anthony Hopkins (When Eight Bells Toll).

The novels follow a pattern that millions of MacLean fans have endorsed for more than three decades. The protagonist is a strong man, usually an extreme individualist, who is often in conflict with regularly constituted authority. He is pitted against an implacable, often a totalitarian, enemy. The confrontation usually takes place in some bleak and menacing locale—the turbulent North Atlantic, the sheer face of a cliff, a windswept mountain peak, or frozen arctic tundra. The action consists of a series of encounters (a capture, an escape, a recapture, a reescape), violent and intense but essentially inconclusive, leading up to the final climactic scene. Here, MacLean follows the basic episodic structure of the adventure story, descending from Homer and the medieval romance through James Fenimore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas, père. He adds to the mix an emphasis on twentieth century technology, so that the hero is often simultaneously facing hostile men, a hostile environment, and hostile machines.

The Guns of Navarone

An example of a novel that blends twentieth century technology with the traditional adventure story is The Guns of Navarone, one of MacLean’s best-known tales, thanks in part to the highly successful motion-picture version starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn. In this work, the Allied heroes must destroy mammoth German guns housed in supposedly impenetrable caves high up the face of a sheer and seemingly unscalable cliff. This novel, like many of the ones that followed, has an additional complication. There is a Judas in the protagonists’ camp, who constantly betrays them to their enemies.

MacLean’s heroes are marked by their steadfastness and by their competence in some crucial field of endeavor. They survive and triumph as much through their expertise as through their character. Andreas in The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone has almost superhuman strength, Bruno in Circus (1975) is a high-wire walker, and Mitchell in Seawitch (1977) has uncanny night vision. These characters share an indomitable will and an inexhaustible resilience.

The Critics Weigh In

The worldwide sales of MacLean’s books, as well as the box-office success of the films he wrote, attest his popularity. The critical response to his work, however, is quite mixed. Some critics complain that MacLean tells the same story over and over, and with considerably less zest and energy in the later novels. Such is likely to be the case with any commercially successful formula writer: He knows that his public thoroughly enjoys the literary meal he is serving up, and he is reluctant to begin adding new dishes to the menu. MacLean’s subject matter gives the superficial appearance of being varied. Some novels deal with war, others with espionage, and still others with crime—one, Circus, even borders on science fiction. The conflict, however, is always physical and unambiguous. The protagonist always possesses the manly virtues, and the antagonists are always recognizably evil: Nazis, Bolsheviks, international drug dealers, terrorists. The protagonist’s mission is a seemingly impossible one: to blow up the indestructible gun turrets at Navarone, to kidnap a German general from an impregnable mountain fortress that can be reached only by a single cable car, to rescue VIPs held hostage in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge, to retrieve sunken atomic and hydrogen weaponry from the ocean’s floor. Moreover, the hero must succeed even while someone close to him (MacLean’s typical Judas figure) is secretly attempting to sabotage his efforts.

MacLean’s handling of violence has been faulted on several counts, some of them seemingly contradictory. Some critics believe that MacLean glorifies violence, that he appeals to the reader’s atavistic warlike tendencies. Some even purport to find in MacLean’s dialogue simpleminded moralizations about the absolute need for violence in a world filled with vermin. Others argue that so numerous are the violent deaths in most of the novels that they become repetitious, pro forma. The scenes of violence are like children’s games of pretend; they lack the power to stir the emotions. It may be true that MacLean glamorizes and romanticizes violence, or that he renders it merely banal and boring; he could hardly do both at the same time.

The political perspective of the novels has been characterized as a kind of radical conservatism. Certain critics rather disparagingly suggest that the values at the heart of MacLean’s fiction are those of the old-fashioned middle-class morality. In the later novels, however, the author seems to have lost his faith in the institutions of society and in their ability to enforce the traditional standards. A stalwart individual, or perhaps a small band of committed men, must save society in spite of itself. Bureaucracy, both British and American, receives harsh treatment in the novels. The armed forces, the intelligence services, the police forces are all riddled with officious fools, spies, and traitors. A MacLean hero must struggle against the ineptitude of the bureaucracy with one hand while he fights villains with the other.

Breakheart Pass

Perhaps criticism of MacLean’s writing is most justified as it relates to characterization. MacLean tends to differentiate his characters by giving each a dominant personality trait or an eccentricity or a tic; too often, the result is caricature rather than characterization. Good examples of these deficiencies can be found in Breakheart Pass, the story of a disguised federal agent aboard a snowbound train in the American West of 1870. Up to its midpoint, Breakheart Pass is a mystery novel. A series of murders occur on the train, and the murderer’s identity is withheld until the reader is well into the book. The emphasis in the last half of the novel is on the hero’s efforts to get the train through the pass. MacLean makes little effort to capture the atmosphere of the American West or, for that matter, of the nineteenth century. The characters employ an occasional Americanism; otherwise, they might as easily be modern-day Englishmen stranded in some European mountain pass. This critical assessment of MacLean’s characterization is particularly applicable to his treatment of his female characters, who serve primarily as props to the he-man types who star in the novels. Yet it can also be argued that such a criticism is obviated by MacLean’s material, which is primarily concerned with masculine exploits.

What MacLean unquestionably does best is to grab readers on the first page and rush them pell-mell through a novel that has great energy and an unflagging pace. Nick Totton says in his review of Seawitch, “Those who read Alistair MacLean will read it, and those who do not need no encouragement.” The MacLean fan may put the book down with no inclination ever to reread a word of it but will soon be longing for another just like it.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007. Comprehensive history of the American thriller provides the tools to understand MacLean’s contributions to the genre.

Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Traces the evolution of the figure of the spy in espionage thrillers and other works of film and fiction; sheds light on MacLean’s works.

Gadney, Reg. “Middle-Class Heroics: The Novels of Alistair MacLean.” London Magazine 12 (December/January, 1972/1973): 94-105. Emphasizes the representation and ideology of class deployed in MacLean’s fiction.

Harper, Ralph. The World of the Thriller. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Study of thrillers with particular attention to espionage and spy stories such as those written by MacLean.

Hepburn, Allan. Intrigue: Espionage and Culture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. This study of British and American spy fiction begins with three general chapters on the appeal, emotional effects, and narrative codes of the genre. Provides context for understanding MacLean.

“Ho-Hum Life of the Man from Navarone.” Life 71 (November 26, 1971): 91. Profile of MacLean, written for a mass audience.

Lee, Robert A. Alistair MacLean: The Key Is Fear. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1976. Very brief but focused study of MacLean’s writing; part of the Popular Writers of Today series.

McDowell, Edwin. “Alistair MacLean Dies: Books Sold in Millions.” New York Times, February 3, 1987, p. B7. Obituary looks at the life and works of MacLean, who wrote in a variety of genres. Notes that it took him about a month to write a book.

Webster, Jack. Alistair MacLean: A Life. London: Chapmans, 1991. The first major biography of MacLean to be published after the author’s death; as the title implies, the focus is more on biography than on criticism of the author’s work.