Scottish writer who became known for his well crafted adventure thrillers. The sea or the icy north was MacLean's favorite 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 a huge success as films, among them Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Esdtwood and Richard Burton, The Guns of Navarone, starring Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn, Ice Station Zebra, and Breakheart Pass, starring Charles Bronson.

"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 his 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 Glaskow as the son of a minister. The family spoke the Scottish language, 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 Glaskow 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 Glaskow University, and became a teacher at Gallowfleet Secondary School. During his spare time MacLean began writing short stories. In 1954 he entered a short story competition of the Glaskow Herald 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 Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951) and Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (1951) as one of the classic novels of the navy ships. It deals with a convoy in the North Atlantic battling during World War II submarines and foul weather. The emotional power in 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 with a great success. His next books, Guns of Navarone (1957) and South by Java Head (1957), were a war stories. The Guns of Navarone (1957) depicted a five men sabotage team sent to destroy two giant guns at Navarone. The book was filmed in 1961 and won an Academy Award for special effects. The producer and screenwriter Carl Foreman bought the screen rights of The Guns of Navarone in 1958. He was fascinated by the author's "gift for keeping his audience enthralled by the pace and drive of his tale. The novel had six colorful major characters, providing an opportunity for casting as many international stars."

Gregory Peck played Captain Mallory in the film and was criticized being at times a trifle wooden - David Niven was Corporal Miller. The women Foreman wrote into the story were played by the Greek actress Irene Papas and the Italian Gia Scala. In its sequel, Force 10 from Navarone (1968), a mixed group attempt to blow a bridge vital to Nazis in Yugoslavia. The film version was not produced until 1977. Robert Shaw and Edward Fox played the Peck and Niven roles respectively. Force 10 from Navarone did not gain similar success as its predecessor.

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 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 from a locked doors of a laboratory, and The Dark Crusader, about a tough secret agent in a Polynesian island, were both Cold War thrillers. MacLean did not try to change his style and readers familiar with his work easily recognized the author behind his Scottish pseudonym.

"But -" I paused. "Good Good, 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, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, and ran in the 1960s hotels in England for four years. During that period, nearly all MacLean's novels were adapted into screen. Among them were Where Eagles Dare (1967), in which a team of special soldiers are commissioned to destroy the headquarter of the German alpine corps, and Ice Station Zebra (1963).

In the 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 in 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 are devoted to their work, and carry some kind of secret knowledge. "The job, the job, always the job on hand," the colonel had repeated once, twice, a thousand times, "Success or failure in what you do may be desperately important to others, but it must never matter damn to you." (from The Last Frontier, 1959) The heroes fight against incredible odds and of course there are the evil opponents, a wide variety of humorless villains, the Nazis, terrorist, Communists, drug dealers, and foreign agents. During the course of the story, the protagonist is pushed at 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 gulches, desert quicksands, frozen Arctic tundra.

Typical for MacLean's novels is the highly dramatic settings and the sudden plot twist. 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. MacLean himself had a very clear concept of his work: "I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique." The protagonist often hides his knowledge, and sometimes one of his closest associates turn out to be a traitor. In MacLean's Western, Breakheart Pass (1974), the federal agent John Deakin poses a thief, a murderer, and a coward.

In Fear is The Key (1961), a novel of revenge, the protagonist 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. The protagonist has his revenge, but he finally realizes that he is alone with his victory and memoirs: "X 13. I supposed that would always be a part of me now, that and the broken-winged DC that lay 580 yards to its south-west, buried under 480 feet of water. For better or for worse, it would always be a part of me. For worse, I thought, for worse. It was all over and done and empty now and it all meant nothing, for that was all that was left."

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. The master criminal Branson wants money for his hostages: "This is the the United States of America, the richest country in the world, not a banana republic. What's three hundred million dollars? A couple of Polaris submarines? A tiny fraction of what it cost to send a man to the moon? A fraction of one per cent of the gross national product? If I take one drop from the American bucket who's going to miss it _ but if I'm not allowed to take it then a lot of people are going to miss you, Mr President, and your Arabian friends."

"I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing," MacLean once stated in an interview. "I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished." 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 sometimes save the world 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 drops 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 prizewinning achievement, a tale of an old seaman who takes an old fishing boat out in a storm in order to rescue his two sons. "And then a miracle happened. Just that, Mr MacLean - a miracle. It was the Sea of Galilee all over again. Mind you, the waves were as terrible as ever, but just for a moment the wind dropped away to a deathly hush - and suddenly, off to starboard, a thin, high-pitched wail came keening out of the darkness."

MacLean died of heart failure in Munich on February 2, in 1987. He was buried in Celigny, Switzerland. MacLean 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 thre sons, and then with Marcelle Gorgeus in 1972.

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); Alistair MacLean -bibliografia by Simo Sjöblom (2000) - See also: Desmond Bagley (started his career as a thriller writer in 1963)

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