 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
|
Alistair (Stuart) MacLean (1922-1987) - wrote also as Ian Stuart |
|
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 Eastwood 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 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, the son of Alistair MacLean, a Church of Scotland minister, and Mary Lamont, a singer. His parents spoke the Scottish language, Gaelic, and English was MacLean's second language; at home he was not allowed to speak English. The family moved north to Daviot, near Inverness, and MacLean spent his early years in the Scottish Highlands. His father died of cerebral haemorrhage when Alistair was 14, and he returned to Glasgow with his mother. MacLean's brother Lachlan, who was a medical student, died of cancer of the stomach. After completing his Higher Leaving Certificate with passes in English, History, Latin, Mathematic and Science at Hillhead High, MacLean took up a post at the shipping office of F.C. Strick. At the age of eighteen in 1941, he joined the Royal Navy. During World War II he served as a torpedo man in Home, Mediterranean, and Eastern Fleets on the HMS Royalist. Much of the time he served on Russian convoy routes, and from these experiences he drew heavily for his novels about the sea. "He was a good chap to have around in a tight situation," recalled one of his shipmates. MacLean claimed that he was once captured by the Japanese and tortured, but his story has not been verified. However, 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 short story competition of the Glasgow 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 navy ships. It deals with a convoy in the North Atlantic battling during World War II with submarines and foul weather. The emotional power in the 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 great success. His next books, Guns of Navarone (1957) and South by Java Head (1957), were 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 had 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 for being at times a trifle wooden – David Niven who was cast as Corporal Miller, one of the commandos, gave one of his very best performances. 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 up a bridge vital to the 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 success similar to 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 behind the 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. Between the years 1957 and 1963 MacLean lived in Geneva. He
owned Jamaica Inn, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, and in the 1960s ran hotels
in England for four years. During that period, nearly all MacLean's
novels were adapted for the screen, with the noteworthy exception of H.M.S.
Ulysses; its film right were sold to an Italian aristocrat, Count
Giovanni Volpi. "So why did I go out of my way to buy this property?"
Volpi said to MacLea's biographer Jack Webster. "I suppose I did it
like I might have bought a painting." The film version of Where
Eagles Dare,
starring Clint Eastwood, Richard Burton, cost $6.2
million to produce, and was a major success. In the story of team of
special soldiers are commissioned to destroy the headquarter of the
German alpine corps. "His story-line and characterization were
brilliant but, frankly, his screenwriting was clumsy," said the
producer Elliott Kastner of MacLean's script. Burton was a Swiss
neighbour of MacLean, who disliked the actor inrensely. When they
quarreled at the Dorchester Hotel, London, MacLean planted a right
hook to Burton's nose and they never spoke to each other again. Ice Station Zebra (1963), filmed in 1968, was an espionage story about a British weather-monitoring station on a polar ice cap, which is almost totally destroyed by an oil fire. The United States nuclear submarine Dolphin is sent to rescue the team. The narrator and 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 a 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, terrorists, 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 the North Atlantic Seas, ice mountains, deep gulches, desert quicksands, frozen Arctic tundra. Even the ordinary Central European winter conditions are nearly fatal to MacLean's hero in The Secret Ways (1959): "Only the snow was real, the snow and that bone-deep, sub-zero cold that shrouded him from head to toe in a blanket of ice and continuously shook his entire body in violent, uncontrollable spasms of shivering, like a man suffering from ague." Typical of MacLean's novels are 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. "It is a world where there are no cities that do
not drip with intrigue", said the American film critic Roger Ebert on
the film adaptation of Puppet on a Chain (1972), "and only the
most romantic of those make the grade: Amsterdam, London, Zurich."
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 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 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 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 the 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 prize-winning 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, 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 to the German-born Gisela Heinrichsen, who worked at Mearnskirk Hospital; they had three sons. In 1972 MacLean married Marcelle Gorgeus, the daughter of French music-hall entertainers, Georgius Guibourg and Marcelle Irvun. The marriage ended in divorce in 1977. According to the divorce settlement, she was given £400,000 and the right to a full lenght screenplay, called The Golden Girl, which MacLean had completed.
Selected works:
Some rights reserved Petri Liukkonen (author) & Ari Pesonen. Kuusankosken kaupunginkirjasto 2008 |
