A lament for Alistair

Nearly every male reader of my generation would possibly remember which was the first Alistair Maclean book he read. To any schoolboy, Maclean?s gripping prose, the epic landscapes against which the stories played out, the cynical heroes, the valour and the treachery would have opened up a whole new madly exciting world. To many of us, novels like The Last Frontier were our introduction to the Cold War at its height, and the atrocities committed under Communist regimes. And the best thing about Maclean was that parents approved of his books-they were after all about men facing unbeatable odds and good guys winning, with sex non-existent, unlike that guilty teenage pleasure, James Hadley Chase, who was a strict parental no-no.

I was luckier than most because the first Maclean I read was the first novel he wrote-and some say his best?HMS Ulysses. I was blown away by this World War II naval adventure, a classical tragedy on a grand scale. I have never read it again, and maybe today I?ll find it over-sentimental and cliched. But I can?t think of any 13-year-old who would not have been stunned by the majesty of the novel.

Today, 20 years after his death, not even AH Wheeler stalls stock Maclean?s novels. Amazon.com informs that there is not a single Maclean novel in print in the US. The largest-selling British author in his lifetime is forgotten, extinct. His legacy lives on in the dauntingly thick tomes of Tom Clancy and his ilk.

But Clancy and Co will never be Maclean. They will write thicker books with incredibly complicated plots, enlighten the reader much more about the latest weaponry and surveillance technology, and sell many more copies than Maclean did, but they will never be Maclean.

Their heroes cannot match up to the Scottish master?s calm, sardonic protagonists, even though most of them were identical in character (to the extent that several of them had lost their wives in car accidents). The first person narratives, especially in books like When Eight Bells Toll and Golden Rendezvous are a delight, with their slow and clever revealing of information to the reader and their understated humour. The opening of When Eight Bells Toll is one of the most imaginative I have read in a thriller: a page on the 45 Colt Magnum and the damage it can wreak on a human body, before mentioning that the narrator is facing a man who is aiming a Colt at him. The man had style. Dark Crusader, for example, begins and ends with the same sentence: ?A small dusty man in a small dusty room.?

Of course, in many of his best novels, the real hero/villain was sea or ice. I haven?t read the supposedly great naval novels of Patrick O?Brian, but I wonder if anyone could have described the sea in all its beauty and ferocity much better than Maclean did. He served in the British Navy during World War II in theatres ranging from the Arctic to the tropical, and it shows. From the freezing and feral waters off the Russian coast in HMS Ulysses to the stifling heat of an utterly still Indian Ocean in South By Java Head, the sea is treated masterfully. And ice, in novels like Ice Station Zebra and Night Without End: blizzards, snowdrifts, frostbite, and in Night Without End, a terrifying passage about what happens when fire breaks out at -40 degree celsius.

Maclean wrote war novels, spy novels, and thrillers with a lot of detective story elements. The heroes, as I have said, were mostly the same man with different names, and perhaps a scar or two on their faces which even plastic surgery cannot get rid of. They were all 39 years old (much to my puzzlement as a teenager; 39 at that time seemed really old). Most of them bore in their hearts some terrible secret. The heroines were unadventurously called Mary, Marie or Maria (except for Golden Gate, where, perhaps due to some rush of blood to his head, Maclean named her April Wednesday). They were strong women, and one of them also had a deep knife scar on her cheek which plastic surgery had no hope of erasing. Many of the novels feature indestructible and untalkative Scotsmen who can take enormous physical punishment. Henchmen of villains in the spy stories and thrillers usually carry machine pistols. It was all corking stuff. We loved the books.

But the quality of Maclean?s books dropped sharply after his 1973 novel The Way To Dusty Death. It was a remarkable downturn, and though he wrote 11 more novels, including his only Western, Breakheart Pass, each book cruelly dashed his loyal fans? hopes. After Athabasca (1980), I retired from the fray.

But he had by then given me years of immense pleasure, culminating in even a bit of political awareness. In Dusty Death, a character allays Johnny Harlow?s fears about a suspiciously behaved teenager by saying: ?He?s just 16 years old.? Replies Harlow: ?Give a 16-year-old Vietnamese boy a gun and see what happens.?

No, Clancy won?t be able to write that piece of dialogue. That?s why I feel sorry that Maclean?s books aren?t around anymore.