Bullet-riddled horrors that haunted hero who wrote the world’s best war stories
Alistair MacLean went from humble teacher to king of the thriller writers. But he never shook off the agony of his own wartime past...
ALISTAIR MacLean was the slight, shy Rutherglen school teacher who in March 1954 won first prize – and £100 – in a short story competition thrown by the Glasgow Herald. Challenged days later by the Bible salesman of William Collins Ltd to write a novel in just ten weeks – on a borrowed typewriter in the cramped rooms he shared with his expectant wife – MacLean duly battered one out, drawing on his war service in the Arctic Convoys.
William Collins himself took one look and immediately offered an advance of £1,000.
The book was HMS Ulysses. In short order it sold 250,000 copies, as MacLean produced another, The Guns of Navarone. Just like that, he was a best-selling author and, to his dismay, a sought-out celebrity.
These days, sales are steady rather than spectacular. But at MacLean’s peak in the 1960s, one of his tales was sold every 18 seconds, every minute, every day of the year.
In time, he would outsell Ian Fleming and, for a season, even Agatha Christie. His sales today are north of 150million – and quite a few became major movies; The Guns of Navarone alone starring such screen legends as Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn.
Fame and fortune were one thing. Happiness – even simple contentment in his own skin – ever eluded Alistair MacLean. As early as 1957, settling into life in tax exile, those closest to him began to worry how much he now drank – and nasty with it.
For so thorough a wordsmith, it still startles many to learn that MacLean – born in Glasgow on April 21, 1922, the third son of the Reverend Alistair MacLean and his wife Mary: their roots were in Coll and Tiree – was a native Gaelic speaker.
When he trotted into Daviot Primary five years later, little Alistair had not a word of English and, till he was 15, he and his brothers were forbidden to speak anything but Gaelic in the manse.
There has been much nonsense written about his upbringing. A silver-tongued and theologically liberal minister of the Kirk, MacLean senior was by no stretch of the imagination a Calvinist.
The future novelist was in some regards strictly raised. Up at the crack of dawn every day to milk the manse cow, he would lifelong be an early riser. Even at the height of later success, he would always cook his own breakfast, make his own bed and wash his own dishes.
Through long summers of boyhood, and to save on shoe leather, he and his brothers went barefoot for months on end amid the moors of Strathnairn, Inverness-shire.
But his father’s ‘living’ exceeded £700 a year – at a time when, say, the local quarryman was paid a pound a week – and the bleak life in a Highland manse has been assuredly exaggerated. In any event, it imploded in 1936 when, still only 49, Reverend MacLean was felled by a stroke.
There was great shock in Daviot and Dunlichity, a vast turnout at the funeral but, too, eager speculation as to when the MacLeans might deign to quit the manse.
With three boys to support on a meagre widow’s pension – secondborn Ian was at sea – Mary MacLean returned to Glasgow, to a tenement flat at 26 Carrington Street.
To make ends meet she took in lodgers. Her sons, used lifelong to spacious homes, had to share a bedroom and she slept in the kitchen.
Her eldest, Lachlan – tall, fair, greatly beloved – was studying mediin
‘A wound in his back he would not explain’
cine at Glasgow University, even as he fought cancer of the stomach. Two operations availed nothing and he died in 1938, just a few weeks away from his 21st birthday.
Alistair completed his education at Hillhead High School – classmates included Gordon Jackson, of subsequent screen and TV fame – winning prizes in science and coming third in English. He found employment in a shipping office and, when war broke out, volunteered for the Royal Navy.
For the rest of his life MacLean was extremely reluctant to discuss his war service, and we know little more than what he shares of ‘the worst journey in the world’ aboard HMS Royalist, in that first novel.
We do know that late in 1944 he was home in Glasgow on unusually long leave and his alarmed mother once glimpsed a wound in his back he would not explain, for which he was receiving outpatient treatment.
This was almost certainly the result of an incident detailed in HMS Ulysses, when a shell exploded in its barrel in a gun turret. Two ratings were hurled back against a bulkhead, their heads smashed to pulp; the third, fortuitously in front of an open door, was blown clear. This survivor, it is understood by surviving relatives, was Alistair MacLean.
The Arctic Convoys – MacLean undertook two – were among the most horrific theatres of the Second World War, as the Allies did their best to provision the Soviet Union against the Third Reich.
The ships braved the peril of attack from U-boats, the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine. Had you to abandon ship, you were all but a dead man: frozen stiff in a matter of minutes. If an oil tanker went down, you choked a slick feet-thick; if a petrol tanker exploded, you fried.
Later service, off India, took MacLean to shark-infested waters – he at least once witnessed the aftermath of an attack – but comrades remember a quiet, disciplined chap.
‘Despite the temptations of Far Eastern ports,’ former crewmate Charlie Dunbar recalled in 1991, ‘Alistair was a clean-living man. He didn’t drink to excess – what I read about him later didn’t seem like the same man – and had no time for idle chatter. He was a good chap to have around in a tight situation.’
When peace broke out, Alistair returned to Glasgow, embarked on a four-year Honours degree in English literature, went with pals every second weekend to watch Rangers at Ibrox, and duly took teacher-training at Jordanhill.
In 1950 he took an unusual summer job as a hospital porter in Surrey. There he met a tall, attractive German nurse, Gisela Heinrichsen – and, despite some family dismay, was soon smitten and engaged. They wed, at St Columba’s in Glasgow, in 1953.
For a man who would make his fortune in writing, MacLean always professed to hate doing it and had a disconcerting habit – often, noisily, even at movie premieres of his own work (‘Terrible film… oh, what rubbish’) of disparaging it.
When a book was under way he would brood, curled up in a corner of a sofa, dark eyes wide, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Once he had the
story entire in his mind, he would begin writing, about 5am, after a heart-attack repast of bacon, sausages, eggs and fried bread.
He would break at ten to relax with the papers, break again for lunch at one, then type again till eight or so. He tried to put in a 13hour day and did his best to complete every novel in five weeks.
On at least one occasion, though,
MacLean hammered one out in just 17 days.
He hated editing, being edited and in particular editors – much fuming correspondence survives from such collisions. And he hit early on a winning formula: a handful of men, charged with a deadly to impossible mission, against villainy of the foulest hue and, usually, with a traitor in their midst. At breakneck speed, MacLean would put his heroes through terror upon entrapment upon shoot-out, the whole thing ending with a vast explosion and, throughout, a steady stream of dead bodies.
MacLean accomplished this at a high-octane pace over the decades and in many different settings, moaning all the way to the bank.
As writer Algis Budrys noted admiringly, MacLean’s style was to ‘hit ’em with everything but the kitchen sink, then give ’em the sink, and when they raise their heads, drop the plumber on ’em!’
The novels are otherwise striking for the absence of foul language and explicit sex.
MacLean’s excuse was that sex slowed down the action: in truth, he thought it vulgar. Yet he despised his trade and his work and so lacked confidence that, in an embarrassing episode, in the early 1960s he insisted two novels be published under the pseudonym of Ian Stuart. (They sold well regardless.) He even spent some disastrous years not writing at all, instead dabbling – badly – in the hotel business.
As time passed, MacLean was increasingly haunted by one book – his first. HMS Ulysses was in a league of its own. nothing he subsequently published ever quite matched it.
Then, in a fateful turning point, elliott Kastner, a bright if pushy American film producer, asked him in 1966 to write ‘an adventure story set in the Second World War, with five or six guys overcoming enormous odds to rescue somebody. A woman or two, if possible… but I want the clock ticking’.
MacLean was paid $10,000 on signature, with $100,000 on delivery, a 50 per cent share of the profits – and full publication rights if he wanted subsequently to make the screenplay into a book.
In March 1967, a parcel landed on Kastner’s desk – a screenplay of Alpine drama, a lofty castle accessible only by perilous cable car and a great many strutting nazis.
MacLean – titles were never his strong point – had called it The eagle’s Castle. And, though it cost $6.2million to make, starring Richard Burton and Clint eastwood, Where eagles Dare proved a cinematic triumph.
But MacLean’s writing was never the same again. He thought thereafter in cinematic terms, losing much of the depth and characterisation. Then, in 1970, his mother – prim, regal and formidable – died.
He had always been rather afraid of her, and she passed away just as his marriage was disintegrating and a ghastly French gold-digger, Marcelle Georgius, seduced the 48-year-old novelist.
They married on Friday, October 13, 1972, and, by the time he finally got rid of her, in 1976, Marcelle had squandered most of his fortune.
After divorcing her with some difficulty, MacLean was desperate to remarry Gisela. She was happy to remain friends, and shared protracted winter holidays with Alistair and their sons every year – but she flatly refused to return to a life she had come to hate.
In 1985, MacLean, who now spent most of the year in Dubrovnik, was sufficiently frightened by a doctor to give up the hard stuff. He thereafter confined himself to a couple of glasses of wine each evening.
But in January 1987, in tow with an Irish hotel porter, he went on a complete bender. By the time Gisela and his manservant caught up with him, days later, he was in a pitiful state. Overnight, he had several strokes and lapsed into a coma from which he never awoke.
By this time lonely, driven and bitter, the author was haunted by memories. Once he spoke of a torpedoed Allied ship – hundreds of survivors bobbing about in lifejackets, all but dead from cold and with no hope of rescue.
eyes abrim, MacLean whispered: ‘We machine-gunned them…’
‘Hit ’em with everything but the kitchen sink’