The untold story behind Alistair MacLean

MacLean’s win wasn’t quite as obvious or as straightforward as it seemed, however. For a start he had submitted a short story previously, which could have barred him from entering the competition (it was rejected and returned to him). Also, the judging panel was horribly divided. Phillips, Murray and Macbeath all backed MacLean. Ranged against them were three who favoured a story titled No Such Light by one Iris Gibson of Paisley. In the end the deciding vote went to long-serving editor Sir William Robieson.

If that was good judgement, what happened next was good luck. Herald reader Marjory Chapman was moved to tears by the story, which involved a shipwreck off the west coast. She recommended it to her husband, Ian, who happened to work in the Bible department of publishers Collins. He in turn wrote to MacLean, invited him to dinner, and suggested he write a novel and submit it to his employer. The rest is publishing history. With over 150 million copies sold, MacLean is now one of the biggest-selling writers of fiction in the English language.

What’s even more impressive, and less well known, is that English was neither his mother nor even his father tongue. Born a son of the Manse, the third of four boys, and raised in the village of Daviot near Inverness, MacLean’s parents were both proud Gaels from Tiree and the only language spoken at home was Gaelic.

Now, ahead of the 100th anniversary of his birth next year, BBC Alba is screening Alistair MacLean: An Sgeulaiche (The Adventures Of Alistair MacLean), a documentary film using interviews, readings and archive recordings to detail the facts of his eventful life. Presented by former BBC correspondent and avid MacLean fan John Morrison, it puts the case for a re-appraisal of his work in the hope that a new generation will discover the joys of his fast-paced thrillers.

Importantly, it also explores the author’s relationship with Scotland and with the language of his birth. It’s a relationship that was complex and occasionally troubled. “He was a very, very good man,” MacLean once said of his father, “but he had this thing that we must all talk Gaelic, with the result that I now hate Gaelic, hate kilts and anything to do with the Highlands.”

Among those interviewed in the documentary are historian Niall Bartlett, an expert in the first and second world wars as seen through the prism of 20th century Gaelic history, Ian Chapman’s son, also called Ian, and Alistair MacLean’s niece, Shona MacLean. So how does she remember her famous uncle?

“When I was little, before I really got to know him better, I associated him very much with the name on the TV screen when the films came on,” she tells me. “And you’d see the books in all the shops, and people at school knew I was related to him and so were quite interested in that. But as I got a bit older I realised that all the starry stuff was around him. He himself didn’t seem to have a particularly glamorous life. He lived in lovely places and he was very fond of his Rolls-Royce and his boat, but other than that he had very simple tastes in clothes and food. He didn’t seem at all pretentious.”

He was, she adds, a quiet and unassuming man. “You wouldn’t have looked at him twice in the street”. But alongside his shyness he had a dry wit and a keen emotional intelligence. “He was very perceptive about people”. She remembers being regularly summoned to sit beside him on the sofa and “interrogated” about her future plans, and although she had early plans to study medicine it didn’t take him long to divine that she also had a yen to write. He wasn’t wrong, either. Now an author herself, she has published several novels of historical fiction as SG MacLean.

Contemporary thriller writer Lee Child is a long-time MacLean fan. Creator of the Jack Reacher novels, which owe an acknowledged debt to the Scot, he has penned the foreword to a new edition of MacLean’s 1961 thriller Fear Is The Key. He sees the pivotal moment in the author’s life being the outbreak of war in 1939. Given MacLean’s background and where he grew up, Child writes that historical precedent would suggest he “live his whole life within a ten-mile radius, perhaps working a rural white-collar job, perhaps as a land agent or country solicitor.” Instead, MacLean joined the Royal Navy in 1941 aged 19, and served on HMS Royalist defending Arctic convoys. He later served in the Mediterranean and Far East theatres, and was involved in the evacuation of prisoners-of-war from the notorious Changi Prison in Japanese-held Singapore.

Had war not intervened, he could have written Buchan-esque thrillers about being a land agent in the Highlands of course. But it did, so his response to Ian Chapman’s exhortation to pen a novel was HMS Ulysses, a story of heroism and resilience which reflected its origins in MacLean’s lived experience as a naval rating.

Published in 1955 by Fontana, an imprint of Collins, its authenticity told: 250,000 copies were sold in hardback within the first six months, justifying the whopping £1000 advance. Two years later came The Guns Of Navarone and a decade on from that, MacLean had published a further 10 novels as well as a non-fiction book about TE Lawrence. The run ended with 1967’s Where Eagles Dare, released as a film a year later to join several other works which had already made it to the big screen. In all, 18 of his novels have been filmed, four of them with screenplays by MacLean himself.

MacLean didn’t devote the decade exclusively to writing novels. In fact he announced his retirement from the thriller game in 1963 and bought the historic Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor, followed by two other hotels in Worcestershire and Somerset. But he was no Rocco Forte and by 1966 he was back at his typewriter penning When Eight Bells Toll. In 1970 he removed himself to Switzerland to again become a tax exile – he had lived there for a spell in the 1960s – and following the end of his first marriage to Gisela Heinrichsen in 1972 he married French woman Mary Georgius, an aspiring film producer. It lasted five years and was a disaster. She persuaded him to move to Los Angeles where they lived in a Beverly Hills mansion once owned by Marilyn Monroe but by then the drink problem which would plague his later years and contribute to his death aged just 64 had taken hold. He died from a stroke in Munich on February 2, 1987. Resident at the time in Dubrovnik, he was buried in the Vieux Cemetery in Céligny near Geneva, just yards from the grave of Where Eagles Dare star Richard Burton. His final novel, Santorini, was completed in 1986, and even in the teeth of incipient alcoholism he was still producing a novel a year for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

For Lee Child, part of MacLean’s strength and appeal lie in his being “notably non-ideological”. “He wasn’t a Colonel Blimp, living in the past,” he writes. “He had a healthy cynicism about the present, and no great hopes for the future. He had no political position. As a result he was able to nimbly unmoor himself from 1939-1945 in narrative terms, but crucially he was smart enough to bring with him the tropes and memes he had developed while writing about those years.”

Child describes what he calls The Perfect Three, a sequence of novels which for him mark MacLean’s creative apotheosis. They are The Last Frontier, Night Without End and Fear Is The Key itself, published between 1959 and 1961. They deal not with the second world war but with Cold War espionage yet still display what Child calls “the easy and natural grip of a born storyteller.”

That word – storyteller – is the one MacLean most often used to describe himself. Interviewed by film critic Barry Norman in 1970, he said: “I’m a storyteller, that’s all. There’s no art in it, no mystique. It’s a job like any other. The secret, if there is one, is speed”. (For the record, he added: “That’s why there’s so little sex in my books – it holds up the action.”).

In Alistair MacLean: An Sgeulaiche, Ian Chapman’s son, also called Ian, makes a similar point. “He was great on character, great on story, [but] he never thought of himself as a good writer,” he says. “He on occasion said that he would prefer to write in Gaelic or even Spanish than in English. He didn’t feel that his English was good enough, which is clearly nonsense.”

For Shona MacLean, her uncle’s storytelling ability came from his vivid yet relatable characters, and from a long

Scottish tradition of yarn-spinning which, in its literary form, takes in Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. “His characters were recognisable as real people and, although what they did was almost impossibly heroic in the books, I imagine it would seem possible that you could be heroic like that,” she says.

As a boy, MacLean would read The Wizard comic under the bedclothes in his Highland Manse bedroom, but later he did become a devoted student of Scott. Indeed Shona MacLean sees in Scott’s 1829 novel Anne Of Geierstein, an intrigue set against the backdrop of a mountain-top castle in Switzerland, a possible forerunner for the castle her uncle created for Where Eagles Dare. Geierstein means Castle of the Vultures in German.

So where does MacLean’s reputation stand today? On the one hand, preserved mostly as a memory. “I know there’s an awful lot of nostalgia around him, particularly from men of a certain age,” says Shona MacLean. “When I go to book events there will always be somebody who comes up to me and says: ‘I read all your uncle’s books’ or ‘My dad had them all’. Quite often current male writers will say they loved his books.”

On the other, with a remake of Fear Is The Key in development and the centenary of his birth to mark, perhaps it’s time for another look. A great story never loses its edge – why should a great storyteller?

Alistair MacLean: An Sgeulaiche is on BBC Alba on December 29 (9pm)