MacLean, Alistair

(British, 1922–87)

MacLean was born in Glasgow, where he was educated at the University before becoming a schoolteacher. Begin with HMS Ulysses (1955), his best-selling first novel. Based on his experiences during the Second World War, the book's account of the shipping convoys to Russia vividly evokes voyages through Arctic winters under constant danger of U-boat attack. The Guns of Navarone (1957) is typical of his work in featuring a group of courageous commandos on a mission of urgent importance. The story of the destruction of a crucial Nazi gun installation on an island off Turkey was, like a number of his novels, successful as a film. In Ice Station Zebra (1963) the atomic submarine Dolphin is imperilled under the Arctic ice cap in an attempt to rescue survivors of a weather-station adrift on the pack ice.

Hammond Innes, Nicholas Monsarrat, Gavin Lyall  DH