Conference tallis::celt

123.0. "Alistair MacLean Obit" by TALLIS::DARCY (George @Littleton Mass USA) Tue Feb 03 1987 23:05

I enjoyed many of his books.  Made for good reading!
        
    Associated Press Tue  3-FEB-1987 04:00                          Obit-Mac Lean

   Bestselling British Author of Adventures Dies at 64
                           By RICHARD HOFER
                        Associated Press Writer
   MUNICH, West Germany (AP) - Alistair MacLean, author of the
bestselling war thriller ``The Guns of Navarone'' and one of
postwar Britain's most popular novelists, died while on a visit to
West Germany. He was 64.
   William Collins and Sons, the writer's publisher in London, said
MacLean suffered a stroke three weeks ago while visiting a friend
in Munich and died in a hospital Monday of heart failure.
   Although he was Britain's bestselling writer, MacLean once said:
``I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller ... . There's no art in
what I do, no mystique. It's a job like any other.''
   An obituary in the London Times said MacLean was fond of
``denigrating his own work.''
   ``The critics consistently found fault; but an obedient public
did not, and MacLean's books sold by the million,'' it added.
   MacLean wrote 29 books, beginning with ``HMS Ulysses,'' based on
his five years of sea duty with the Royal Navy in World War II.
   More than 24 million copies of his novels had been sold by 1973,
Associated Press Tue  3-FEB-1987 04:00                 Obit-Mac Lean (cont'd)

and many were made into films, including ``Where Eagles Dare,''
``Breakheart Pass,'' ``When Eight Bells Toll,'' ``Puppet On a
Chain,'' and ``The Guns of Navarone.''
   ``I'm good at my job,'' MacLean said in a 1971 interview at his
home in Geneva, Switzerland. ``No, I'm very good at my job. I'm a
thorough professional.''
   He wrote ``HMS Ulysses'' in spare evenings over a three-month
period in 1955. The book sold 250,000 hardback copies in six months.
   A year later, MacLean wrote ``The Guns of Navarone,'' drawing
from his wartime experiences in the Aegean Sea aboard HMS Royalist.
The book sold 400,000 copies in six months.
   ``The Guns of Navarone'' tells the tale of a Allied commando
force that slips onto a Nazi-occupied Greek island and blows up a
clifftop artillery emplacement. The guns guarded the sea approaches
to an area being approached by Allied naval forces.
   The novel was made into a successful motion picture in 1961
starring Oscar-winning actors Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck.
   MacLean also wrote ``South by Java Head'' (1958), ``Night
Without End'' (1960), ``Fear is the Key (1961) and ``Where Eagles
Dare'' (1967). His later works include ``Goodbye, California''
Associated Press Tue  3-FEB-1987 04:00                 Obit-Mac Lean (cont'd)

(1977) and ``Athabasca'' (1980).
   He lived in Geneva for many years and regularly visited
Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. He was married and divorced twice, and is
survived by three sons, Lachlan, Michael and Alistair.
   MacLean was born in 1922 in Daviot in the Scottish Highlands. He
joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and spent five years on convoy
escorts.
   After the war, he graduated with honors in English from Glasgow
University and became an English teacher at Gallow Flat School near
Glasgow.
   He wrote short stories in his spare time, and won a newspaper
competition with one of them. Ian Chapman, who worked for Collins
publishers in London, spotted the story and encouraged Maclean to
write a book.
   Chapman said Monday in London: ``We will miss him terribly. As
an adventure-thriller writer, his loss is a great one, but thank
heavens he has left us such a marvelous legacy - wonderful escapist
adventure stories.''