Despite being one of the world's best-selling writers, Alistair MacLean was consistently modest about the literary merits of his twenty-eight novels of action and adventure. He always insisted that he...
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Critical Essay by Roger Baker
I found [Caravan to Vaccares] childish schoolboy stuff. I can only think [Mr. MacLean] was having a slack moment, for Bear Island has all the tight construction, high ad...
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Critical Essay by Linda Bridges
Alistair MacLean is one of the best suspense writers around, and [Breakheart Pass]—in which, one by one, the passengers on an Army supply train in the Old West ...
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Critical Essay by Julian Barnes
One of the manifestations of encephalitis lethargica, or sleepy sickness, is a condition known as akinesia. The sufferer presents a deceptive surface of passivity or i...
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Critical Essay by Nick Totton
Alistair MacLean has … [little] emotional involvement in his tales. Many years and many books ago, he found a selling vein; and he has been opening it, bloodily, ...
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Critical Essay by Herbert Gold
A veteran of more than 20 novels, not all of them as bad as ["Goodbye California"], Mr. MacLean lectures us a bit about "Mankind's morbidly ...
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Alistair (Stuart) MacLean
Critical Essay by Roger Baker
