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 adventure and excitement we really expect from [him]. But funnily enough, despite the setting—a charter ship with film crew on the Arctic seas and what must be the most inhospitable island of all time, and despite the tremendous violence of the action, Mr. MacLean and Miss [Agatha] Christie are siblings under the skin. Quite simply it i...

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 inertia; but his difficulty in moving is in fact the product of an unceasing inner struggle…. It is a condition which can be simulated to a remarkable degree by reading Alistair MacLean. A coarsely thrustful plot impels you forward; a coarsely imprecise style retards you; and the result, even though you formally progress through the page...

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, ever since. But Mr MacLean's violence has no real suggestion of pain; it is the 'Bang bang you're dead' violence of children's games. The impression is heightened by the constant reversals and counter-reversals of fortune, captures, escapes and recaptures, that keep the plot steaming along: either Mr MacLea...

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 are found murdered—picks up speed rapidly and maintains it to the last page. In fact, it is such a good suspense novel that it's a pity it is not a better novel. The characters never do anything out of character, but they seem to be without thoughts, passions, even the little tics that can make a flat character come to life. Furt...

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 avid love of vicarious doom and disaster." I wish he wouldn't, because it is the source of his reknown. He has here dictated a script designed for those who do not treat the original "King Kong" as 30's camp. After California is saved, Ryder's wife, Susan, utters these words about the world-destroying...