Simmons does his best but it’s in the post war chapters that the book comes to life. Trying to write directly about MacLean’s war service must have been extremely difficult as he was an inconspicuous figure amongst HMS Royalist’s crew of 600. The Dileas is reprinted as an appendix to this book. The Dileas, the story of a Scottish rescue, won a £100 prize from the Glasgow Herald and led directly to the commissioning of MacLean’s first novel, HMS Ulysses. Ownership of the Silver Craig seems to have given him both friends and the confidence to begin writing short sea-based stories. Neither he nor his friends had experience of small craft and they were lucky to survive the collection trip. Maclean joined the Second World War Navy in 1941, aged 19, and served five years as an Ordinary Seaman rising to a Leaning Torpedo Hand.įor the majority of the time, he was on HMS Royalist, a Dido-class cruiser, serving in a variety of locations including the Arctic Convoys, Western Mediterranean, Aegean and the Far East.

His brother described him as ‘a dour wee customer’ and his headmaster, who had taught him English, commented that his later extraordinary success simply reminded him always to ‘keep an open mind’ about his pupils. He was a Scottish ‘son of the manse’ who grew up speaking only Gaelic at home until age 15. And there were the films as well …Īlistair MacLean was perhaps a surprising character to become such a sensational bestseller.

Merely reading the list of titles, HMS Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone, South by Java Head, The Last Frontier, Night Without End, Fear is the Key brings a wave of nostalgia for those annual new stories, published from 1955, almost without intermission until MacLean’s relatively early death in 1987. So many of us post-war children will concur. ‘Alistair MacLean was a giant figure when I was growing up,’ writes massively-successful thriller writer, Lee Child, in his foreword to this book.

Hms ulysses book