Last of the Swashbucklers:
The Exalted Heroism of Alistair MacLean’s Novels
By Andrew Bernstein

It is inconceivable that Alistair MacLean’s novels are currently out of print in America. Inconceivable and criminal—because MacLean is one of the few authors of the past 100 years who manifests both a genuine comprehension of man’s potential for heroism and an ability to convincingly dramatize it in literary form.  

MacLean’s early books, written in the 1950s and 1960s, were uniformly superb. Several are masterpieces. Four will be briefly discussed here: HMS Ulysses (1955), The Guns of Navarone (1957), Where Eagles Dare (1967), and, above all, The Secret Ways (1959).

MacLean served in the Royal Navy during World War II and his best stories pit British sailors, soldiers, or secret agents against either Nazi or Soviet antagonists. His plots generally eschew romance in favor of high voltage action that grips the reader early and keeps him riveted until the final climactic showdown. In these four books, the internationally best-selling author who was known in his day as the “Master Storyteller,” provides a series of thriller plots that keeps his readers in breathless suspense until their final paragraphs.

In her “Introduction” to the reprinting of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, Ayn Rand advised a new generation of that book’s readers: “Do not look for ‘the folks next door’—you are about to meet a race of giants, who might have and ought to have been your neighbors.”¹ This insight is equally true of MacLean’s best novels, for in them he created a gallery of immortal heroes who remain dauntlessly unflappable  in the face of epic forces seeking their  extinction.

MacLean’s first book, H.M.S. Ulysses, is one of his best. Set during World War II’s notoriously dangerous Murmansk Run, it tells the story of a mutiny ship, of a crew who—after too many days and nights of bleak and bitter convoy duty—rebel against overbearing authority. The British Admiralty, locked in a death struggle against Hitler and vastly undersupplied with men and warships, sends the Ulysses out on one last mission through Arctic waters to Russia’s frigid north. But this is no ordinary supply run: The Ulysses and the convoy she protects are being offered up as bait to lure out of hiding the sister ship of the legendary Bismarck—the mighty battlewagon Tirpitz.  The trip is, in effect, a one-way ticket to a hell in which the convoy will suffer incessant, numbing cold, furious Arctic storm, and unceasing assault by German planes, submarines, and cruisers.  

The book’s tag line reads, “The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater.” It is admirably exact. Although they are consistently outfoxed by cunning German commanders and suffer one crushing blow after another, the crew members of the Ulysses demonstrate in battle after interminable battle their unbreachable determination to protect the merchant vessels assigned them. MacLean neither trenchantly examines the nature of this “something greater” than heroism nor explores the characters of the select individuals able to achieve it. Instead, he provides a brutal, gut-wrenching—but uplifting—dramatization of what it looks like in action. The crew members of the Ulysses are sleep-deprived, malnourished, chronically wet, frostbitten, tubercular, dead-on-their-feet zombies thrown into an inescapable death conflict with a swarming, ruthless enemy. And yet these horrific conditions, presented in harrowing detail, are not the dominant essence of the novel. Rather, they constitute the ghastly backdrop necessary for a select few to transcend heroism into some nameless, glowing stratosphere beyond.   At story’s end, a discerning reader shakes his head, uncertain whether he has witnessed triumph or tragedy, but knowing without cavil that he has witnessed rare moments of august grandeur.   

H.M.S. Ulysses is not representative of MacLean’s early work. The combination of the British Admiralty’s distrust of the mutiny ship, the crew’s consequent expendability, and the bitter Norse hell to which they are consigned pervades the novel with an inescapable gloom. Further, its final word is that an elite cadre among men can ascend to rarefied heights of valor—but mere mortals cannot understand, much less appreciate, their extraordinary deeds. As depicted in the novel, whether from ignorance, or spite, or lack of experience, or simple plebian composition, the common man—including those in the upper echelons of command—fail to recognize the elevation to which such singular men have risen. The heroes of the Ulysses die in horrific splendor inconceivable to men of pedestrian character.                

In The Guns of Navarone (1957), made into a hugely successful 1961 film starring Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn, MacLean’s theme is again World War II heroism, but the details and emotional tone of this tale are vastly different. Heavy German guns on Navarone, a Greek island off the Turkish coast in the Aegean Sea, command a vital sea lane, prohibiting the naval evacuation of the near-by island of Kheros, where twelve hundred British troops are stationed.  With an impending German invasion of the island, the lives of the troops on Kheros depend on the destruction of the German artillery on Navarone. But the guns themselves are guarded by a seemingly impregnable fortress, and all attempts to destroy them by air, land, and sea assaults have resulted in catastrophic failure. The only remaining chance is stealth: A commando team must infiltrate the island and blow up the guns, accomplishing what could not be accomplished with overt force. The difficulty is that the only surreptitious way onto the island is its south cliff overlooking the sea—which experienced mountaineers assess as impossible to scale.

Enter a team of elite British commandos led by “the human fly” Captain Keith Mallory. The toast of pre-war Europe, Mallory is an accomplished New Zealand mountaineer and is universally acknowledged to be the world’s greatest climber. And he proves it: Under the worst possible conditions—on a dark night, in a driving storm, as his boat is battered to pieces by wind, wave, and reef—Mallory achieves the seeming impossible by scaling the south cliff of Navarone, thereby enabling the other commandos to climb by rope.

But the team’s troubles have only begun. The Germans know, by the treachery of a Greek spy in their midst, of their arrival, and hunt them down by means of trained mountain troops and Stuka dive bombers. Fighting betrayal and heavily outnumbered, Mallory and his small team must somehow penetrate the fortress of Navarone and destroy the giant guns.  Then, hounded from every imaginable quarter, they discover that their explosives have been sabotaged… 

One of the most satisfying elements of MacLean’s best plots is the interminable cat-and-mouse game, the life-and-death battle of wits between the heroes and their cunning adversaries. One such episode plays out when the team is captured by the Germans, and one the heroes—a lethal warrior who has killed innumerable Nazis—chooses to feign the role of a simple islander who faints at the sight of blood.  . . . The subterfuge often employed by his protagonists show them to be individuals of far more than superlative physical prowess—they are also brilliant, desperate men of almost preternatural resource. 

This is especially true of John Smith, an English secret agent and the main character of Where Eagles Dare (1967).  Although burdened with a name woefully banal, Smith is a man of almost limitless resource, a man who gradually reveals himself to be one of the great cloak-and-dagger masters of espionage fiction. Smith must infiltrate Gestapo headquarters in Bavaria to rescue a captured American general who knows the secrets of the impending D-Day invasion of France. Making matters worse, the headquarters are located in the Schloss Adler, a castle located on a lofty mountain peak, protected by elite Alpenkorps troops and guards with trained Doberman pinschers, and accessible only by a cable car suspended one thousand feet over a yawning chasm. 

Where Eagles Dare remains one of the most suspenseful thrillers ever set during the grim days of World War II, for nothing is what it seems in the novel’s universe—not the mission, not the members of Smith’s team, and especially, not Smith himself. Bits and pieces of the truth bubble slowly to the story’s surface in the midst of the heroes’ breakneck attempt to breach the fortress’s defenses. The reader only becomes aware of large portions of the truth when, in one of the most dramatically intense scenes in espionage fiction, Smith reveals his actual identity. But not all is revealed. MacLean saves one last twist for the finale, when everyone but Smith believes the hair-raising saga to be mercifully concluded. A large measure of the enjoyment provided by this tale is to be found in the manner in which Smith towers—both intellectually and physically—over the action, pulling the strings of both friend and foe as though he were the master puppeteer of a vast, high stakes marionette show.                  

But if these other books are superb, The Secret Ways (1959, known in Britain as The Last Frontier) is magnificent. It is the one twentieth-century thriller that is Hugo-esque in its grandeur.

The story is set in Hungary, a few years after the Soviet’s brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Britain’s top secret agent, Michael Reynolds, must rescue a leading English scientist, Dr. Harold Jennings, from the Communists. Reynolds is a hero of James Bondian-proportions, a battle-scarred British commando during World War II whose rapier-sharp training since has prepared him for an even more dangerous mission as a secret agent deep inside a Communist police state. But even Reynolds’ heroism is dwarfed by that of two members of the Hungarian Resistance from whom he receives aid: Jansci and the Count. In their roles as freedom fighters against both the Nazis and Communists, these two men have endured hardships and suffered staggering personal losses that would crush lesser men.

Jansci’s father, a dedicated Ukrainian Communist, was murdered by Stalin in the purges of 1938, tortured to death by the GPU in Kiev.  Seeking justice, Jansci proceeded to kill his father’s murderers, but was captured and shipped to Siberia where, for six months, he was kept in solitary confinement in sub-zero temperatures, without daylight, a bed, or a blanket, and with mere scraps of food and drops of water for sustenance. “For the last month they stopped all supplies of water also, but Jansci survived by licking the hoarfrost off the iron door of his cell.”²  The Communists then shipped him to the slave labor camps at Kolyma, where millions died under Stalin. At Kolyma he lost fingers being dragged inches behind propeller-driven sleds, was thrown unarmed into a pit with starving wolves, and was nailed naked to two trees and left to die in frigid Siberian temperatures. “Nobody ever came back from . . . Kolyma . . . but Jansci came back.”³  Nobody knows how he escaped, but within four months, alone and on foot, Jansci reached the Trans-Siberian Railway and eventually made his way back to Ukraine, where he joined the army and awaited his chance to fight the Soviets. When the Germans invaded in 1941, he, along with hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians, joined them to fight the Communists. He fought for two years before being re-captured by the Russians and placed in a suicide position against the Germans. But, again, he escaped and after the war became an anti-Communist freedom fighter based primarily in Hungary, helping hundreds escape into Austria and thereby the Free World. In his exploits he has made the gruesome discovery that his mother has been killed, along with his two children, who were buried alive by the Soviets. Everybody but him believes that his wife is also dead, and in search of her he has broken into and out of five of Hungary’s nine concentration camps.

Jansci’s partner, known only as “The Count,” possesses an equally astonishing capacity for enduring hardship and personal suffering while fighting for individual rights and liberties. At the novel’s outset The Count, like Jansci, has suffered the loss of his entire family to murder or disappearance, but at the hands of the Nazis. An actual Polish aristocrat, The Count fought the German invasion of his country in 1939, then joined the Underground Resistance to secretly fight the Nazi occupation that followed. Captured and condemned to grisly slave labor. The Count killed his Nazi jailers and escaped, joining the Polish Resistance Army. Captured again, and sent this time to Auschwitz, The Count nevertheless survived, and after World War II joined forces with Jansci to form an elusive, irrepressible cadre of freedom fighters to battle the conquering Communists.

The Count, a swashbuckling, devil-may-care, Errol Flynn-style hero, is also a master of disguise and language and has used his talents to infiltrate the AVO, Hungary’s cunning and murderous secret police, and rise brilliantly to the rank of Major. The Count, in his nerve-straining double existence, risks his life daily—and to great effect. The knowledge gained by him in his position as a trusted confederate of the AVO leadership is invaluable to Jansci, enabling him to carry a steady stream of freedom-seeking Hungarians to the West.

Without Jansci and The Count, Reynolds would have no hope of rescuing Dr. Jennings from the Communists. But even with the aid of these two great men—already proven heroes before the novel’s action begins—Reynolds’ chances of success are slim, for they are deep within a suppressive totalitarian state, and the secret police constitute an ubiquitous presence . The result is an epic duel between Reynolds and Jansci’s freedom fighters on the one hand, and, on the other, the secret police, who are represented superlatively by the relentless and deviously brilliant Colonel Hidas. The plot twists roar at the reader at breathless pace—the suspense ends only at the story’s death-struggle climax.

One highlight of the rescue attempt is Reynold’s adrenaline-pumping, death-inviting journey across the icy roof of a  hurtling train in a howling blizzard, brilliantly rendered and leaving the reader wide-eyed and  sweaty-palmed throughout the scene’s duration.  . Generally, MacLean’s plots are limited to such violent external conflict, in which the hero is single-mindedly determined to prevail, suffering no internal value struggle regarding the desired outcome. But in The Secret Ways, the heroes are additionally burdened by an agonizing internal struggle that causally engenders the story’s roaring climax. For, through the vicious cunning of the secret police, the freedom fighters discover that the lives of innocent people deeply loved by several members of the band will be violently terminated if they carry their mission to fruition. The on all-fronts nature of the conflict waged by MacLean’s heroes is what accounts for the Hugo-esque quality of this book. This is what makes The Secret Ways MacLean’s finest work: the grandeur achieved by men so principled that they dauntlessly face any form of antagonist—internal and external, intellectual-emotional and physical—to successfully conclude their chosen value quest.

A minor annoyance in this novel is the pacifistic philosophy endlessly spouted by Jansci and his converts. For example, they believe the Soviets to be dangerous solely because they fear the West, not because they hold a collectivist ideology that utterly eschews the principle of individual rights.  But while such drivel undermines the consistency of the characters, in a specific form it also serves to enhance their heroism. Because they can incapacitate, but never kill, their murderous secret police adversaries Jansci and his freedom fighters are driven to even more brilliant heights of ingenuity to overcome both their enemies and their self-imposed limitations.

Two generations ago, MacLean’s books were international best sellers and he was proclaimed “The Master Storyteller.” Today, he is virtually forgotten, and an entire generation of avid young readers has never heard of him. Why is this? What accounts for the literary sin of such great works being out of print in America?

A superficial and wholly inaccurate attempt at explanation is that his books are World War II or Cold War thrillers—and nobody is any longer interested in archaic tales of what, to some, is the dim past. But such an excuse obliterates the entire realm of historical fiction. If this were the case, would anyone bother reading Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Hugo? Does anyone suggest that the historical settings so date these works as to make them irrelevant to contemporary audiences?

What makes historical fiction possible, and historical settings irrelevant to modern readers, is the objectivity of human nature and the universality of human experience. A great writer captures some essence of human nature or experience and conveys it in a gripping story that holds a reader in suspenseful thrall until its final climax. Dostoyevsky’s best works, for example, are set in a Russia of almost 150 years ago. Yet his depictions of human evil, of religious fervor, and of a profound (and irrational) yearning of some men for a transcendent world are brilliantly timeless—as are the singular plots by means of which he conveys his characterological insights.    

MacLean’s best books, superbly plotted and populated by heroes of immense stature, offer superlative values to 21^st century readers. Are they brimmed with insights into the nature of human beings or human life, in the manner of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky? They are not. Characterization in his books is generally eschewed in favor of hard-driving, unrelenting action, and explicit philosophy—such as it is—is woefully inadequate to explain even the meaning of his books, much less the meaning of life.

No, the enormous value provided by MacLean can be summarized in a single line: to a rational man, heroism never goes out of season.

Because heroes take actions in support of human life—and often on a grand scale—they are profoundly inspirational to all who seek success and happiness. Heroes remind a rational man how much is possible, showing him that the difficulties of his own universe, possibly magnified in his mind by burdensome quotidian struggle, are mere surmountable hindrances incapable of impeding the indefatigable efforts of a resolute man.

Because of such factors, literary heroism is a priceless benison. Value oriented men need heroes to emulate. This is certainly true of the young, who have not yet formed their characters, and for whom the sight of exemplary heroism is a tonic and a beacon, showing them that much more is possible than the villainous and the mundane, and highlighting the path to moral stature.

However, for those who are old in years but still young—not merely in heart but in character, in hunger for values—the sight of literary heroes is equivalently imperative. Since man is a volitional being, it is possible at any age and regardless of personal pedigree and past attainments for an individual to become weary of struggle, to grow embittered at a society seemingly bent on suicide and often purblind regarding its noblest members. For such an individual, the sight of an unbowed man, of a rigid spine and an unbreakable spirit, functions as a restorative, replenishing his soul with the fighting spirit necessary to pursue values. For example, the response in effect is: if Dr. Stockmann, hero of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, can withstand assault from an outraged society virtually in its entirety and still prevail, then how much less daunting seem the scant challenges confronting my value quest?     

The glory and power of art has fuelled the soul of innumerable good men. But no other artistic form has the matchless power of literature to perform this task, for it alone can render a hero’s tale from inception to finis, exact and complete in every essential item of his struggle for values. This is the superlative gift offered mankind by MacLean’s best novels.

How can such books be allowed to slip into obscurity?

The answer lies in the nature of our literary culture. It has often been pointed out that ours is the era of “the anti-hero,” in which “serious” novels, dramas, and short stories depict man as a pitiful, ineffectual creature, perennially beset by loathsome desires. In the post-World War I era, the avant-garde writer, Gertrude Stein, famously observed of her intellectual peers: “You are all a lost generation.” The evidence for this, and, indeed, of a virtual “lost century” is overwhelming.

One of the 20th century’s most widely respected novels, for example, depicts a neurotic young southerner at Harvard, who commits suicide over the chronic guilt he suffers as the result of an incestuous affair with his sister. Another, a scabrous, mocking parody of The Odyssey, depicts “the struggle” of a philandering husband to journey home to his adulterous wife through a virtual “Who’s Who” of drunks, prostitutes, and sundry inveterate low-lives.  

One influential 20th-century playwright, sneering at The Orestia, dramatizes the self-destruction of a prominent, incestuous, and murderously conniving American family. Another presents a modern day savage who brutally drives into insanity his supercilious, captious, pathetically neurotic sister-in-law.  

One of the past century’s leading short story writers depicts a woman who seeks out the terminally ill for the ghastly satisfaction she derives from their cadaverous condition and final death agonies. Another dramatizes the manipulative, domineering grandmother of a pettily sniping and backbiting family who finds God instants before a homicidal maniac (mercifully) obliterates the whole bickering brood of them. A third presents the story of an alienated man who goes to sleep and awakes as a gigantic beetle—one subsequently starved to death by his family rather than expeditiously expunged with a can of Raid.  

Such a literary culture might as well hang signs above the entrance to university English Departments proclaiming: “Hero Free Zone.” In such an intellectual atmosphere, great men are not wanted and their evanescent stories are allowed to wither away and disappear, like a gasping patient dying of neglect.

MacLean is currently ignored for the identical reasons that Hugo and Dumas are: the extravagant Romanticism of his writing, i.e., the relentlessly goal-directed characters who assume control of their destinies, the vivid external conflicts that they triumphantly wage, the consequent superlative plot structures generated by such conflict, and, above all, the towering, swaggering heroism of his protagonists.

Is MacLean, even at his best, a great novelist in the sense that Hugo is? He is not, although The Secret Ways, as noted, manifests distinctively Hugo-esque elements. Rather, he can be favorably compared with lesser, although still great Romantic authors; with the outstanding masters of swashbuckling adventure fiction—of whom the best are Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Baroness Orczy, and Anthony Hope. MacLean, at his best, is the Dumas or Sabatini of late-20^th century literature—and this is exalted praise, indeed. The reason of his neglect is the reason of his stature: he is the last of the great writers of heroically swashbuckling adventure fiction—or the first of their return.  

Endnotes

MacLean’s early books, written in the 1950s and 1960s, were uniformly superb. Several are masterpieces, including the four discussed in this article. Unfortunately his later books, written in the 1970s and 1980s, are weak and cannot be recommended.

For those interested in obtaining and reading MacLean’s out-of-print novels there is good news: His early books sold so many copies during his heyday that used copies can readily be found for sale at Amazon.com or for loan through local libraries.

1. Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Penguin, 1971), pp. 154-55.
2. Alistair MacLean, The Secret Ways (New York: Fawcett Books, 1959), p. 99.
3. Ibid., pp. 99-100.