Grace under pressure

reading Alistair Maclean

Brian Docherty

pp. 203-224

in: Clive Bloom (ed), Twentieth-century suspense, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990

Abstract

Alistair MacLean has been a bestselling popular writer for over thirty years, credited by John Sutherland and Ernest Mandel with estimated sales of 150 million copies, yet he has received no attention or even mention by most critics, whose view of the modern novel seems to ignore most of the books the reading public borrow from libraries or buy in shops.¹ Thus he is not listed in Contemporary Novelists or The Oxford Companion to English Literature and is not in the Longman Companion to Twentieth Century Literature, although he is included in Who's Who and The International Who's Who, where we learn that he was born in Glasgow in 1922, educated there, and that he has written at least twenty-seven novels between 1956 and 1983, or roughly a book per year.