Writers We Love but stopped reading: Alistair MacLean

A Long time ago, I devoured Alistair Maclean books. I was chilled to the bone reading the Arctic adventures of HMS Ulyssees back in the middle of a very hot summer in what must have been the very late 1970s, thrilled by The Guns of Navarone, horrified by Puppet On a Chain, and various impressed or baffled by a dozen other titles. But even as a teenager, there were doubts. I didn't now if Where Eagles Dare was meant to be taken seriously, suspected Force 10 From Navarone was tongue in cheek, and was baffled by Bear Island. So much so that when I read it again recently, it was bafflement all over again. I could see why he completely fell out of favour the instant he stopped publishing. The heavy ironic style of the World War Two veterans had long since become old hat and younger folks didn't care for it much, and as one of the (then) younger folks, I could see why I stopped reading him as well. The protagonist, Doctor Marlowe, has a somewhat grating, waffling line in first person narration which got very tedious to the extent that I had to force myself through to the end I was something close to a speed-reader when I read it last time, which explains my bafflement on that occasion. On this time round, I was wondering why his editors hadn't asked him to make it a bit snappier. But it sold about eight millio copies in 1971 apparently. Must have been nothing to do at the airport and on the beaches that year. I sneaked a look at the start of Where Eagles Dare in the meantime, and there was a similar arch style to that, a little less annoying for being in third person, but still enough to make me beat a hasty retreat for the time being. Having had one book of my youth ruined on re-reading, I was in no rush to spoil one that I had actually enjoyed first time around. But I might be brave soon...

Writers We Love But Stopped Reading: Recovering Jack Higgins Fan

As I mentioned in my Sad Wind From The Sea post, I am a long time and recovering Jack Higgins fan. At one time he climbed to the top of the list of my favourites to where I judged him as being better (presumably, in those days that meant more entertaining) than Alistair MacLean (probably true most of the time). Aside: have I done a post on Alistair Maclean? If not I should have to do a couple, at least one on HMS Ulysses (nothing to do with James Joyce) and at least one for his work in general. At that time, in my early twenties, the fact that he seemed to have brought out been quite prolific and I had fun tracking down old out of print Harry Patterson books and James Graham books in the public library (this was in the early 1980s when you still could find twenty year old books in libraries, something they don't seem so keen on now) But every love affair has its rocky moments, and over time, the publishers went back and mined the Harry Patterson/Hugh Marlow(e)/Martin Fallon/James Graham pen-names for books to become Jack Higgins titles. Actually I found the James Graham books on my own before they got rebadged, and felt quite clever for tracking them down while it was still an open secret. But I digress. As one encounters the different titles spread across many years, a pattern emerges. At times it is straight-forward re-publishing of old titles, at others re-working of titles (some older books became Sean Dillon titles when previously they had been Paul Chavasse stories etc) which was maybe not quite entirely self-plagiarism, and then there were the repeated themes and characters and names -- Hugh Marlowe was a pen-name, and Hugh Marlow was a hero, Steiner is a German surname that comes up again and again, Jago as a surname recurs, boats sink and planes crash in marshes or just off the coast in nearly all parts of the world and have to be salvaged by disgraced ex-military men who have been cashiered for embezzlement or for massacring surrendered Enemy Combatants. The head eventually spins, and the hero or one of his side-kicks usually has a mocking grin and a quip for the disappointing way life turns out, and/or has a haunted look and a death wish. Eventually you get to the point where you wish you just would go back and re-read some of the better ones and forget the others. I learned that much faster with the Jack Reacher books (oh must put them on the list). And a certain troubling inclination as time went on to borrow tropes from the Irish author Maurice Walsh, who did a very good line in Irish Richard Hannays but has been mostly forgotten except for the Quiet Man (another writer who deserves a blog post) One must always be wary of what writers say about themselves as they make things up. At one stage in the past twenty years, Jack Higgins revealed that he had develope a condition called Essential Tremor Syndrome, which caused shaking of the hands and as he wrote by long hand, he was unable to write for some time. This was allegedly cured by falling and hitting his head. Now, it did bring up the observation by George Orwell (which was correct, as it turned out,) that the style of Frank Richards - author of the Billy Bunter school stories - was so mannered that it could easily be taken over by ghost writers. The same could be said of jack Higgins, when I read A Season In Hell, I was still a fast and superficial reader, and at the time I merely thought "He seems to be going in a new direction". Subsequently I have started to wonder was it actually a less than entirely successful substitution of a ghost writer, because of the subsequent books, apart from the ill-advised Memoirs Of A Dancehall Romeo, a non-thriller, were nearly all Sean Dillon books and absurd thrill-by-Lego outings. I should say all as I have not had the patience to read more than four or five of the Dillons, but after the first couple of novels, reliably there is a Russian or Al-Quaida conspiracy intersperssed with Dillon playing piano in a music bar and somebody else singing along to great aclaim, bad people being shot in the ear or knee cap, etc etc. So the best ones still in order of being read, East of Desolation and The Eagle Has Landed. As to others, I defer to Ben Boulden over at the excellent Grave Tapping blog, although he is much more forgiving of the later as well as the paint-by-numbers of some of the very early novels. The Testament of Caspar Schulz springs to mind, although on re-reeading it lately it held up better than a Dillon book I abandoned after ten pages!