radically expanded, his experiences increased many thousandfold, and like many of the demobilized, his nature perturbed by an inchoate restlessness, and his future dependent on a vague, unasked question: well, now what?
The man was Alistair MacLean, and he became a schoolteacher. But the restlessness nagged at him. He wanted more. He began writing short stories, and in 1954, the year I was born, he won a newspaper competition. Legend has it the prize was a hundred pounds, which if true was an enormous sum of money – half of what my dad earned that year, as a junior but determinedly white-collar civil servant. The story was a maritime tale. The competition win was followed by a commission from the Glasgow publisher Collins, to write a novel, with a thousand-pound advance – another enormous sum. That novel was HMS Ulysses, which drew on MacLean’s own experiences on the Murmansk convoys. It was an immediate and significant success. It was followed by The Guns of Navarone and South by Java Head, both also set during the war, and both also huge sellers. After three books MacLean was comfortably established as one of the world’s biggest-selling fiction writers.
His next three books were different, in one important way – they were set postwar. In the first half of the 1950s, British popular culture was utterly dominated by war stories, very understandably, given the depths of the recent dangers and the immensity of the recent triumph. Churchill was prime minister again. On the page and the screen, brave pilots bombed from low levels, and plucky POWs escaped through sandy tunnels, and charging destroyers smashed through towering waves. The first movie I ever saw was The Dam Busters. The second was Reach for the Sky. A Saturday morning double bill, up at Villa Cross, for ninepence. Comic books were full of lantern-jawed privates, fighting through Normandy.
But it had to stop. At some point we had to move on. Merely a question of timing. It was a fraught decision. A delicate psychological balance. The Suez crisis of 1956 was a humiliation that rubbed our noses in our much-diminished power and status. The temptation to keep on revisiting past glories was huge. But the present was happening, and the future was almost upon us. MacLean adapted better than most, perhaps because – as his books show – he was notably non-ideological. He wasn’t a Colonel Blimp, living in the past. He had a healthy cynicism about the present, and no great hopes for the future. He had no political position. As a result he was able to nimbly unmoor himself from 1939–1945 in narrative terms, but crucially he was smart enough to bring with him the tropes and memes he had developed while writing about those years. The result was his second trio of novels, books four, five and six, which I think surely represent the absolute plateau of his talent and achievement. They are the perfect MacLeans. Some will argue that the hot streak continued another five years (the Ian Stuart pen name being then unknown) and I would agree that book seven, The Golden Rendezvous, and book nine, When Eight Bells Toll, are almost-perfect MacLeans, glorious and solid in every possible way, but, in my view, slightly backward-looking, slightly over-reliant on muscle memory, not quite able to overcome the Perfect Three’s gravitational pull.
The first of the Perfect Three was MacLean’s fourth novel, The Last Frontier. Its backstory was rooted in wartime events, and its characters were war-weary and war-experienced, but its setting was explicitly contemporary late-1950s, in communist Hungary, with the recent uprising still fresh in the memory. True to Maclean’s non-ideological nature, the book contains an astonishingly humane and sympathetic understanding of Soviet feelings and paranoia. Its characters are compelling and multi-dimensional, and in some cases genuinely and affectingly tragic. By any standard it’s one of the great postwar thrillers.
Next up was Night Without End. It’s set when commercial transatlantic air travel was just beginning to change from a pipe dream to a roaring, thrashing reality. In terms of structure, it’s a classic locked-room mystery, but set on the polar icecap. An airliner crashes near a remote research station. The scientists rescue the survivors. One of them is clearly a murderer. Various clocks start ticking. It firms up MacLean’s instinctive facility with character types. He knew what we wanted from the hero. He knew we wanted a talented and uncompromising sidekick. Overall it’s a total success. Weather has never been done better.
The last of the Perfect Three is Fear is the Key, the volume you’re holding right now. It has everything. Its melancholy opening harks back to those millions of unspoken demob questions: what now? Some young veterans knew they could never settle down, nine to five. They started cockamamie charter airlines, or rag-tag air cargo operations, using war-surplus planes. John Talbot – this book’s hero and first-person narrator – did just that, in partnership with his brother. It didn’t end well. Read on, to find out how justice is served. Along the way you’ll enjoy every single one of MacLean’s signature strengths, all present and correct and in perfect working order – the silent but preternaturally skilled boatman, the stolid and reliable family chauffeur, who we know will play a minor role in saving the day, the dramatic physical infrastructure, the constant presence of the sea, its sound and smell, its depths and dangers. Plus an opening with an amazing first reveal. Above all you’ll enjoy the easy and natural grip of a born storyteller. It feels like coming back to a place you had a good time before.
Lee Child
May 3rd, 1958.
If you could call a ten by six wooden box mounted on a four-wheel trailer an office, then I was sitting in my office. I’d been sitting there for four hours, the earphones were beginning to hurt and the darkness was coming in from the swamps and the sea. But if I had to sit there all night, then I was going to do just that: those earphones were the most important thing in the world. They were the only remaining contact between me and all the world held for me.
Peter should have been within radio range three hours ago. It was a long haul north from Barranquilla, but we’d made that haul a score of times before. Our three DCs were old but as mechanically perfect as unceasing care and meticulous attention could make them. Pete was a fine pilot, Barry a crack navigator, the West Caribbean forecast had been good and it was far too early in the season for hurricanes.
There was no conceivable reason why they shouldn’t have been on the air hours ago. As it was, they must have already passed the point of nearest approach and be drawing away to the north, towards Tampa, their destination. Could they have disobeyed my instructions to make the long dog-leg by the Yucatan Strait and flown the direct route over Cuba instead? All sorts of unpleasant things could happen to planes flying over war-torn Cuba those days. It seemed unlikely, and when I thought of the cargo they were carrying it seemed impossible. Where any element of risk was concerned, Pete was even more cautious and far-seeing than myself.
Over in the corner of my office on wheels a radio was playing softly. It was tuned in to some English-speaking station and for the second time that evening some hill-billy guitar-player was singing softly of the death of mother or wife or sweetheart, I wasn’t sure which. ‘My Red Rose Has Turned to White’ it was called. Red for life and white for death. Red and white – the colours of the three planes of our Trans-Carib Air Charter service. I was glad when the song stopped.
There was nothing much else in the office. A desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet and the big RCA receiver-transmitter powered by a heavy TRS cable that ran through the hole in the door and snaked across the grass and mud and one corner of the tarmac to the main terminal buildings. And there was a mirror. Elizabeth had put that up the only time she’d ever been here and I’d never got around to taking it down.
I looked in the mirror and that was a mistake. Black hair, black brows, dark blue eyes and a white strained haggard face to remind me how desperately worried I was. As if I needed reminding. I looked away and stared out of the window.
That was hardly any better. The only advantage was that I could no longer see myself. I certainly
