This 1986 Fontana paperback claims to collect all the short stories of Alistair MacLean ever wrote about the sea or sailing. This is seriously misleading because no fewer than eight of the 14 texts are not stories at all, but something more like newspaper articles or features about true-life naval disasters of World War Two. I’ve marked these with an asterisk (*). So that leaves just six ‘stories’ and three of these are set in Alexandria, Singapore and Basra, one takes place mostly in the Savoy Hotel, and one is set on a quiet English canal. So the book in fact contains only one fictional story set at sea, so the title, packaging and blurb are all pretty misleading.
Some MacLean biography
As the blurb says, by the 1970s MacLean had established himself as the premier writer of adventure thrillers in the English-speaking world. Each new novel was a bestseller and at least ten were made into movies, including classics such as ‘The Guns of Navarone’, ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and ‘Ice Station Zebra’. His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.
MacLean began writing short stories while a university student after the war (1947 to 1950). In 1954 his short story The Dileas won a short story competition. The wife of Ian Chapman, editor at the publishing company Collins, was particularly moved by The Dileas and prompted her husband to meet the young man. Chapman suggested MacLean write a novel and three months later he came back with HMS Ulysses, based on his own war experiences in the Royal Navy. MacLean was paid a large advance of $50,000, which made the newspapers. Collins were rewarded in their faith when the book went on to sell a quarter of a million copies in hardback in England in the first six months of publication. It went on to sell millions more. Film rights were sold to Robert Clark of Associated British for £30,000, though a film was never made. This money meant MacLean was able to devote himself to writing full-time.
These stories or articles have absolutely no depth or deeper meaning or significance. They are entertainments which grip and entertain for as long as you read them, then disappear like dew when you put the book down. In fact the most notable thing is how puzzling some of them are. They’re nowhere near as good as Frederick Forsyth’s short stories.
The Dileas (8 pages) 1954
An intensely moving story, told as if to MacLean by a participant. On a fierce stormy night a boat is spotted in trouble out off the Scottish shore. The first few pages are so thick with Scots dialect it’s difficult to make out who is who or what’s going on but slowly you realise that the curmudgeonly old Seumas Grant will reluctantly take his boat out to rescue his two sons, Donald Archie and Lachlan who man the local lifeboat which has got into trouble. It’s only when they get close that, in high seas in terrible weather, they see two children lashed to a makeshift raft, as if survivors of a smash. In that instant Grant has to make a choice, and chooses to rescue the children, who he knows were themselves rescued by his boys, and thereby forced to leave his own sons to drown in the wrecked lifeboat. Not only was it the better thing to do, but Grant felt he had to do it or let his own boys down. It’s a harrowing little story and by miles the best thing in the book.
St George and the Dragon (14 pages)
Having promised action and adventure, the second tale, incongruously enough, is a comic story in the mould of the innocent and charming 1953 movie ‘Genevieve’. The facts don’t matter hugely, but Dr George Rickaby is a prominent young expert in nuclear fusion (he was recently patted on the shoulder by the Minister of Supply!) but George is not happy, no, because just a few months ago the love of his life left him stranded at the altar, jilted him on his wedding day.
So he went on a quiet canal holiday, with his former batman, Eric and is idly enjoying the scenery of the Dipworth canal when his barge is in violent collision with another one. It’s not his fault as the other barge was rammed into the bank, its body sticking out and blocking the way.
He sees a red-haired young woman on the barge and leaps over to offer his apologies and help but discovers that she is a flame-haired Amazon, Mary, perfectly capable of looking after herself and hopping mad.
But she’s not angry at him so much as at Black Bart Jamieson (!), a rough, prize fighter-looking man. Bart is an unscrupulous business rival who put her father in hospital, steals carriage contracts and steals her business. Now and is now, as the story starts, doing everything to prevent the young lady reaching a ‘granary’ whose trade she wants to win but Bart is preventing her.
There follow a series of comic escapades with hapless George (tall but short-sighted) being knocked into the canal by Mary, then by Bart, then by Mary again, while Bart organises cartoon sabotage of Mary’s barge, cutting her mooring rope, then attaching a hawser to her tiller which tears it off as she steams away, all in the manner of Dick Dastardly from ‘Wacky Races’.
George has the last laugh when he pretends to befriend Bart at the canalside pub, the Watman’s Arms, gets him completely plastered, staggers back to his barge and drinks Bart and his man under the table. When they’ve passed out, George gets up stone cold sober, collects his man, Eric, they push the barge into a ‘blind lock, close the canal and and saw off the handle of the gates, then open the ‘blind’ side (a lock opening into empty countryside where a canal was begun but abandoned) letting all the water drain away and Bart’s barge settle into the mud.
However, George is caught off guard the next morning when Bart emerges from the mud at the bottom of the empty lock like a prehistoric monster and catches George before he’s cast off, giving him a good thump which sends him spinning into the canal for the fourth time in 24 hours. But there’s a happy ending when Mary dives in, pulls him out (again) and the story ends with George very happily lying (still wet and dripping) in Mary’s lap as she steers her canalboat with one hand and George’s own boat, steered by the faithful Eric, chunters cheerfully alongside.
The Arandora Star (13 pages)*
The story of a luxury liner catering to the pampered rich which, when war comes, is converted into a troop ship painted battleship grey, and tasked with carrying 1,600 German and Italian internees from Britain to Canada. Unfortunately, just off the west coast of Ireland it is holed below the waterline by a torpedo from a German U-boat.
The tragedy was covered in the press which all made a big point that the Axis prisoners fought madly among themselves to get into the lifeboats, thus considerably increasing the death toll. Oddly, the ‘story’ then pretends to summarise the findings of a recent public enquiry into the sinking and selects the testimony of four witnesses: three Brits and an Italian.
In fact all the evidence contradicts the newspaper reports and point to the loss of life being cause by: 1) Overcrowding. Built to carry 200 passengers, adapted to carry 250 more, the ship was carrying 1,700 when it was hit. 2) There were nowhere near lifejackets. 3) there weren’t enough lifeboats and these had been disabled e.g. oars removed. 4) There had been no lifeboat drill. 5) There were rafts to supplement the boats but these were secured by wires which couldn’t be loosened. 6) The presence of lots of professionally secured barbed wire criss-crossing the main decks and preventing access to the lifeboats. To my surprise this isn’t a story at all, but an entirely factual account:
So it’s not a ‘short story’ at all and when you look at the credits page you see that it is © Express Newspapers. It’s a newspaper article!
Rwawalpindi (9 pages)*
So is this, a lightly fictionalised account of the sinking of HMS Rawalpindi, another civilian liner which was converted to a navy ship at the start of the war, was patrolling the North sea to intercept cargo ships bound for Germany, and was itself surprised by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which proceeded to sink her in 40 minutes with the loss of 238 men including Captain Edward Kennedy.
MacLean reimagines the events in melodramatic but simultaneously sentimental style. Here’s the final sentence, demonstrating the bathos of the sentiment and the long-winded clumsiness of his style.
Two hundred and forty men went down with the Rawalpindi, and, in light of the fanatical courage with which they had served both their ship and their commander, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to think that some of those who were still alive when the waters closed over them at 8 o’clock that evening may have derived no little consolation from the thought that if they had to go down with the ship, they could have asked for no greater privilege than to do so in the incomparable company of Captain Edward Kennedy. (p.60)
Hyperbole is his characteristic mode: ‘fanatical courage’? Surely just ‘courage’ would have been enough. ‘Incomparable company of Captain Edward? Surely just ‘company’ would have been enough.
The Sinking of the Bismarck (29 pages)*
Another factual article and not a short story at all. It’s in three parts which describe the events leading up to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941. MacLean writes that it all took place 17 years ago which places the article in 1958.
MacLean’s account is as sentimentally heroic, overblown and overwritten, as the previous article.
With the Hood destroyed and the Prince of Wales badly hurt and driven off in ignominious defeat, she [the Bismarck] had achieved success beyond her wildest dreams. (p.75)
Even though these are true stories, MacLean adds hyperbole and amps them up till they sound like cartoons of a particularly fraught and harrowing kind. Here are choice phrases from the final ten pages or so:
badly crippled…powerful enemy…murderous accuracy…act of folly…suicide…incalculable power…gallant captain…dark foreboding…savage fury for revenge…dreams of glory are notoriously treacherous counsellors…show her teeth…a tired and anxious man…the enormity of his blunder…tones of desperation…fight to the death…the difference between life and death…suicidally break radio cover…ironic and amazing coincidence…increasingly mounting tension and almost despairing anxiety…wildly wrong hunches…almost unbelievable oversight…breaking morale and steadily mounting despair…her last hope…self defeated…last desperate effort…in despair…cruellest blow…bitterest of defeats…ignominious blunder…splendid gallantry…agonising last night…dark and bitter harmony…bleak and sombre despair…driving rain lashed pitilessly…The situation was desperate…time was running out…haggard, exhausted men…dreams of glory…utter wretchedness…black and gale-wracked sea…wallowing wickedly…in his hopelessness, in his black despair and utter exhaustion…doomed men…shattering blow…the long dark night…bleak cheerless dawn…the despair and the fear…no escape…bent on revenge…made ready to die…drugged uncaring sleep…the cruellest, the most bitter dawn they had ever known…terrifying sight…the odds were hopeless…exhausted, hopeless and utterly demoralised…mercilessly battered into extinction…devastating and utterly demoralising…dazed and exhausted gun crews…nightmarish is the only word to describe…battered, holed and flaming shambles of twisted steel and broken bodies…fear-maddened men…running blindly back and forward like crazed animals seeking escape from the twin terrors…murderous storm of flying shrapnel…ghastly fate…nightmarish…appalling spectacle…battered, devastated wreck…
This selection of key phrases shows how MacLean bludgeons the reader with the same battering sense of extremity, scenes of death and destruction and devastation, and feelings of utter exhaustion and complete despair, relentless portraits of men right at the limits of human endurance. It was the tone of his debut novel, HMS Ulysses which he later learned to tone down and channel in his spy and adventure novels but is, nonetheless, a central trope of the genre.
In these factual pieces it works a lot less well, in fact it’s almost insulting to treat the real deaths of actual people in the style of a cheap thriller. No fewer than 12 of the ‘stories’ are copyright Express newspapers so it’s reasonable to conclude that overblown exaggeration and sentimental heroics are what Express readers liked.
The Meknes (10 pages)*
Once again this is a totally true wartime incident, the sinking of the Meknes, a civilian ship which had been converted to become a troop carrier and was carrying 1,180 French naval officers and ratings from Southampton to Marseilles when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat and went down with the loss of about 420 lives. The odd, almost macabre thing about the incident was that the British had told the Vichy government and, through them the Germans, all so the ship had made a point of sailing with all lights on full blast, lit up like Blackpool illuminations, precisely to indicate that it was on a non-military, civilian mission. To no effect. A zealous U-boat captain sank it anyway.
The shouts and screams of the men terribly wounded by the first torpedo attacks and almost immediately engulfed by hundreds of tons of freezing seawater gushing in through the mangled hull of the ship, is strongly reminiscent of similar scenes in HMS Ulysses. In fact it’s easy to think of these articles (they’re certainly not short stories) as repeating the hyperbolic description of extreme human suffering which he pioneered in that book, again and again. Rehashing the same theme, hundreds of men suffering wounds, blasts and drowning in freezing seas.
MacHinery and the Cauliflowers (11 pages)
A childishly simple entertainment whereby an undercover cop in Singapore pretends to be an alcoholic shambling sailor, MacHinery, and is shown into the office of a supposed Chinese businessman, Ah Wong – except that he isn’t actually Chinese, he’s an Armenian criminal posing as Chinese (!).
MacHinery hands Ah Wong a manifest of goods from a ship recently arrived in Singapore which includes loads of vegetables, then pretends to be a junkie getting withdrawal symptoms, feverishly saying he needs to get hold of his ‘medicine’. Very simply, the Chinaman spots he’s talking about heroin and gets his huge bodyguard to cut open one of the many cauliflowers in the crates which have been delivered, to reveal that sachets of heroin have been sewn into them.
From the toilet where he asks to go and shoot up, MacHinery signals out the window to a van parked opposite and moments later a bunch of heavily armed special branch officers burst through the door and arrest Ah Wong as the lynchpin of Singapore’s heroin smuggling trade. I begin to wonder why I’m bothering to read this rubbish.
Lancastria (10 pages)*
Another factual article rather than a fiction, this is the true story of the sinking of the RMS Lancastria as part of the Dunkirk evacuations on 17 June 1940, retold with MacLean’s characteristic hyperbole, all despair and exhaustion and doom etc.
Like the other ‘articles’ this one quotes from people involved, in this case the Tillyer family who had driven across France to get to Dunkirk, Sergeant Young and Corporal Broadbent. He tells us that Young is now living in Wickersley Road London while Broadbent is now a London taxi driver.
Did MacLean track these people down and interview them? Are these pieces examples of real journalism, tracking down eye witnesses and mixing their accounts with the documentary record? They’re so alike I wonder if they were part of a series commissioned by the Express, with a title like ‘Great Naval Disasters of the Second World War.’
This is possibly the most harrowing of these features, because it has the least amount of MacLean melodrama in it and he sticks closest to the terrible, harrowing facts. Apparently nobody knows how many people were aboard the Lancastria when it was hit by aerial torpedoes, but some estimates say as many as 7,000 people lost their lives, more than the Titanic (1,500) and (1,200) combined, making it the largest single-ship loss of life in British maritime history.
McCrimmon and the Blue Moonstones (13 pages)
A terrible little story set in Alexandria and pullulating with racist stereotypes about the shifty untrustworthy natives, in which a crooked seaman, McCrimmon, tries to do a deal with an Alexandrian jewel dealer, Mohammed Ali. He fails but in the process gets into a fight with four Armenians he tries to cheat at poker, gets thrown through a café window, and has his pocket picked. The tale is larded with MacLean’s terrible, heavy-handed humour at its clumsiest.
McCrimmon started, performed some masterly sleight of hand with the wrench, then turned unconcernedly around. If innocence of expression were any criterion, any unbiased judge, could he have seen him in company with an average archangel, would have branded the latter as a habitual criminal. (p.136)
The ridiculous punchline is that, returning to the submarine he serves on, absolutely hammered after finally haggling a price for the little bag of gemstones, McCrimmon madly decides to hide it in the little-used torpedo chamber. Having done so, he is so drunk he falls down a ladder and is knocked out. When he comes to he discovers that the very same torpedo tube was used for an attack on a small German patrol boat i.e. his gems are at the bottom of the sea. Tripe.
They Sweep the Seas (9 pages)*
Another factual account. The first-person narrator describes going out to sea on the West coast of Scotland, in bitter January weather, crewing a trawler acting as one of a pair of minesweepers. There’s no real plot but having a first-person narrator reins in some of MacLean’s worst sins, such as the crushing facetiousness. But he can still barely write a sentence:
Suffice is it to say that his attitude, regarding the weather, of the completest unconcern was Spartan to a degree. (p.153)
There is no plot at all. At the end the narrator plainly becomes McLean who delivers several paragraphs of straightforward praise of the work of the wartime minesweepers.
City of Benares (10 pages)*
Another ‘it sank and they all drowned’ article, distinguished by the fact that the City of Benares was carrying children refugees from Britain to Canada when it was torpedoed. MacLean paints the same kind of scene of total devastation, scores of human beings blown to shreds by the first blast and the swiftly drowned in the icy green water gushing in through the rent in the hull, in almost the same words and phrases he used in the other half dozen articles like this.
As with all the other articles, the strongest element is the memories of two of the children who survived the sinking, Colin Richardson and Kenneth Sparks. Did MacLean track then down and interview them himself? Or was he copying quotes from published interviews (or books)?
The Golden Watch (5 pages)
Told by a crew member of a merchant vessel about the captain’s obsession with his gold watch, a family heirloom, which he swears is made of gold and waterproof.
He ostentatiously wears it when he goes ashore at Basra (in southern Iraq?) and on the way back from visiting his agent, realised had been successfully pickpocketed. He is livid and tearful. A few days the ship runs down a native dhow and the captain orders netting and ladders put over the side in order to save the fellows. To his astonishment, the first Arab to climb up over the edge is one of the Arabs who stole his watch and the second one is actually wearing it! To everyone’s surprise the captain is not furious and vengeful but instead delighted to have had proof that the watch is waterproof!
Rendezvous (24 pages)
An actual story, not a factual article, and set in the present. The first-person narrator, McIndoe, is driving south from Scotland to London. He is going to meet up with a guy named Nicky (p.187) who he worked with during the war, when he was known as Major Ravallo.
The long car journey gives the narrator time to fill in the backstory for us. In 1943 he was skipper of a small naval vessel which this Nicky used to deliver secret agents into occupied Italy. Chief among these was a good-looking woman named Stella who they come to suspect of being a double agent. Too many of the operatives they drop on the coast disappear or are arrested.
Characteristic MacLean hyperbole:
- ‘Your crew?’ ‘The best, sir. Experienced, completely reliable.’
- Major Ravallo, US Army. A top espionage agent and just about the best lend-lease bargain ever.’
- ‘Passière…Free French…just about the best radio operator I’ve ever known.’
- ‘Stella…she’s one of the best in the business.’
- The crew of the 149 were superbly trained.
Back then the narrator came to believe that Nicky Ravallo was the traitor, betraying these clandestine missions, and on a final trip abandoned Nicky on a pebbly Italian beach at night, pulling a gun on him and telling him to stay still while the narrator withdraws to the boat’s dinghy and his crew row him away. Out of the distance comes Ravallo’s threat, that he’ll track McIndoe down one day.
And now he has, sending McIndoe a message at home in Scotland, asking to meet him in London. The drive and the backstory complete, the narrator sleeps at a London hotel then makes for the meeting with Nicky at 7pm at the Savoy.
Long story short: turns out McIndoe was wrong, neither Stella nor Nicky were double agents, it was McIndoe’s own radio officer, Passière, supposedly Free French but in reality a German spy. Nicky has the documentation to prove it. McIndoe feels crushed with embarrassment and terrible guilt at letting Stella walk into a trap only…she didn’t, proving it by putting her soft hands over his eyes from behind and surprising him, there in the Savoy, alive and well. They both forgive him and he feels like a twerp. He stands and in front of the puzzled bar clientele, kicks himself, something which is hard to do and doesn’t make sense. This is dire.
The Jervis Bay (10 pages)*
Another ‘article’, focusing on the end of 1940, the year Britain stood alone against the Nazis. Replete with his usual hyperbole: ‘fear and despair…starved into surrender…explode into devastating reality…ruthless and implacable enemy…hardship and suffering and crushing defeat…’
Jervis Bay was guarding the 37 merchant ships of Convoy HX 84 sailing from Bermuda, then onto Halifax Canada, and so on to Britain in November 1940. The convoy was attacked by the German warship Admiral Scheer. Although hopelessly outgunned, her captain, Edward Fegen, ordered the convoy to scatter and steered the Jervis Bay towards the attacker. The Bay was pulverised by German shells, took heavy casualties and eventually sank with large loss of life including the captain. But their action allowed all the members of the convey to scatter to safety. Captain Fegen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Autobiographical article for the Glasgow Herald (4 pages)
The Glasgow Herald obviously asked him to write a note about his career to date, in 1984. This short text is almost illiterate, staggeringly bad. If it makes anything clear it is that he is ruefully aware that he is a bad writer, puzzled by his own success – and that’s about it. It would have been great to have some kind of insight to how he got the ideas and structures for his best thrillers, but there’s nothing like that. Lost opportunity. Big shame.
Summary
This book is tripe, don’t buy it. If you’re remotely interested in MacLean, read the thrillers from his golden period in the 1960s (see list below).
Credit
The Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean was published in 1985 by Collins. References are to the 1986 Fontana paperback edition.
Books & Boots 