ABSTRACT
I MacLean’s outstanding popularity is hard to account for. He writes clumsily; his characters are wooden; his morality banal; his plots are virtually sexless; he is derivative and behind the latest thing where ideas for his highly contrived fiction are concerned. Yet sales of 100 m. or more are claimed for his twenty-odd novels. He is-in Fontana’s old-fashioned descriptionthe ‘master story teller’; ‘the leading adventure story writer in the world’, according to his immodest hardback publisher, Collins, who also claim him as their protégé. (A Collins editor, Ian Chapman, spotted a prize-winning short story of MacLean’s in the Glasgow Herald. He persuaded the young teacher to write a novel; the result was HMS Ulysses. A record-breaking 250,000 hardback copies of this work were sold in the first six months of publication.) ‘Everything that MacLean writes’, the Sunday Mirror correctly observes, ‘is an immediate bestseller.’ And often, too, a long-term bestseller. Fontana estimated in 1978 that MacLean had outdone the previous record-holder Ian Fleming’s thirteen 1 m. sellers. According to Fontana’s reckoning MacLean had no less than seventeen-which would make him, title for title, the bestselling English novelist ever.
