Alistair MacLean Dies; Wrote ‘Guns of Navarone,’ Other Best Sellers

Novelist Alistair MacLean, author of “Where Eagles Dare,” “The Guns of Navarone” and 25 other best-selling books, died Monday in Munich, West Germany, at age 64.

A spokeswoman for MacLean’s publisher in London, William Collins Books, said MacLean died of heart failure. He had been hospitalized and in a coma since suffering a stroke three weeks ago while in Munich to visit friends, she said.

MacLean, who had lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years, specialized in war and adventure stories that sold in the millions and were translated into many languages.

Born in 1922 near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, MacLean spoke only Gaelic as a child. He joined the Royal Navy in 1941 and spent five years on convoy escorts, which were frequently menaced by Nazi U-boats.

After the war, the soft-spoken MacLean graduated from Glasgow University with a degree in English.

He was a teacher in Glasgow when a newspaper offered a prize for a short story. He was broke, so he wrote one. It not only won him the prize, but a representative of Collins, the publisher, suggested he write a book.

That novel, “HMS Ulysses,” a thinly fictionalized account of his own ordeal as a young sailor, was set aboard a British naval convoy ship during World War II. Published in 1955, the book sold an unprecedented 250,000 hardback copies in six months, launching his career as an internationally acclaimed novelist.

A year later, he wrote “The Guns of Navarone,” which was made into a blockbuster film starring Gregory Peck and David Niven. The book broke another record, selling more than 400,000 copies in its first six months.

MacLean continued to produce a string of best-selling novels and was much sought-after by film producers and directors. He wrote the screenplays for four of his own novels--”Where Eagles Dare,” “Caravan to Vaccares,” “Puppet on a Chain” and “Breakheart Pass.”

He was one of the most filmed writers of his time, but he insisted this was merely because of his “visual imagination” rather than his design.

Asked about his success in one of his last interviews in 1985, he replied: “All I do is write simple stories. There is enough real violence in the world without my adding to it.”

His most recent novel, “Santorini,” is scheduled for publication later this month. The book deals with the end of the world after the crash of a plane carrying nuclear weapons in the ocean near a geological fault and an inactive volcano.

MacLean once said he wrote rapidly--35 days for a novel--because he wasn’t a born writer and didn’t like writing.

MacLean claimed never to read reviews or articles about himself. This, he said, was because his hometown paper in Glasgow assigned the review of “HMS Ulysses,” his first book, to a navy commander who panned it in a review headlined, “This Is a Book That Should Be Burned.”

MacLean was married twice and is survived by three sons.