Obviously, I have read Where Eagles Dare, but this is not the first MacLean I have digested over the course of my life - just the most famous. Probably. I also read Force 10 From Navarone, a sequel of The Guns of Navarone, of which I have only seen the 1962 film, and River of Death, which is about Nazi war criminals in hiding. River of Death was the first I read, confusing me royally, but it did prepare me for MacLean's style with the others I have witnessed. As such, I'll be reviewing the author more than any particular novel of his, because they share more similarities than differences.
The first thing to mention about MacLean is that it is impossible to trust any of his characters to tell the truth; in short, they always lie, and the protagonist is always hiding something, even right at the end. This has the effect of making the plots of each book twisty and confusing, and a lot of the time I find myself more baffled than shocked. The plots can generally be summed up as this: a team is assembled (there's always the team, filled by various non-descript, blank-faced people whose main purpose are to get slowly killed off one by one as the story progresses, and then at the end the survivors get killed in one great clump) and has to embark on a daring mission, of which the future of the free world is at stake, only to discover as time goes on that there is a secret purpose for the mission, one which only the protagonist/team leader is aware of, and that their mission briefing was just a cover-up for the real goals. By the time I picked up Where Eagles Dare, my fourth MacLean story, I thought I was wise enough to guess what the hell was going on - it turned out to be even more bewildering than I had anticipated. It was almost ridiculous, but MacLean does seem to perform well in his own element.
The characters, unfortunately, prove to be the weakest part of the books, due to a distinct lack of development. The protagonists of each book are all cynical, ruthless, and secretive, good for the stories they're in, but they can easily be transplanted from one to another. As an example, Mallory from the Navarone stories has, at least for me, no discernable difference of character to Smith of Where Eagles Dare, and this problem is made all the more apparent by the fact that both of them have wisecracking, sarcastic sidekicks. The sidekick characters of Miller and Schaffer respectively are a little more interesting, owing to their stark contrast to the dour, secretive protagonists, but again it was their similarities between books that bugged me. It just makes me wonder that if MacLean liked writing these sorts of characters so much, then maybe he should have written using the same people, rather than just giving them a quick scrub and a change of name; if he had done this, then maybe he could have developed the characters a bit more between books. I read on Wikipedia that he only uses recurring characters once, and that was between the two Navarone books.
My final point about the characters brings us to 'the rest of the team', that group of people with interchangeable names who end up getting killed, one or more of whom turn out to be traitors, who then get killed. They're always introduced in a bunch at a time, making them very difficult to distinguish from one-another, and in many cases the only interesting thing about each one individually is when precisely in the plot they end up dying. None of them are sufficiently developed enough to warrant anything more than apathy at their passing, or a shrug when they turn out to be bad-guys, or slight annoyance when they quite rightly accuse the team leader of witholding information from them.
Now that my major gripes about the characters are out the way, I can mention some of the things I like about MacLean. Despite what I said about the main characters being recycled and under-developed, I do like them for the fact that they are calculating no-nonsense ruthless bastards, and they don't let anything get in the way of their jobs (which, of course, only they know the whole truth about). This is a good quality for characters to have in thrillers such as these, because MacLean will always make sure the challenge is impossible, something that only a character as hard as nails has any chance of surviving, let alone succeeding.
The plots of the stories are intense, and MacLean pulls every trick he can in order to increase the suspense - he knows a few tricks, but alas he uses all of them every single time, making the books a little repetative from time to time. The characters are put through terrible trials of endurance and intelligence, many of which test their abilities to bluff their way out of impossible situations; just put on a German uniform, act as though you know best, and the enemy troops will believe you're their superior officer. And when all else fails, explosives will solve everything - there are very few problems in MacLean novels that can't be solved by blowing them up.
So apart from the flaws, Alistair MacLean thrillers are all right really if you just want action, suspese, more action, insane plot twists in which you can't even trust the protagonist. The characters are, for me, the main let-down, but I think that this is due to the author's obsession with the plot; he keeps it moving, whether you like it or not, too quickly to keep track of, and he will not let anything get in the way of that. To this end, the characters are plot-devices more than anything else, something to oil the wheels of the narrative. These are thrillers, after all.
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