Just the Facts
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Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Acclaim for MacLean
This seems to be a day for reporting poll results. First, I brought you the findings from a new survey--conducted by the British Crime Writers’ Association--to choose the “best” authors and works available in this genre. Now I can provide the results of a survey we’ve been running over the last month in The Rap Sheet, intended to pick readers’ favorites from among Scottish writer Alistair MacLean’s 28 classic adventure-thriller novels.
With 487 votes having been cast, here are the 10 MacLean novels that received the most support from Rap Sheet readers:
• The Guns of Navarone (1957) -- 71 votes, or 14.58%
• Where Eagles Dare (1967) -- 65 votes, or 13.35%
• Ice Station Zebra (1963) -- 53 votes, or 10.88%
• Breakheart Pass (1974) -- 39 votes, or 8.01%
• Puppet on a Chain (1969) -- 36 votes, or 7.39%
• Fear Is the Key (1961) -- 29 votes, or 5.95%
• Night Without End (1959) -- 23 votes, or 4.72%
• Bear Island (1971) -- 22 votes, or 4.52%
• When Eight Bells Toll (1966) -- 20 votes, or 4.11%
• Circus (1975) -- 19 votes, or 3.9%
All of the big vote-getters were published during the first 20 years of MacLean’s fiction-writing career. None of the nine novels he penned during the final decade of his life received more than five votes in this survey. That supports a statement I made, in a recent column for Kirkus Reviews, that his later books “were of considerably less quality than their predecessors.”
The full results of this survey can be found here.
This ranking sounds about right. Hiis later books were not very good
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