When Eight Bells Toll – Alistair MacLean, 1966 ★★½

Requiem for an Airport Thriller

If Alistair MacLean isn’t the godfather of that once-popular genre known as “airport fiction,” then he is at least a capo in high esteem.

For decades, people – mostly male business travelers – picked up MacLean novels with a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes in preparation for a long flight or train ride. These books featured garish covers where lean, muscular men fired machine guns in front of impressive explosions. For a pre-teen like me, they offered a glance at the world where I liked to imagine adults really lived.

As a thriller writer, MacLean was not subtle. But he was effective.

Case in point: When Eight Bells Toll. This thriller from the early middle of his long career starts you off with a bang, or the expectation of one. Narrator and protagonist Philip Calvert begins his story aboard a ship where a man sits motionlessly in front of him, a Colt Peacemaker aimed right at Calvert’s thigh:

I was paid to take chances. I was paid even to step, on occasion, into danger. But I wasn’t paid to act the part of a congenital and suicidal idiot. I hoisted my hands a couple of inches higher and tried to look as peaceful and harmless as possible. The way I felt, that was no feat.

The first scene in the book was reproduced exactly the same way in a 1971 film adaptation directed by Étienne Périer and written by MacLean himself. Image from http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/When_Eight_Bells_Toll.

As you might have guessed from the fact this is a first-person narrative, Calvert survives this encounter. In fact, we soon get an explanation for the other man’s nerveless manner: he is already dead.

It pulls you in. No doubt many browsers idling at the paperback rack were sold then and there to buy the book for company on a long ride. They could have done worse; When Eight Bells Toll is an energetic charmer and a paper rollercoaster, too. It certainly helps pass the time.

When Eight Bells Toll wouldn’t have happened at all had MacLean had his way. According to Wikipedia, he hated writing for a living and gave it up at the height of his success, just as the 1961 film version of his novel The Guns Of Navarone was making a mint around the world. He wanted to be a hotel proprietor, because nothing beats the glamour of supplying strangers with fresh linen and early checkout times.

But by the mid-1960s, MacLean found hotels tougher work than espionage, and went back to his typewriter. When Eight Bells Toll was the first of 18 novels produced until MacLean’s death in 1987. Booksellers were pleased; critics less so. While his commercial appeal remained steady, the quality of his novels dipped a lot over time.

Author Alistair MacLean. A Scotsman by birth, MacLean only used Scotland as a setting this one time in his thriller-writing career. Photo by Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos from http://www.masoncounty.lib.mi.us/author-alistair-maclean/.

Being the first book back from a break, When Eight Bells Toll has energy to spare, right from that opening encounter. Calvert barely has time to catch his breath (and recognize the dead man, and another he finds in the adjoining cabin, as his own undercover associates) when he is attacked by a short but very powerful adversary lurking on deck. Calvert just escapes with his life, gets back to his own boat, and discovers the bad guys are hot on his trail.

A government agent, Calvert is trying to solve a number of very expensive ship hijackings on the sea lochs along Scotland’s western coast. Suspicions center on Sir Anthony Skouras, a very rich man who lives on a well-furnished yacht anchored near Calvert’s vessel. Skouras explains his title: “Money can buy anything. A baronetcy is next but the market is not right at the moment.”

It soon becomes apparent that if the cheeky Skouras is up to no good, he has plenty of support among the local population, who seem to be either corrupt, habitually nasty to outsiders, or both.

This tricky situation is handled by Calvert with aplomb, vigor, and dollops of sardonic humor. Calvert cracks wise about the dangers he faces, an approach which takes getting used to. If the protagonist can’t take a deadly situation seriously, how can you?

This does work as counterpoint to the high-action plot, sending up the conventions of the form in a way that suggests MacLean was onto his own tropes and may even have been calling them out. Thrillers are supposed to be fun; why not invest them with a little humor?

This cover of a 1994 Paragon Softcover edition makes use of two elements that feature in the novel: helicopters and castles. Image from https://www.amazon.com/Eight-Bells-Paragon-Softcover-Large/dp/0745134815.

So after his helicopter is shot down over the Scottish waters, Calvert takes a roundabout approach explaining his predicament:

Among the more ridiculous and wholly unsubstantiated fictions perpetuated by people who don’t know what they are talking about is the particularly half-witted one that death by drowning is peaceful, easy and, in fact, downright pleasant. It’s not. It’s a terrible way to die. I know, because I was drowning and I didn’t like it one bit. My ballooning head felt as if it were being pumped full of compressed air, my ears and eyes ached savagely, my nostrils, mouth, and stomach were full of sea water and my bursting lungs felt as if someone had filled them with petrol and struck a match.

Yet much of the novel moves at a fairly sedate pace, at least by MacLean’s usual high-octane standards. We learn about Calvert’s attitudes about his job, his aristocratic boss (who shows up midway through this adventure to serve as his cranky partner) and his suspicions regarding who was up to what.

Plenty of scenic descriptions too of the Scottish lochs, which play a leading role in the novel:

From the Isle of Torbay to the mainland the sea was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white-capped rollers marching eastwards across the darkened Firth, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wave tops veining the troughs between.

As Calvert does his exploring, surviving numerous attempts on his life, his suspicions center on a desolate section of Loch Houron known as Beul nan Uamh, Scottish Gaelic for “the mouth of the grave.” Much time is spent discussing how the boats are disappearing, why the residents are so non-cooperative, and kicking back with an adult beverage or two. Calvert’s first words to his assistant after returning from battle sets the tone: “I don’t need bandages. What I need is a Scotch.”

There is no Loch Houron in Scotland, but on the west coast there is Loch Hourn, seen above, which may have fed MacLean's imagination. Like Houron, it flows out into the sea and offers both scenic vistas and rugged weather. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loch_Hourn.

So what’s wrong with the novel? Like much airport fiction of its era, When Eight Bells Toll is very reliant on its formula, a particularly tight one even by thriller standards. No romance was allowed in MacLean novels (he thought it slowed things down) and the characters are kept in constant motion to hide a total lack of personality.

MacLean had some odd tics, too, like a predilection for ominous foreshadowing. He characteristically ends a chapter with the comment: I should have listened to Hunslett more. For Hunslett’s sake. It milks the suspense and makes sense that way, but it is also annoying.

Or he has Calvert abruptly end his moment-by-moment narration to mention a pivotal conversation in a way that overtly keeps the reader in the dark: So I poured him another whisky, a large one, and told him what had happened, what I knew and as much of what I thought I knew as seemed advisable to tell him.

Most painfully, MacLean’s logorrhea is a thing of wonder. For someone who didn’t like writing, he didn’t seem to know how to stop himself. Calvert rambles on for pages in his plummy manner about the tricky situations he finds himself in, offering vague allusions and half-jokes and pulling the reader out of the story just as it gets tense:

What had happened to them was what inevitably happened to people in our trade, which would inevitably happen to myself when the time came. And that something would have a half-inch wood chisel in his hand and all your…years of experience and knowledge and cunning counted for nothing for you never saw him coming and you never saw him going because you had met your match at last and then you were dead.

Read that again, and you can see a perfectly fine and self-contained opening sentence followed by a longer and completely unnecessary second sentence. This happens a lot, and much worse than the above. MacLean didn’t edit his copy closely.

Anthony Hopkins as Calvert in the 1971 film adaptation of When Eight Bells Toll. The movie takes itself even less seriously than the book, and that's not a bad thing. Image from http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/When_Eight_Bells_Toll

Yet despite the lapses I see when reading When Eight Bells Toll with older eyes, I still enjoy the book overall and find it a pleasant, nostalgic diversion. MacLean knew his function was providing enjoyable companionship for readers, and does so for most of the book.

It’s too bad he can’t bring it in for a landing. The novel’s climax is where my rose-colored glasses fall off. MacLean never seems at risk of taking his plot seriously, but for most of the book this is more of a positive. Then he has to tie it all up, and throws up his hands instead.

Without spoiling the unspoilable, let’s just say after getting his hero in a seemingly impossible situation, he reveals the guy was playing cards you didn’t know were in the deck, and was just putting himself in the villain’s noose as a bit of sport.

But if you were some tired business traveler in the late 1960s, feeling beaten down by life, perhaps such a capper was just the thing. I know as a teenager there was something refreshing about having my dread turned into relief, never mind how weak the explanation.

Today’s tropes are different than back then, and MacLean’s formula comes off less rote today, with its clearly demarcated bad guys and uncompromised hero. Humor helps, and so does a healthy dollop of nostalgia for a time and place much different than now. If you enjoy a jokier take on the thriller genre, and can forgive some slack writing, When Eight Bells Toll will satisfy you as it does me.