Striving for MacLeanesque Success

Driscoll’s Diamonds, by “Ian MacAlister,” aka Marvin H. Albert (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1977). Cover art by Gordon Johnson.

By the early 1970s, Scotland-born thriller novelist Alistair MacLean had achieved the status of major best-seller. His books—from The Guns of Navarone, Fear Is the Key, and Ice Station Zebra to Puppet on a Chain, The Way to Dusty Death, and Breakheart Pass—were familiar bookshop fixtures, with several of them having been made into big-screen films or on their way to cinematic refashioning.

Those rapid-clip, suspense-abundant adventures typically pitted resourceful male protagonists against guileful, unscrupulous opponents, the plots designed to both delight and deceive. “Alistair MacLean would always set up his books with a basic foundation in which not a single thing you learned would turn out, in the end, to be true,” author Dennis Lehane once told an interviewer. “After you read a few of his books, you’d start to look for the twists, but you could rarely see them coming.” Journalist Alessandra Stanley characterized them as “romance novels for boys, which means very little romance and lots of danger, complicated weaponry and battle-forged camaraderie. Historical romances are known as ‘bodice-rippers.’ The only silk to be found in an Alistair MacLean novel is on a parachute.”

Given MacLean’s popularity, it’s no wonder other authors sought to emulate his pot-boiling style. One of those was Marvin H. Albert.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 22, 1924, Marvin Hubert Albert would go on to serve as a radio officer with the U.S. Merchant Marine during the Second World War. Afterward, he worked as the director of a Philadelphia children’s theater troupe. Then in 1950, he relocated to New York City and took jobs editing and writing for the magazines Quick and Look. Finding success with the publication of his 1956 western novel, The Law and Jake Wade (which was made into a Robert Taylor/Richard Widmark film two years later), Albert took the big leap to begin writing full-time. In 1965, he moved to Los Angeles, where in addition to writing books, he penned screenplays, adapting more than a few of his own tales for silver-screen audiences.

(Left) The Lady in Cement (Pocket, 1961); cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

Albert proved to be versatile and prolific. Over the course of his 40-year career, and under a surfeit of pseudonyms (Albert Conroy, Al Conroy, Nick Quarry, Anthony Rome, Mike Barone, J.D. Christilian), he produced hard-boiled crime yarns, westerns, and historical mysteries, plus numerous Hollywood film and TV novelizations (including of the original Pink Panther picture and Blake Edwards’ Mr. Lucky) and even biographies of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and King Henry VIII. Among his notable works of fiction were 1958’s The Hoods Come Calling and 1961’s Some Die Hard (both featuring “tough, no-nonsense” Manhattan private investigator Jake Barrow); three books starring a Miami, Florida, police lieutenant turned gumshoe, Tony Rome (the first two of which—Miami Mayhem and The Lady in Cement—Albert helped translate into Frank Sinatra movies); standalones such as The Road’s End (1952), Nice Guys Finish Dead (1957), The Reformed Gun (1959), and Devil in Dungarees (1960); and The Zig-Zag Man (1991), one of 10 novels about Pierre-Ange “Pete” Sawyer, a French-American shamus living in Paris, who specializes in “higher-end crimes.”

(Right) Devil in Dungaress (Crest, 1960); cover art by Barye Phillips.

In 1973, Albert adopted yet another nom de plume—Ian MacAlister—and set about composing what would ultimately be a quartet of softcover adventure thrillers published by Fawcett Gold Medal. That alias was a calculated nod toward Alistair MacLean, evident not only from the “MacAlister” mash-up of a surname, but also because of the “Ian” forename: As Wikipedia notes, “In the early 1960s, MacLean published two novels under the pseudonym ‘Ian Stuart’ to prove that the popularity of his books was due to their content rather than his name on the cover. These were The Dark Crusader (1961) and The Satan Bug (1962).” The design and typefaces employed on the MacAlister covers, too, bore a striking resemblance to those decorating Fawcett’s 1970s MacLean paperbacks. It’s not a stretch to presume the intention here was that book buyers should either mistake Albert’s MacAlister novels for MacLean’s, or else that they would purchase them knowingly, hoping the packaging portended similarities in pacing and excitement between the two lines.

Like MacLean’s best-sellers, Albert’s skinnier MacAlister novels were action-packed one-offs, each boasting a different but ever-resourceful protagonist, “exotic and inhospitable settings,” do-or-die missions, stunning young women, and bad guys of the plainly reprehensible and minacious sort. His first MacAlister tale, Skylark Mission (1973), is set in World War II’s Pacific theater. It delivers us into the company of Captain Mike Shaw and his partner, Corporal Neal Miller, who launch an assault on a Japanese torpedo base in New Guinea, hoping to free Allied prisoners and open up passage to Allied vessels seeking safer waters around Australia.

Book two, Driscoll’s Diamonds (also released in 1973), is a contemporary story that takes place in the ever-volatile Middle East. It stars American mercenary John Driscoll, who, in the company of his Israeli girlfriend, Shana, is trying—without drawing significant attention to their activities—to recover a dear trove of diamonds that were purloined from smugglers in Africa, only to subsequently be lost during a plane crash in the Red Sea, an accident that nearly cost Driscoll his life. The problem is, that pair aren’t the only ones searching for said gems. Also hot on the trail are the hired guns who originally filched the diamonds, and who have no compunction against killing Driscoll and Shana to retrieve them. Both parties wind up in the Sudan, in what the blog Vintage Pop Fictions calls “the most inhospitable stretch of country on the planet, heavily infested with bandits and with Sudanese troops in hot pursuit.”

Above: Skylark Mission (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973) and Driscoll’s Diamonds (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973). Below: Strike Force 7 (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1974)—possibly with actor and ubiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland featured on the front—and Valley of the Assassins (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1975).



An additional couple of MacAlister thrillers appeared in bookstores and on squeaky spinner racks over the next two years.

Strike Force 7 (1974) introduced Earl Jarrell, a former British Army officer serving a three-year prison stint for gun running. Through the intervention of his Corsican partner, Jarrell is liberated prematurely in order to take on a specific, high-risk assignment: to secure the release of a wealthy American businessman’s wife and step-daughter, who’ve been abducted by revolutionaries in Morocco. After assembling a cadre of mercenaries, Jarrell and his partner persuade a woman journalist who’s interviewed the head rebel, Bel Zaara, to help them track down the insurgents—a quest that will lead them on a nerve-wracking chase into North Africa’s Atlas Mountains.

The fourth and final MacAlister yarn was called Valley of the Assassins (1975). Albert’s central player this time around is Eric Larson, an American “adventurer” who came to the Middle East to drill oil, but stayed to take on assorted jobs for entrepreneurs visiting from abroad. The plot kicks off with him traveling through the Persian Gulf aboard his cabin cruiser, and there stumbling across three dead men—one of whom isn’t dead after all. He’s a hunchbacked old Persian, who wants Larson’s help getting back to (pre-revolutionary) Iran and in the course of their journey leaves a puzzling map on our hero’s boat. Larson learns that map may point the way to long-lost riches, amassed over centuries by a murderous cult known as the Assassins and secreted somewhere in the Arabian desert. Together with his quondam Kurdish rebel lover, “dark, hard-eyed” Darra, and a company of shady specialists, Larson embarks on a treasure hunt into Saudi Arabia’s Rub-al-Khali, “a massive desert so infamous that even veteran sand-dwellers go out of their way to avoid it,” as Joe Kenney writes in his review of this novel. It won’t ease their going, that freebooking Bedouins lie in wait for them on the way.

Despite their manifestly commercial intentions, the MacAlister books have scored rather intemperate praise, at least in recent years. “Popcorn fiction done right,” enthused one critic. “An absolutely top-notch thriller,” proclaimed another. The blogger known as “dfordoom” extols Albert’s action-sequence restraint: “The violence isn’t particularly graphic. We’re dealing here with an author who doesn’t need to resort to graphic violence in order to make his story exciting.” Of Skylark Mission, Paperback Warrior observes that “In emulating the British style, Albert’s delivery recalls a Jack Higgins novel, complete with a propulsive narrative and just enough variance in characters to keep readers invested in their destiny and fate.”

Other thriller writers might kill for such notices!

As with 1970s editions of Alistair MacLean’s work, the hand-painted fronts of the MacAlister novels did much to promote them as compelling nail-biters worth their retail price of 75 cents to $1.50 (ah, the good old days of cheap softcovers). Rifles or machine guns were conspicuous elements, as were foreign-seeming backdrops. And, inevitably, people—usually the protagonists—in danger.

Regrettably, most of the illustrators responsible for those covers were uncredited, their identities now difficult to ascertain. The exception has to do with the purple-shaded edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds installed atop this post. That seems to be accepted as the work of Gordon Johnson (1924-1989), a flexible and highly productive artist “who was probably based in or near New York City,” according to Jeff Christoffersen, author of the Paperback Palette blog. Johnson’s forte was realism, Christoffersen says, as demonstrated in the “illustrations he produced for various magazines in the mid 1950’s, such as The American Magazine, American Weekly, Outdoor Life and Boys’ Life.” Later, Johnson created artwork for titles by a panoply of name-brand fictionists, including Helen MacInnes, John D. MacDonald, Brian Garfield, Donald Hamilton, Jack Higgins, and of course, Alistair MacLean. He also developed fronts for romance novels, teen tales, and sex romps such as Club Tropique, by Donald Bain.

Four of Gordon Johnson’s covers, clockwise from upper left: The Keys of Hell, by “Jack Higgins,” aka Henry “Harry” Patterson (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1976); Club Tropique, by Donald Bain (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978); Trial by Fury, by “Jack Lancer,” aka Jim Lawrence (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969); and Bear Island, by Alistair MacLean (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1972).



There’s no consensus on whose hand was behind the other MacAlister fronts displayed here. Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and “web monkey” turned ardent paperback collector, often cited as an authority on book cover artistry, suggests Skylark Mission and Valley of the Assassins “are reasonable candidates for being Johnson. The style on both of those seems consistent with, if not identical to, other Johnson covers. The only one I’m not sure about,” he says, “is Strike Force 7. That one looks like the cover artist was striving for a Frank Frazetta look (I’ve even known people to, incorrectly, say it’s a Frazetta cover!), but there’s no reason that Johnson couldn’t be that artist.” On the other hand, Hewitt flatly rules out the original, 1973 edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds (the red one, which he calls “rather flat and amateurish”) as belonging in Johnson’s portfolio.

I have a few Marvin H. Albert releases among my hoard of vintage softcovers, but none of his Ian MacAlister thrillers. I haven’t discovered yet why the author abandoned that promising line just four books into it. He lived another two decades after Valley of the Assassins saw print—plenty of time for a speedy scribbler like him to have delivered several further entries. Maybe sales figures didn’t warrant the cash and hype Fawcett was devoting to those books. Maybe his decision to move on to different projects had to do with the fact that Albert relocated to Europe in 1976, the same year his international terrorist thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, became an Edgar Award finalist for Best Mystery Novel. (Maggie Rennert’s Operation Alcestis eventually walked off with that prize.) Maybe he simply lost interest in trying to out-MacLean MacLean.

What we know is that he instead began penning his Stone Angel series starring ex-French resistance fighter and P.I. Pete Sawyer. And in February 1996 he witnessed the publication (under his J.D. Christilian alias) of Scarlet Women, the opening installment in a planned succession of novels about an 1870s New York City detective known as Harp. The author died in France a month later at age 73, leaving behind what’s been reported as 85 pages of notes for a second Harp book, never to be completed.

READ MORE: “The Gold Medal Corner,” by Bill Crider (Mystery*File).