Word: macleans
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BEAR ISLAND by Alistair Maclean. 273 pages. Doubleday...
...Alistair MacLean is a craftsman of a special product: the instant bestseller and "soon-to-be-made-into-a-major-motion-picture" novel...
...concerns the making of a movie. A film company presided over by an evil Germanic butterball named Otto Gerran embarks on a refitted trawler to shoot on location at Bear Island in the Arctic Circle. Unlike, say, Ian Fleming, who was content with swift caricatures or comic-book effects, MacLean casts a few interesting human characters. There is old Captain Imrie, for example, who drinks like John Barrymore and thinks like Samuel Eliot Morison; and there is a rummy but Jesuitical mate named Stokes, who can remember the specific weather on an afternoon a generation...
...Bear Island, MacLean...
...most notable successes was the Burgess-MacLean-Philby case, a classic example of successful infiltration aided by the refusal of the British Foreign Office's "old boys" to admit that one of their class could betray the country. Colonel Rudolf Abel spent nine years in the U.S. running a spy network that may have covered...