The Dark Crusader by Alistair Maclean

Written in his glory days, Maclean's gift to devise a brilliant and cunning plot is perhaps best represented by this book. This cold war story plunges right into the action and keeps it's pace throughout the book. Although the main focus is rocket science and pretty advanced stuff at that, he manages to present the facts in a digestible, straight forward way. This book coincided with the age of rising interest in solid fuel rocketry among the scientific community. (You can learn more more about solid fuel rockets here or here.)

Rocket fuel expert and intelligence agent John Bentall is sent to investigate the mysterious disappearances of 8 of Britain's leading rocket scientists. At the same time, 9 mysterious advertisements crop up in the newspapers. He and the agent Marie Hopeman, posing as his wife, travel to Sydney on acceptance of the ninth advertisement. However, they are kidnapped en route to Sydney at Fiji and made captive on board a schooner (which is a ship by the way). They are then deftly manipulated by the kidnappers and end up on an island supposedly by accident. Their host on the island who takes good care of them is a well respected archaeologist, seems to be a pleasant man, but our hero feels otherwise. He suddenly finds himself in the midst of desperate men and a game of deceit. The stakes of which are very high, world domination, no less.

John Bentall is quite a bit different from Maclean's other protagonists, he displays an excessively self depreciating character and makes mistakes which play the duo right into the trap set by the villains. Marie Hopeman, his companion, doesn't play a major role here and the romance between them was a bit out of place. The main villain is cast as an exceptionally brilliant character and he was, for a change, a memorable one.

What I absolutely loved was that he gave emotional and human touches to even the secondary characters in the plot, which is not something you see in every other book.

The only thing I didn't like in this book was that Maclean cast Asians to be the villains in the plot. He cast them both as the foot soldiers and as the evil mastermind behind the whole plot. It was probably due to the bad 'encounters' he had with the Asians in WWII. But I did notice that he uses his books one too many times to foil them. I let the matter rest, we all have our mindsets.

All in all, this a great read provided that you are willing to suspend your disbelief just a little bit.
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The Guns of Navarone

The Guns of Navarone by Alistair Maclean is one of the best books set during World War 2. Those of us who have read his novels know that it is not only the high voltage plot that reels us in, but also the amount of detail and the depth assigned to the characters. We see his characters not only as mere pawns enacting his plot but also as real humans, people just like us. This I believe is enough to have made him "The man with the Golden Typewriter".

Now where would a WWII book be without the Nazis? The main playground in this book is the island of Navarone in the Aegan sea. The Germans have established an 'impenetrable fortress' in the island and with the help of the special Guns of Navarone enjoy almost complete dominance over the Aegan islands. There is only the island of Kheros left under the control of the Allied powers and their time is running out fast. The 1200 Allied soldiers holed up here await evacuation, but evacuation by sea is impossible with the presence of the massive guns of Navarone nearby. After several futile attempts by the Allies to take the guns out of the equation, they send in a covert sabotage team to wreck the guns. What follows is a fast paced action thriller that has you rushing to the climax. While the plot and the island are fictitious, a little research brings up a place called Navarino in the Aegan, the site of a major battle in the previous century. The plot however is based on the Battle of Leros, the central event in the Dodecanese campaign, an effort by the Allied powers to reclaim the Aegan islands. 

The lead character in the book is Captain Keith Mallory, a legendary mountaineer turned commando from New Zealand. An engaging character who takes to his job with utmost sincerity, he is completely practical and non sentimental. He mulls over this fact over the course of the book. His close associate, Andrea is the epitome of a fighting machine and is my favourite character in the book. In the beautiful words of Maclean himself, "A destroyer of his fellow-man, he loved his fellow-man above all things. Andrea killed neither for revenge, nor from hate, nor nationalism, nor for the sake of any of the other "isms" which self-seekers and fools and knaves employ as beguilement to the battlefield and justification for the slaughter of millions too young and too unknowing to comprehend the dreadful futility of it all Andrea killed simply that better men might live." 

Along with Corporal 'Dusty' Miller, Lieutenant Andy Stevens and Casey Brown, all of them legends in their own right, they embark on a mission that some would deem to be suicidal. Failure is not an option for these men as the lives of a thousand depend on them. Maclean weaves a spell on the readers with feats of courage, deceit and loads of breath taking action. The book is nothing short of a masterpiece!