News

December 2, 2011

I have just received word that Gisela MacLean, the author's first wife, recently passed away. Though this is sad news, I will soon have an announcement about a rare opportunity regarding an Alistair MacLean artifact that was in Gisela's collection. Check back here for an update (I'm sorry I don't know exactly when it will come).

September 13, 2011

Sony Pictures has announced that it will release The Guns of Navarone on Blu-ray Disc next month. See details here.

July 13, 2011

I just discovered that Powercorp, a British producer and distributor of TV movies and miniseries, is creating four miniseries based on Alistair MacLean's work. These are the titles:

• Alistair MacLean's Air Force One is Down
• Alistair MacLean's The Catch
• Alistair MacLean's The Dark Crusader
• Alistair MacLean's Puppet on a Chain

The good news is that these miniseries are being produced. The not-as-good news is that, according to the capsule descriptions on Powercorp's website, their plots are wildly different from anything MacLean wrote.

For example, the book The Dark Crusader (sold in the U.S. as The Black Shrike) pitted British intelligence against an Asian-based conspiracy to steal nuclear missiles from a Polynesian island. In Power's version, though, the enemy is "La Fontaine, an extreme right-wing operation whose membership penetrates the governments of every west European state. Their plan: to release Dark Crusader, a horrific biological weapon, into Europe’s immigrant population in a bid for total ethnic cleansing."

The Puppet on a Chain miniseries' description begins: "When ex-British Army Officer Paul Sharman travels to Amsterdam to reconnect with his anarchic little brother Danny, their short lived reunion ends in tragedy at the airport. A young, drug addled woman advances towards Danny carrying a bomb in her backpack. As it is detonated, he is caught in the explosion, dying in Sharman’s arms." In the book Puppet on a Chain, Paul Sherman visits Amsterdam to connect with a colleague ... who is shot ... by a man.

Power's other two miniseries hold little obvious promise either. The book Air Force One is Down is based on a MacLean-penned plot, but written by someone else of presumably lesser talents. Meanwhile, the miniseries The Catch is "based on the best-selling novels by Alistair Maclean" — whatever that means, as he didn't write a novel called The Catch. Will this be some hodgepodge of MacLean-esque thriller bits?

If you are in Britain and view any of these miniseries, I'd like to hear your assessment; please drop me a line at .