Despite being one of the world's best-selling writers, Alistair MacLean was consistently modest about the literary merits of his twenty-eight novels of action and adventure. He always insisted that he was a storyteller rather than a novelist, and he felt great regret that he had never written what he regarded as a "good" book. MacLean was, however, proud of his ability to create fast-moving, exciting action-adventure stories. In a 1971 interview he told Barry Norman, "Basically I'm a person who tells stories. . . . the basic secret is speed--keep the action moving so fast that the reader never has time to stop and think. . . . That's why there is never any sex in my books; it holds up the action." MacLean added that he disapproved of "permissiveness and pornography. It's a matter of satisfaction to me that I can produce bestsellers without resorting to these things." He disdained what he referred to...