Alistair MacLean Reissues

Alistair MacLean produced 28 novels and one short story collection before his death in 1987. In the 1990s the books gradually went out of print but lately many of his thrillers have gradually been reissued in the UK.

I'm glad to see these reissues. Frankly a lot of modern thriller writers could learn a thing or two from the way MacLean wrote and constructed a story.



Here are covers that HarperCollins will be using for four books that will be released in the coming months. The books are River of Death, Athabasca, Bear Island and Circus.

It's also interesting to see how dramatically different the page count of novels has changed since the 1970s. Most of my old MacLean Fontana paperbacks had exactly 222 pages. That made me think they were very short compared with more recent books. Now the new editions have been reset to larger text more common in today's paperbacks and the page count has shot up to about 380 pages.