It was written in 1962 and set aboard a luxury freighter that is hijacked by pirates smuggling a tactical nuclear weapon. Sometimes, in the middle of a covert operation or a terrorist heist, a beautiful girl would come along and briefly win the hero’s heart, before he had to shove his feelings back in the glove compartment, pick up a marlin spike and 1,000 rounds of ammunition and save the world - while making the occasional wisecrack.Īnd that is what made “The Golden Rendezvous” my favorite. They didn’t chase women or even miss them. These heroes were all loners, strong and mostly silent. So mine was a lonely passion, deepened in a way by the solitary communion with bosuns, saboteurs and germ warfare specialists. I couldn’t share my MacLean fixation with my best friend because she would only read novels on the prescribed pink list. We lived in Paris and I went to a French all girl’s school where teachers limited our reading to a children’s imprint called La Bibliothèque Rose. I was so captivated it didn’t matter that the heroine was secondary or that the wooing was perfunctory and mostly took place under gunfire while climbing the cliffs of a Greek island or escaping the Japanese in a lifeboat in the South China Sea. I was like Titania, who under Puck’s spell in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” falls in love with the first person she sees. So these action thrillers were the first books I read that filled my head with fantasies of love and courtship. Historical romances are known as “bodice-rippers.” The only silk to be found in an Alistair MacLean novel is on a parachute.īut I had never read a real romance novel - I hadn’t yet discovered Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer.
Years later, I understood that these were in fact romance novels for boys, which means very little romance and lots of danger, complicated weaponry and battle-forged camaraderie.
In between bouts of wheezing, I devoured one after the other: “South by Java Head,” “When Eight Bells Toll,” “The Guns of Navarone,” “Night Without End,” “Ice Station Zebra” and, my favorite, “The Golden Rendezvous.” As soon as the daring rescue was done, I ransacked my brother’s room and discovered an entire cache of Alistair MacLean. I read his book in an afternoon, transported to Schloss Adler, an impregnable Nazi fortress in the Bavarian Alps where an American general was held captive. In my older brother’s room, the only novel I could find was MacLean’s World War II thriller. I was home from school sick with something that kept me snuffling under a snowdrift of rumpled tissues, and had read every book on my shelf. It was “Where Eagles Dare,” by Alistair MacLean. I was 11 when I read my first romance novel.
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