ALISTAIR MACLEAN, the son of a Scots Minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands.
In 1941 at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy; two and a half years spent aboard a cruiser was later to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his first novel, the outstanding documentary novel on the war at sea. He is now the author of twenty-two best-selling novels, of which Goodbye California is the most recent; sixteen of them have now sold more than a million copies throughout the world.
Many of his novels have also been filmed — The Guns o fNavarone, Where Eagles Dare and Force Ten From Navarone are among the most famous — and there are plans to film many more books including The Golden Gate.
