Books: On Location

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BEAR ISLAND by Alistair Maclean. 273 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Alistair MacLean is a craftsman of a special product: the instant bestseller and "soon-to-be-made-into-a-major-motion-picture" novel.

His previous efforts composed simultaneously with typewriter and viewfinder include Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare. This time the scenario actually concerns the making of a movie. A film company presided over by an evil Germanic butterball named Otto Gerran embarks on a refitted trawler to shoot on location at Bear Island in the Arctic Circle. Unlike, say, Ian Fleming, who was content with swift caricatures or comic-book effects, MacLean casts a few interesting human characters. There is old Captain Imrie, for example, who drinks like John Barrymore and thinks like Samuel Eliot Morison; and there is a rummy but Jesuitical mate named Stokes, who can remember the specific weather on an afternoon a generation ago.

The trip doesn't go very well. Bodies begin to accumulate in novel ways. Midway through the book, Marlowe, the film company's doctor, turns out to be a British treasury agent as well as a physician. Nazi gold is involved, and guilt for long-ago deaths. Amid the systematic carnage, the reader begins to think of the film version of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians.

Film makers are negotiating for the rights to Bear Island. But as a possible major motion-picture novel, it seems more like a candidate for the Academy Awards of 1948. MacLean writes an almost archaically stylized thriller. If there is no sex, there is enough drinking to sabotage the Thin Man's liver. The final expository "Aha!" scenes suggest a weary late, late show charm: "Let's stop playing silly games," says Marlowe, "for your own game is up."