REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:


ALISTAIR MacLEAN – Night Without End. Collins, K, hardcover, 1960. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1960. Reprint editions include: Fawcett Gold Medal, US, paperback, no date stated [1960s], among many others, both US and UK.

   In latitude 72.40 north, 8000 feet up on the Greenland ice-cap, self-preservation makes for a remarkable turn of speed.

   That’s an understatement to say the least in Alistair MacLean’s Arctic thriller, Night Without End, that opens as the team at an IGY tracking station in the bitter north hears a plane where none should be, and one in trouble at that, a jet airliner circling above their lonely station, in trouble in the sky, and about to come down in an unforgiving land.

   Dr. Mason, the narrator, and his two companions know what the Arctic can do to the unwary, the unprepared. They know routine, food, shelter, warmth, and common sense are life and anything less is death.

   At his best, and this was written in his best period before his work became little more than screen scenarios, no one could drop you into the middle of a pulse-pounding plot with the same elan as the Scottish author of adventure classics like The Guns of Navarone and Ice Station Zebra. He seemed, too, to have a fine ear for the detail of Arctic adventure, for the ice prick pain of the bitter cold and the soul destroying chill no protective gear can fully repel.

   If he lacked the Conradian or Stevensonian skills of a Hammond Innes or Geoffrey Household or the sheer gift for character of a Victor Canning and humor of a Desmond Bagley, he made up for it with driving narrative, impeccable research, and an eye for plot that Agatha Christie might have admired, for his best works tend, like a classic Christie tale, to set a small group of people in an isolated environment with a mystery to be solved whose solution is as vital to everyone’s survival as the natural world that threatens from without.

   As with Ice Station Zebra, the McGuffin in this one is only important to set the action in motion, but that’s more than enough, this is about action, suspense, mystery, and thrills, not the history of a plot contrivance.

   Here it turns out the cause of the plane coming down was no accident. It was hijacked and forced down, and it’s 18,000 miles off course.

   No one knows who the hijackers are, why they did it, or if they survived, but they have committed one murder other than the passengers killed in the crash, and they are willing to commit more, and only Mason can uncover their plot, stop their sabotage, and keep his crew and the survivors alive as the weather deteriorates and the endless night closes in while outside human threats accumulate, including the good guys who will do anything to stop the killer escaping and the bad guys set to rendezvous with him and leave everyone else to die.

   The tense finale on a shifting glacier is as satisfying as it is nerve wracking.

    Night Without End is one of MacLean’s tighter plotted and leaner books, with just the right mix of action, atmosphere, weather, characterization, plot, and twists to keep you happily turning pages and wishing that someone today still had the skills to write this kind of book with the same economy. An old favorite, and I was both pleased with how well it holds up, but also how much of it I remembered considering I first read it back in Middle School.

   This night has an end, and a very satisfactory one it is.