Sometimes I just want to veg with a shallow action novel. It’s not my best quality, but it’s true. My go-to authors for such escapism include Clive Cussler (though after 60+ Cussler novels, I’ve grown tired of him), Michael Crichton (hit-or-miss; each novel is either really great or utterly terrible) and Alistair MacLean (a mixture of these two).

By my reconning, this is the 6th MacLean novel I’ve read, and all I can say is that it’s definitely better than the worst of his books: The Golden Gate and Goodbye, California. That might not be saying much.

Some Background Information

Air Force One Is Down proved to be about as exciting as The Black Shrike (the first of his I ever read), though I think my ignorance of this book’s placement in MacLean’s larger bibliography affected my interest. In fact, I missed out of some of the novel’s key elements, because I was unaware that it’s the second installment to MacLean’s twelve-book UNACO series, not a standalone novel. A little after-the-fact research helped clear things up—and also gave me some other insights that help me understand MacLean better.

One key insight about MacLean is that he actually hated writing, finding it a lonely, dreadful business. The only reason he dished out so many novels was to pay the bills. That so many people ate up his stories shocked him, because he himself was never much impressed with his own work. His later career consisted of trying to sell plots more than novels, and he ultimately died an alcoholic at age 64.

These sad tidbits tie it all together for me—when his books were bad, he knew it and didn’t care. His novels are shallow, because there was no real heart in them. I strongly dislike some of his books, and my bad reviews would have likely made him happy. What a thing to learn (that is, supposing I can trust my minimalist research on Wikipedia).

Other insights I got from that slight research is that MacLean’s involvement in the UNACO series (and others) was merely as the Idea Man: he wrote the plots, hinted at the scenarios, drafted the characters, and then other writers took it from there. That’s why this book was published “with John Denis”—John Denis actually did all the writing. Again, what a revelation!

Plotting and Characters

I actually did enjoy this book’s straightforward plot. A villain (possibly a recurring character, though I hadn’t read the pervious book) escapes from prison and hires a goon to help him and the KGB kidnap a bunch of OPEC leaders who are flying (without the U.S. President) aboard Air Force One. He does so by first kidnapping the Chief Security Office, McCafferty, and replacing him with a murderous doppelganger, Jagger, who highjacks the plane mid-flight. It all gets fast-paced and wild after that, which was good to see, since “lack of climax” is why I hated several of MacLean’s other books.

As far as characterization goes, I was bit confused at first. Reading the first book in the series, Hostage Tower, likely would have helped me better understand who’s who in this second book, but I never read it, so I came in blind. There were so many names flying around the first bunch of chapters that I was a little lost. I’d have paid a lot more attention to McCafferty’s storyline, for example, had I known that he is in fact the series hero (at least that’s what I assume)! Oh well. Lesson re-learned: don’t jump into a series mid-stream.

One character I didn’t like at all was the 12-year-old Arab boy who spoke and behaved like an adult. What he says to the female agent when they’re locked in the bedroom together is laughably ridiculous, and that single line shaved off any “realism” that the authors had achieved up to that point. Shallow entertainment for sure.

This book contained some hefty language and one horrible scene between a terrorist and a female agent, so reader beware. Other than that, this was a mildly enjoyable and short book that scratched the spy itch in me. I think when I feel it again, I’ll go for Ian Fleming or Geoffrey Household instead—authors who give at least a few more inches of depth to their thrillers than MacLean ever gave his audience—and begrudgingly so.

©2024 E.T.

Read More from Alistair MacLean:

• HMS Ulysses (1955)
• The Black Shrike (1961)
• Ice Station Zebra (1963)
• The Golden Gate (1976)
• Goodbye, California (1978)
• Air Force One Is Down (1981)