MUNICH, West Germany -- Alistair MacLean, the Scottish-born author who was among the most widely read writers of his time with such best-selling novels as 'The Guns of Navarone' and 'Ice Station Zebra,' has died. He was 64.
MacLean died at 9:30 a.m. Monday as a result of a fall that broke a rib and pierced his lung, his family said in Geneva, where the author spent the last 20 years of his life.
But his London publisher, William Collins, said MacLean suffered a stroke three weeks ago and had been in a coma since. 'He was being treated for that in Munich and died of heart failure,' a spokesman for the publisher said.
Born in a Gaelic-speaking region of the Scottish Highlands in 1922, MacLean spoke little English until he turned 15. He began a teaching career in Glasgow but turned to writing after winning a short story contest sponsored by a newspaper and was offered a book contract.
His first best-seller, 'HMS Ulysses,' was published in 1955. He became a full-time novelist only after proving to himself with his second book, 'The Guns of Navarone,' that his success was not a quirk.
Over the next 20 years his books sold more than 25 million copies, were translated into several languages and made into successful films. He had 29 novels published.
Maclean moved his family to Switzerland and produced a string of best-sellers, including 'South by Java Head,' 'The Last Frontier,' 'Fear is the Key,' 'The Golden Rendezvous,' 'Ice Station Zebra,' 'When Eight Bells Toll,' 'Where Eagles Dare,' 'Force Ten from Navarone,' 'Puppet on a Chain,' 'Bear Island,' 'Breakheart Pass,' and 'The Satan Bug.'
MacLean's last novel was 'San Andreas,' published in 1984. His last work was 'The Lonely Sea,' a collection of short stories published in 1985.
MacLean regarded his writing as craft rather than art and said he stopped reading reviews of his work after a Scottish newspaper recommended his first novel be burned.
'I am not a novelist. That's too pretentious a claim,' he once said. 'I'm a story-teller. That's all. I'm a professional and a craftsman. I will make that claim for myself.'
But his books, along with those of Harold Robbins and Georges Simenon, outsold all others in the world. Also one of the most filmed writers of his time, he dismissed his cinema success as simply the result of his 'visual imagination.'
MacLean admired Raymond Chandler as a novelist and detested the 'sex, snobbery and sadism' he saw in the popular James Bond books of Ian Fleming.
