Bear Island Is Not A Happy Place

When I started Bear Island, I had no familiarity with Alistair MacLean's work. I've heard of some of his other books, but I'd never read any of them, and I only knew Force 10 From Navarone and The Guns of Navarone as movies. There will be some spoilers ahead. I'll try to be vague, but I thought I'd warn you.

The book starts of a trawler heading to Bear Island, carrying a small film crew, lead by their producer, Otto Gerran, and the various other board members of Olympus Productions. People begin dying, or very nearly dying, and the crew's doctor, a Dr. Marlowe (our point of view character), concludes it's poisoning. The deaths continue once the boat reaches remote Bear Island, as it becomes apparent that almost no one is what they seem, including Marlowe. The ending is as happy as it can be under the circumstances, as the villain's are caught or killed, and the day is saved, for those still alive, anyway.

I've mentioned before I'm very bad at mysteries. In this case, I was determined to have it figured out, but I don't believe I can claim success. I had half the guilty parties figured with 100 pages to go, but what I was basing my belief in their guilt on was false. I had thought, when one of the ship's crew commented that he could raise NATO training forces on the ship's radio if things grew too hairy, that the book was going in an espionage direction. One of the guilty parties had supposedly been in a Siberian prison for 20 years, and had been surprisingly released only two years ago. As it turned out, this was fishy, just for less political reasons than I suspected.

I wouldn't say this is a "fair play" mystery, which was what I thought it would be in the early going. It's more of a suspense novel, I think. MacLean does present some clues as Marlowe comes across them. For example, when Marlowe goes snooping he finds what he describes as a 'correspondence between Otto's chequebooks and Goin's bankbook.' What this correspondence is, he leaves to our imaginations. I went through several possibilities, including the correct one, but couldn't piece things together sufficiently to narrow it down. Whether I was supposed to or not, I don't know. What I do know is Marlowe has a considerable amount of information from the beginning the reader only becomes privy to when he feels like telling some other character. There are even things about Marlowe we are unaware of until well into the book. I imagine MacLean held these tidbits in reserve so he could have the surprise reveal of who Marlowe really is, but it does complicate things for the reader trying to solve the crimes on his own.

I feel MacLean tends to write info dumps he can't disguise as anything other than info dumps. The first chapter is Marlowe checking on the condition of the other passengers, as the weather is rough that night, and the landlubbers are suffering from it. What It boils down to is Marlowe describing each of the character's in turn. What they look like, why they're there, their personality, how the rest of the cast feels about them. I appreciate the effort, but it was a bit too obvious. This happens a few other times, where things seem to come to a halt so Marlowe can tell us (through some other character) a lot of information it would be helpful to have.

One thing that I was disappointed by was that Marlowe seems fairly good at deciding who to trust. If he confides in them, then ultimately, he can trust them to watch his back. They may not be on his side at the start, but inevitably, it turns out they're under coercion. The reason this bothered me was that Marlowe didn't seem that on the ball. The killers are running laps around him throughout the book. Rifling through his stuff while he's otherwise occupied, seeing from a book he left open he's been studying a particular kind of poison, luring people he trusts into the wilderness and eliminating them, and so on. When he keeps trusting one particular character to watch his back, I kept expecting that to blow up in his face. After all, his judgment up to then hadn't been extraordinary.

This was another quick read, as the expository dumps are few and far enough between they don't slow things down terribly. Part of why it read quickly for me might be due to my conviction it was a mystery, so I was eager to keep going, to see if the next clue would be what let me put all the pieces together. As a mystery, I wouldn't recommend it, but as a suspense novel, I'd say it's worth a look, especially if you can find it for 50 cents. Let's hear it for library sales.