Tales from the Gryphon

Yet another of Alistair Maclean screenplays pretending to be a book. Set mostly on the Golden Gate bridge, it would have made a spectacular movie. Clever plot hooks, but a almost non-existent plot line; but still, better than some action movies from that era. Chalk another one up to guilty pleasures.

This is one of the books that Alistair Maclean wrote when he thought he was writing screenplays, not books — very visual action, inscrutable and inhuman protagonists, improbable or missing plots, and quite entertaining in a brainless kind of way. Yup, guilty pleasures.

This is an old favorite from Alistair Maclean, and I’m revisiting this after some 20 odd years since the last time I read it. This books is from a time period towards the end of his good phase, and is heavier on the action and lower on plot, and the amount of suspension of disbelief is correspondingly higher than his best, but this is still very good. Perhaps I don’t like it just because it is so sad. Anyway, this is one of a set of Maclean novels I picked up recently, and some of the others are more of a guilty pleasure than this one.