The convoy is based upon the tragic real-life convoy, PQ-17, which in July 1942 suffered enormous losses when 24 of its 35 merchant ships were sunk during a series of German attacks that lasted for a week. Ulysses sets sail once again, this time as an escort for the convoy FR-77, heading for Murmansk. The ship serves on the Arctic convoys and her crew is pushed above and beyond the normal limits of human endurance, leading to a mutiny.
HMS Ulysses tells the story of a Royal Navy light cruiser of the same name, which is among the fastest ships in the world. They were near neighbours and although Burton starred in the highly successful Where Eagles Dare, they were not close friends. He is buried just a few yards away from the actor Richard Burton in Céligny, near Geneva. His success meant that he spent much of his life living as a tax exile in Switzerland. MacLean drank heavily and struggled with alcoholism. The book received unprecedented pre-sales and earned MacLean enough to buy his first house. After some persuading he agreed to write a novel and twelve weeks later delivered HMS Ulysses. An employee of the publisher Collins read the story in the newspaper and managed to track down MacLean. It was while at university that he began writing short stories and in 1954 won a local newspaper competition with his maritime story Dileas. He graduated in 1953 and became a popular school teacher in Rutherglen. It was this experience that sits behind his compelling 1955 book, HMS Ulysses. MacLean left the Royal Navy in 1946, when he attended the University of Glasgow to study English. His active service took him to the Mediterranean and the Far East, as well as on two perilous Arctic convoys.
In 1941 he joined the Royal Navy and served as a Leading Torpedo Operator on HMS Royalist. He was responsible for some of the greatest novels of the 1950s and 60s, many of which made it to the big screen, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Ice Station Zebra and Golden Rendezvous.Īlistair Stuart MacLean was born on 28 April 1922 in Glasgow, the third of four sons of a Church of Scotland minister, and he learnt English as a second language, his first being Gaelic. He remained in the best seller lists right up to his death in 1987. A publisher had to persuade a reluctant MacLean to write it after he’d won a local short story competition.Īlistair Maclean’s writing career went on to be, quite frankly, monumental. HMS Ulysses was the highly acclaimed debut novel by the Scottish author, Alistair MacLean, based upon his experiences in the Royal Navy and the dangerous Arctic convoys of the Second World War.
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