During these interminable static hours Mort told me everything he knew. He was quite a lady’s man, it seemed, though he must have been well into his thirties. He was slim and his black hair was slicked firmly into place with lavish applications of oil, and his large hooked nose provided a satanic look if the light was bad enough. He talked all the time: “There was this sheila...” most of it began. She wouldn’t want to, but then, later, she would change her mind.
    Mort never said exactly what it was that she didn’t, and then did, want to do and, had I not picked up one or two clues in the Moorabbin Tech schoolyard, I would not have had the foggiest idea what Mort was talking about, but one of those clues was that you had to pretend to know all about it, so I never asked questions. As a result, there were no specifics. There was just this sheila...

“You look surprised to see me, Colonel Hidas,” Reynolds murmured. “You should not be surprised, you of all men. Those who live by the sword, as you have lived by the sword, must know better than any man that this moment comes to all of us. It comes to you tonight.”
“You have come to murder me?”
“Murder you? No. I have come to execute you...”
    Reynolds has two disadvantages in this climatic moment from Alistair MacLean’s The Last Frontier. One, he is talking too much and plainly won’t kill anybody, and two, he is the hero of the story and isn’t allowed to kill even this mass murderer in cold blood. Bloody wimp.
    Night Without End  followed, and was one of  Alistair’s better efforts but then came The Golden Rendezvous which only demonstrated that MacLean, like me, was having trouble recovering from being too old for Biggles. He grew so desperate that he tried to reinvent himself, publishing his new work The Dark Crusader under the pseudonym Ian Stuart, which disguise held for only a couple of years. It is a very routine thriller indeed and contains most of the elements that he would continually regurgitate over the years to come, in Fear is the Key, The Satan Bug and Ice Station Zebra.  His descent was almost complete which was all rather a pity because it was right about here, in 1962, that they released the mighty film from his book The Guns of Navarone. The movie placed him at the top of the world’s best seller lists at just the time when his writing had hit bottom. Fate can be cruel.