An undoubtedly somewhat shaken Alistair MacLean needed to pull up his socks a bit with his next book to be published after the cinematic release of The Guns of Navarone. This was Ice Station Zebra, and although he went very solidly to safe ground, still it was a better effort. He dumped the pseudonym Ian Stuart and allowed that author’s true identity to become known, and basically did a rewrite of Night Without End, but this time he did it with a touch of class.
  US nuclear sub Dolphin is off under the icepack on a Top Secret mission (to recover a crashed Russian spy satellite before the Reds get their hands on it, or some such nonsense.) They are carrying a civilian, the mysterious Dr Carpenter who, even once in the isolation of the sub, refuses to tell the captain what the mission is really about.   Typical stuff, but the joy of it is that the story is narrated by Carpenter, who refuses to tell the reader what he is really up to as well, but at least is honest enough to admit that most things he says are outright lies.
You see, he knows that there are traitors in the crew, and seems to suspect that even you, the reader, might be one of them. It’s all done with pace and energy and a fine line in cynicism by the narrator. So that, typically, when they get to the secret Arctic monitoring station and find it burned down and the crew murdered, Commander Swanson forcibly demands that Carpenter tell him the truth.

  I sighed. “It would have to come to this. You must be told now—and you’ll understand why your Director of Naval Operations was so anxious that you give me every help possible.”
“We can believe this one?” Swanson asked.
“You can believe this one. The story I spun back in Holy Loch wasn’t all malakey—I just dressed it up a bit to make sure you’d take me along. They did indeed have a very special item of equipment here—an electronic marvel that was used for monitoring Soviet missiles and pin-pointing their locations….” And he goes on to explain the whole mission in detail, at the end of which Commander Swanson says:
“What can I do to help, Dr Carpenter?”
“What are you willing to do, Commander?”
“I will not hand over command of the Dolphin.” He smiled, but he wasn’t feeling like smiling. “Short of that, I—and the crew of the Dolphin—are at your complete disposal. You name it, Doctor, that’s all.”
“This time you believe my story?”
“This time I believe your story.”
I was pleased about that, I almost believed it myself.
So it goes, right to the end.
  Now, some years later, in 1968, they made a movie of it, a big budget monster with Rock Hudson as Swanson and the usually wonderful Patrick McGoohan as Carpenter, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown, and a fellow named Tony Bill who everyone thought was going to be a big star in 1963 but by then was slipping down the supporting cast lists, and the multi-Olympic gold winning Australian swimmer Murray Rose in his acting debut (and finale) as the handsomest, blondest and bronzest member of the crew, blessedly killed off early in the piece. Such should have been the fate of the whole production, for it is a true rotter. With so many assets and John Sturges directing, it’s hard to imagine how they messed it up, but they did. A serious candidate for the worst ever movie and surely the most boring.
It’s easy to see why. The action scenes are weakly handled—plainly that wasn’t where the big budget got spent—and, after employing the caustically delightful McGoohan who should have been perfect for all those Carpenter lies and cynicisms, they instead left all that out of the script and had him mouthing Cold War platitudes instead.
Once more, poor Alistair was let down, but don’t you worry. His day was coming when he would get it right in the end.