Bear Island was published by Collins in 1971. Dr. Dorian Christopher Dorian narrates: he is the medical officer aboard a converted trawler carrying a film crew to Bear Island, a remote Norwegian territory in the Arctic Ocean. The production company, headed by the affable Otto Dorian and the autocratic director Neal Divine, plans to shoot a film on the island. But from the first night at sea, things go wrong: passengers fall ill (poisoned, Dorian suspects), equipment is sabotaged, and the film crew — a collection of actors, technicians, and hangers-on — turns out to include several people with hidden connections to the island’s past.
MacLean returns to his strongest setting — the Arctic — and his strongest mode — the confined group in a hostile environment with a killer among them. Bear Island, which actually exists (it is part of the Svalbard archipelago), provides a suitably isolated and threatening backdrop: mountainous, fog-bound, populated only by polar bears and seabirds, with abandoned mining installations that serve as both shelter and potential death traps.
The mystery involves wartime secrets: Bear Island, during World War II, was the site of German weather stations and supply caches, and the true purpose of the film expedition is connected to unfinished business from the war. Dorian (the narrator) is himself concealing his true identity and purpose, and MacLean’s technique of using an unreliable first-person narrator — who withholds information from the reader as deliberately as he withholds it from the other characters — creates a distinctive reading experience in which the narrator is simultaneously the detective and one of the suspects.
Collecting Bear Island
First edition (Collins, London, 1971): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $50–$150
- Very good: $20–$50