When Eight Bells Toll 1968 detective book
When Eight Bells Toll (1968, United Kingdom)
Agent Phillip Calvert is sent on a secret government mission to a secluded bay somewhere on the western coast of Scotland. The place is cold, bleak and unforgiving, and has the weather to match. Calvert and his partner are pretending to be marine biologists aboard a scientific boat belonging to a university. But the real reason they are here is a bit more grim - five merchant ships were kidnapped in the area, the crews were imprisoned, but the ships themselves simply vanished somewhere in the Irish Sea. Calvert sneaks aboard the nearby ship to look around and finds two other agents dead inside, plus a few unfriendly and heavily armed men. While he manages to escape, soon the customs officers together with police officer from a nearby town come aboard the boat. They look for stolen chemicals, at least that is what they said they were doing, but Calvert has no doubts that is it only a cover story. The crew members from a luxury yacht moored nearby also came round asking Calvert if their radio is working, because something happened to their own, which was discovered after a visit from the customs officers. To make things a bit more complicated, all the phones in the town are also dead after a line was cut.
Alistair MacLean novel that is hard to assign to just one genre, it is sort-of spy story, sort-of whodunit, sort-of mystery book. Government agents, sent to a secluded place in Scotland, find themselves cut off from any form of communication while they try to find the culprits behind the kidnapping of the ships on the Irish Sea. As in other MacLean novels, here also the story is full of surprises and the constant cat-and-mouse game between the agents and the criminals is gripping the attention from the beginning until the end.
The movie adaptation of this novel, starring Anthony Hopkins as Calvert, was disappointing mostly because the plot is hardly suitable for the big screen - the book was far better in building the atmosphere and the mind-games that were taking place.
Can you solve a mystery like this one?
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