Glengavel wrote:Where Eagles Dare and When Eight Bells Toll took Alistair MacLean back to the top of the best-sellers after a hiatus from writing. WEBT is the only book set wholly in a Scottish location, incidentally.
Earlier efforts you hint at are HMS Ulysses and Ice Station Zebra, both set in high latitudes. Not sure who PF and the English poet are.
(if there was a bell emoji, I'd do eight of them)
The English poet quoted at the start of HMS Ulysses is Tennyson
"My purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars
Maybe the gulfs will wash us down
Maybe we will touch the Happy Isles"
I said "business, not enjoyable but profitable" because MacLean was quoted as saying that he did not enjoy writing and was a "businessman" who wrote to make money.
He was also criticised for not finding space in his fast-moving plots for romantic storylines. A bit like a reviewer of Jane Austen saying "Even though written during the Industrial Revolution, these disappointing novels don't feature even a single cotton mill or iron foundry".
Anyway, you have saved me finding photos of the Scottish locations (Fingal's Cave, Duart Castle and others) used in the film version of Eight Bells.
Instead, here is a picture explanation of why
PF stands for
Pulp
Fiction.