Anything Maclean wrote before ~1975
After that, he was so pissed he didn't realise he was copying his own books. Night Without End and Ice Station Zebra are still some of the best novels I've ever read.
My favourite passage from Ice Station Zebra, when they're looking for a gap in the ice to surface:
"Five o'clock in the afternoon. People weren't looking at each other any more, much less talking. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Defeat, despair hung heavy in the air. Heavy ice, still heavy ice. Even Swanson had stopped smiling. I wondered if he had in his mind's eye what I now constantly had in mine: the picture of a haggard, emaciated, bearded man with his face all but destroyed with frostbite, a frozen, starving, dying man draining away the last few ounces of his exhausted strength as he cranked the handle of his generator and tapped out his call sign with lifeless fingers, his head bowed as he strained to listen above the howl of the ice storm for the promise of aid that never came. Or maybe there was no one tapping out a call sign any more. They were no ordinary men who had been sent to man Drift Ice Station Zebra, but there comes a time when even the toughest, the bravest, the most enduring will abandon all hope and lie down to die. Perhaps he had already lain down to die. Heavy ice, still heavy ice."
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Sat 7 Jan 2012, 14:26, 1 reply)

Yep, you have a point
his later stuff was a bit crap, but also better than a lot of other crap I have read since :)
(arnie2703 is sick of this damn French keyboard since, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 17:27, closed)