Born on April 21, 1922, in Glasgow in Scotland as the son of a Minister, Alistair Stuart MacLean spent his youth in the Higland village Daviot, near Inverness.  Until the age of 18, when he joined the Royal Navy, he attended the Hillhead High School in Glasgow.

After the war, during which he spent two and a half year as a torpedo man aboard a cruiser, he studied English at the University of Glasgow, where he graduaded in 1953.  Afterwards he worked as a schoolteacher.

In 1954 one of the short stories he had been writing won in a contest organised by the Glasgow Herald.  The story drew the interest of an editor who suggested to MacLean that he should attempt to write a novel.  That became H.M.S. Ulysses, in which Alistair MacLean used much of his experiences as a torpedo man during the war.  The book became the first in a series of bestsellers.

Partly for tax reasons MacLean moved to Switzerland, where he continued to produce a new novel about every year.  He died on February 2, 1987, in Munich, Germany, and he was buried in Celigny, Switzerland.