Patrick O'Brian, novelist, 85

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Friday January 7 3:56 AM ET 

Patrick O'Brian, novelist of the sea, dead at 85

LONDON, Jan 7 (Reuters) - British author Patrick O'Brian, whose long
series of novels of seafaring in the Napoleonic era brought him belated
recognition, has died at the age of 85, London newspapers reported on
Friday.

O'Brian published his first book at the age of 15 but was in his mid
fifties before an American publisher, on the strength of an earlier
seafaring book, persuaded him to try his hand at a novel of the sea.

The result was ``Master and Commander,'' the first of what was to become a
series of 20 books tracing the lives of two characters: Jack Aubrey, a
naval captain, and Stephen Maturin, his Irish-Catalan ship's surgeon, who
was also a secret agent.

Into these books O'Brian, who claimed to be Irish but was in reality the
eighth of nine children of a doctor of German extraction, wove his views
on life and the nature of relationships, and they were eagerly bought by a
small but loyal readership.

But it was not until the New York Times book section featured him in 1991
that O'Brian began to reach a wider audience and to live down one critic's
description of him as ``the best author you have never heard of.''

The last of his Aubrey-Maturin series, ``Blue at the Mizzen,'' was
published last year.

Richard Patrick Russ (he changed his name in 1945) was born in Chalfont St
Peter, southern England, on December 12, 1914. Twice married, he had a son
and a daughter and had lived since the 1940s in France, where he died.

Reuters/Variety 




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