Marcus Palliser, novelist
Hyfler/Rosner
Writer who escaped the boardroom to create historical seafaring
adventures
(Times of London)
MANY successful executive wage slaves dream of throwing off
their corporate shackles for a life of adventure funded by a second career
as a novelist or writer.
Marcus Palliser managed it, leaving the plush office reserved
for the director of communications at a big computer corporation to live on
a small yacht and sail the Mediterranean before crossing the Atlantic
single-handed and then returning to Britain to write a series of elegant and
well-received historical seafaring novels - for which he first negotiated a
handsome advance from the publishers William Heinemann.
He was a maverick in the boardroom, on one occasion informing
the dour representatives of the French government who owned the computer
company that he was working for that they needed to learn English.
His maritime novels were set at the beginning of the 18th
century, coincidently at the time of the start of the French wars, and his
hero, Matthew Loftus, is a private seaman and commercial trader - a rather
modern character who agonises over the injustices and inequities he sees
around him.
The three books in the series, Matthew's Prize, A Devil of a Fix
and To the Bitter End, explore life in the Caribbean at a time when it was
filled with pirates and warring imperial powers, and have a fresh and
invigorating perspective backed up by painstaking historical research.
Matthew is portrayed as a trained navigator, one of very few at the time.
This gave Palliser the freedom to take his hero and his ships anywhere - as
a privateer and a fur-trader, as the man holding the secret of the
longitude. Marcus Palliser was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1949, and
retained his American citizenship, although he moved to Britain with his
mother in the 1950s and lived for much of his life in Cornwall.
He was educated at Truro Cathedral School and Reading
University, where he read English and politics between 1972 and 1975.
He left to join the Digital Computer Corporation, which in the
late 1970s had its British headquarters in Reading and which hired him to
write and edit a house magazine.
The computer business was booming at the time, and he quickly
rose through the ranks to become the corporate communications manager in the
UK, before going to the French-owned computing and telecommunications giant
Bull as a board director in charge of communications.
He took up sailing after crashing a powerful motorbike which he
had bought himself as a birthday present, but became frustrated by what he
regarded as the unnecessary bureaucracy of the maritime qualifications
system, triumphantly sailing the Atlantic on his own with just a day skipper
ticket.
He moved back to Truro to write, but kept a yacht in the
Caribbean about which he continually fretted, complaining that it was always
parked on the wrong island and that now he could not afford the time away
from his writing schedule to take it somewhere more convenient.
As well as writing novels, Marcus Palliser wrote as a
journalist, contributing to The Times, and was an accomplished speechwriter
who was in demand in the world of boardrooms with former colleagues who
lacked his courage and talent for successful escape but valued his ability
to sum up their predicament in a humorous and stylish way.
His elder brother, Charles Palliser, is also a novelist, the
author of The Quincunx and The Unburied. The pair constituted a highly
unusual brace of successful literary siblings on the London literary scene,
making an urbane and amusing double act in recent years.
Marcus Palliser is survived by one son, David.
Marcus Palliser, author, was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on
January 8, 1949. He died of a heart attack at his home in Truro, Cornwall,
on October 4, 2002, aged 53.
