David Donachie, 79, historical novelist

[Michael Rhodes]

__.The historical novelist David Donachie, who has died aged 79, after suffering from cancer, used to say that he became a writer after trying most other careers first. He had been a house painter, salesman, truck driver, publican, ice-cream salesman, chauffeur and backstage hand in the theatre before turning his hand to authorship. It was no wonder that the dust jacket of his first novel told readers that he had had more jobs than birthdays.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/11/david-donachie-obituary

That novel, The Devil’s Own Luck, set on a British warship during the Napoleonic wars, was published in 1991, and thereafter a stream of historical novels, distinguished by their pace and their author’s lively sense of history, followed.

Although most, such as the John Pearce adventures and the Nelson and Emma trilogy, were set in the late 18th-century navy, there were also crime novels, trilogies based in Republican Rome, the sixth-century Norman period in southern Italy, in Byzantium and during the Crusades, some under the pseudonyms Tom Connery and Jack Ludlow. David rarely produced fewer than two books a year and the final tally was 54: an American publisher recently contracted to publish them all in the US market.