Born 27 July 1929, Henry Patterson grew up poor in Northern Ireland. A good lad, he did his two years of national service in the late 1940s, first with the East Yorks, then as an NCO with the Blues & Royals along the East German border during the tense period that included the Berlin Airlift.
After the Army, he went back to school and became a teacher, then, at age 30, started writing and never stopped.
Writing under his own name and the pseudonyms James Graham, Martin Fallon, and Hugh Marlowe, you probably know him best as Jack Higgins.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I read The Eagle Has Landed and Storm Warning (in my opinion his best book) and they were my first “war novels,” starting me on a road from which I have never felt the need to look back.
Henry Patterson last week passed away at his home in the Channel Islands, on 9 April 2022, aged 92, with at least 85 books and several screenplays under his belt.
Thank you for your work, sir. I owe you more than you could have ever known.
As a salute, the film version of The Eagle Has Landed, with the magnificent Sir Michael Cain (a Fusiliers veteran of Korea) and that anti-war hippy Donald Sutherland.