W. W. Norton Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian, Whose 20 Sea Stories Won Him International Fame, Dies at 85
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By FRANK J. PRIAL
Patrick O'Brian, the Anglo-Irish novelist whose stirring tales of the British Navy in the Napoleonic Wars made him a literary celebrity at an age when most writers have long ceased to ply their trade, died Sunday in Dublin. He was 85.

Cheryl Clegg/ W. W. Norton

Patrick O'Brian
In recent months O'Brian had acknowledged that he was in ill health and unlikely to continue his writing much longer. His biographer, Dean King, said O'Brian's body was being flown back to Collioure, the village near the Spanish border in the south of France where he had lived for almost half a century.
O'Brian achieved international fame with his series of novels featuring Jack Aubrey, a British naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician, naturalist and accomplished spy who was Aubrey's friend and constant shipmate. The first of the series, "Master and Commander," appeared in 1969; the 20th, "Blue at the Mizzen," was published late last year. Like most of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, it appeared on the New York Times best-seller list.

"Master and Commander" had modest success in England and Ireland, and a dozen more books in the series were produced over the next decade. But it wasn't until 1989, when Starling Lawrence, who was to become his American editor, read one of the books, "The Reverse of the Medal," on a flight from London to New York that they were taken up by serious critics. Lawrence's company, W.W. Norton, began to publish the books in the United States, and within two years some 400,000 copies had been sold here.

To date, more than 2 million copies of the Aubrey-Maturin novels have been sold. O'Brian was compared to Melville and Conrad and even to Proust. Iris Murdoch, the English novelist and scholar, was one of his first champions, and his admirers included Eudora Welty and Tom Stoppard.

Critics likened the O'Brian books to the sequential novels of Trollope and Anthony Powell, but the comparison that pleased O'Brian most was to Jane Austen. He revered her as the finest of all English novelists and kept first editions of her works near him while wrote, along with first editions of Gibbon and Samuel Johnson and a battered but still serviceable 1810 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The second book in the series, "Post Captain," set mostly in country houses and as much a novel of manners as a sea story, was said to be O'Brian's homage to Ms. Austen.

O'Brian was something of a recluse. Interviewers were warned away from personal questions, and while he was a paragon of politeness and 18th-century courtliness, he never hesitated to cut short any conversation he felt was edging toward his private life. Interviews were granted rarely and only on the understand that his hometown, Collioure, would not be disclosed.

The residents of Collioure, a fishing village turned tourist destination, respected his privacy and protected him from the occasional visitor who came to the Roussillon coast to find him. "They say they've never heard of me," he said, "or that I've moved away."

In fact, Patrick O'Brian had his reasons for being an unusually private person. On those occasions when he chose to speak about his life, he claimed that had been born in Galway and grew up a Roman Catholic in genteel circumstances. He had been a sickly child, he said, and was educated mostly at home. A voracious reader, he eventually mastered French, Italian, Spanish and Catalan. He knew some Irish, he said, and read easily in Latin.

After serving as an ambulance driver in London during World War II and serving in some unspecified branch of military intelligence, he and his wife, Mary, moved to Wales. "Dear people, splendid mountains, but a terrible climate," he said. So, in 1949, they came to Collioure, and they stayed.

Or so he said.

Beginning in 1998, British journalists began to unravel the O'Brian saga. He was not Irish, as it turned out, and not a Catholic. He was born in London and his name was Richard Patrick Russ. He was the son of an English mother and a physician of German descent.