My friend 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.
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.
