Within the space of a week in 1975, Harry Patterson's life was transformed. It had started in pretty much the same way as every previous week of the past 15 years, with Patterson supplementing his day job as a college lecturer in Leeds by writing moderately successful thrillers in his spare time; it ended with the publication of The Eagle Has Landed, about a plot to kidnap Churchill, written under the pseudonym of Jack Higgins, and a phone call from his accountant.
"He asked me what I wanted to get out of my writing," Higgins says. "I replied that I wasn't really sure, before adding as a joke it would be nice to make a million by the time I retired. He then said: ‘Well you're a bloody fool. Because you've just earned that much this week. So what are you going to do about it?'"
Life in exile
Back in the 1970s it was a reasonable question. The highest rate of income tax was 83p in the pound, with a further 98p in the pound disappearing on any interest earned and Higgins was advised to become a tax exile if he wanted to hang on to any of his earnings. So he upped sticks almost overnight — leaving his wife and children back in Leeds until he could sort out somewhere to live — and moved to Jersey. He has been there ever since.
"I didn't really want to go," he says. "And if the tax rates had been as they are now — or even at 50p in the pound — I'd have stayed in England. I had a good life there and I was happy; but I'd never had any real money and I wanted the security."
Higgins was born in Newcastle in 1929 and his father left soon after he was born and his Irish mother took him back to Belfast to live with her mother and grandfather in the Shankhill Road.
Higgins started reading at the age of 3. His grandfather was bed-ridden and Higgins was made to read him The Christian Herald every day: By night he would crouch near the window to read by the street lamps. "I read Oliver Twist when I was six," he says. "Not because it was a classic, but because it was a book that was available. ... I just loved reading."
His mother eventually remarried and the family moved to Leeds, where Higgins went to the local Roundhay grammar. Higgins and school did not see eye to eye and he left with few formal qualifications, eventually winding up doing his national service in the army in the early 1950s, serving as an NCO in the East Yorkshires. On his return he moved to London to take a degree in sociology at the London School of Economics. He managed to graduate and after getting a teaching qualification, took a job lecturing in social psychology and criminology.
Yet he still had a desire to write, born partly out of his passion for literature and partly to prove he amounted to something. He tried to get a job on The Yorkshire Post as a reporter but was turned down for not having shorthand and then had a go at writing TV plays but got nowhere. So he turned to writing thrillers and in 1959, Sad Wind from the Sea caught the attention of Paul Scott who agreed to be his agent. "I was so excited when Hutchinson agreed to publish it," he says.
The early thrillers were all perfectly serviceable, with tough villains and tougher heroes, but it wasn't until the late 1960s that his writing developed from pulp genre to something the literary critics were forced to take seriously.
This new depth to his writing was partly a matter of experience; Higgins was getting better at what he was doing, and even 1960s thriller greats, such as Alastair MacLean, had begun to believe he had a good future. But it was also prompted by a chance encounter with an old school teacher. Higgins said: "[He] told me I could do so much better if I were to start by thinking of the characters and letting the plot develop from them, rather than what I had been doing, which was shoehorning the characters into the plot."
Style transformed
The change of style paid off immediately with East of Desolation, the first book published under the name Jack Higgins and still high on anyone's list for the most gripping opening chapter, attracting a far wider readership. He followed up with The Savage Day and A Prayer for the Dying and then came the game changer: The Eagle Has Landed.
The Higgins magic appeared to be flagging by the start of the 1990s — if you can call someone selling by the hundred thousand rather than the million as flagging — until Eye of the Storm, with its ambiguous hero, the Irish gunman Sean Dillon, and fictionalised retelling of the mortar attack on John Major.
The story might have ended there, as in the original draft Higgins killed off Dillon. "My daughter read it and told me I'd made a huge mistake," he says. "Dillon was too energetic and charming to be bumped off in one book. The readers would feel ripped off. So I rewrote the ending to keep him alive." Eye of the Storm has also sold in its millions, and last year was translated into its 59th language: Tamil. Dillon hasn't done so badly, either. He has made 16 further appearances. It has been touch and go at times, though. Higgins had become unwell in his late sixties with what he thought was Parkinson's but turned out to be essential tremor syndrome.
"I'm realistic about what I do now. Jack Higgins is a freak, a one-off. No writer can expect to make £4 million per year. So I know I've been lucky. I certainly don't think I'll ever repeat the success of Eagle; six weeks in the bestseller lists is the best I can hope for these days."
That is the kind of failure most writers only dream about.
