Brian Moore: a writer who readily accepted the price of his refusal to be typecast

Though he started off as a Joyce enthusiast, and remained one all his life, Brian Moore might be placed at the opposite extreme from Joyce, and indeed from the whole modernist tradition with its denigration of plot-making as something a bit bourgeois and passe.

Moore not only opted for a straightforward narrative approach, in most of his 19 novels, but even went so far as to rehabilitate certain slightly suspect genres such as the thriller or the historical novel, just to show that, as he once joked, it doesn't have to be the hacks who hog all the strongest storylines (or words to that effect).

His stark and racy Black Robe (1985), for example, is set among the Algonquin Indians and Jesuit missionaries of 17th-century Canada; and the wonderfully subtle and atmospheric novel of 1997, The Magician's Wife - another historical undertaking, as well as a vivid work of the imagination - is jam-packed with suspense of the ordinary page-turning variety.

And on the subject of page-turning: I defy anyone who sits down with the thriller Lies of Silence (1990) to get up before the book is finished. Moore had qualms about this novel: its existence implied he had to eat his words about refusing to tackle the Northern Irish troubles directly; he'd declare in more than one interview that he felt it would be an "impertinence" for an exile like him to try to get to grips with the state of upheaval prevailing in the North.

However, some visits to Belfast in the mid-1980s persuaded him that he was, in fact, as well qualified as anyone to depict the city's indigenous violence and terrorism, which were, in a sense, an outcome of the malaise he had identified decades earlier. (However many years he spent abroad, he was, and remained, a Belfast man).

On top of that, a particular incident involving a group of tourists rooted out of their beds during a bomb scare sparked off an idea that wouldn't leave him alone until he had elaborated it into a riveting, bold and morally complex piece of fiction. Lies of Silence contains some disquieting truths.

The terrorism at its centre is specifically republican, but Moore intends his narrative to have a wider application. In this context the Provisional IRA simply stands for one enormity of contemporary life: the terrorist threat - wherever it comes from - and its impact on ordinary people.

In the same way (as he has said often) Moore tends to use Catholicism - the religion of his childhood - as a metaphor for belief of whatever kind: a useful shorthand, in other words, and not to be read as undermining his own presentation of himself as instinctively irreligious.

As most Irish readers will know, he was born in 1921 into a Belfast Catholic family with extreme nationalist connections (Eoin MacNeill was an uncle by marriage), grew up sceptical and disabused, against the odds, and couldn't wait to remove himself from an environment he perceived as ossified, obstructive and in every way benighted.

In 1943, the British Ministry of War Transport provided a way out; then came a stint with UNRA, and in 1948 the famous flight to Canada in pursuit of an older woman who gave him short shrift when he got there. In retrospect, his life can be seen to arra nge itself into a series of decisions which seemed fearfully risky at the time, but actually proved to be exceptionally felicitous.

Canada gave him a useful training as a journalist ("he was", a friend from those days has remarked, "the best reporter the Montreal Gazette ever had the luck to light on"), and then supplied the conditions in which his first serious work of fiction, Judith Hearne (1955), took compelling shape.

Interestingly, when he came to write his first novel, it wasn't his wartime experiences - seeing the Germans pouring out of Naples, the dead brought off the ships from Anzio, and much else - that got him going, but the plight of a dowdy Belfast spinster and incipient alcoholic, and the collapse of all her threadbare pretensions.

The novel's ultimate effect was such that its heroine has been absorbed into the folklore of Belfast. "Judith Hearne is alive and well": this piece of graffito appeared on a wall in Camden Street, near the scene of Miss Hearne's vexations, though whether in spirit of complaint about the changelessness of things, or out of some kind of feminist bravado, it is hard to say.

Before this - and having re signed from the Gazette - Moore, ever resourceful, bought time for himself to work on Judith Hearne by turning out a series of paperback thrillers, sub-Chandleresque, under one or two pseudonyms, including Bernard Mara.

The publishers were so pleased with these efforts that they invited the author to call on them, only to be rather taken aback when (as Moore has it) "this wee fat Belfast man in a Brooks Brothers suit walked into their office claiming to be Bernard Mara". Clearly they'd expected a Humphrey Bogart-type figure.

The $50 advance for Judith Hearne didn't enable him to give up his hack-work straight away; but a couple of novels later, and after he'd been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (the first of many honours and accolades), he acquired the freedom to settle down to his life's work, to bring it into existence in all its brilliance and variety.

Its variety, in fact, hasn't always worked to the author's advantage. His well-known refusal to be typecast, to be lumbered with Judith Hearne, for example, in the way Edna O'Brien (say) was lumbered with The Country Girls, has meant that admirers of one Moore novel are likely to be cool about another, which doesn't conform to their expectations. He accepted this as the price of his untrammelled unpredictability.

Never one to shirk a challenge, he set himself a technical problem with each novel, whether it entailed inventing an equivalent for a lost Indian dialect, coping with a situation of transcendental ace (as in Fergus, 1971) or pulling off a secular miracle (I am thinking of that virtuoso novel The Great Victorian Collection of 1975).

With his death we have lost a novelist of rare power and distinction, a cosmopolitan writer who remained, in his own words, "ineluctably Irish".

Patricia Craig is Brian Moore's official biographer and the editor of The Oxford Book of Ireland published last May