Patrick O'Brian was the second most famous non-Irish Irishman this century after Micheal Mac Liammoir, and an incomparably greater talent. Whereas the latter cloaked his non-Irishness in a complex web of bravado, fancy and detailed falsehood, O'Brian hid his origins behind a fiercely-guarded privacy.
His "Irishness" was alluded to only vaguely but any question into an apparently unguarded - but probably deliberate - aside about, say, his birthplace in Ballinasloe, would be met with an often ferocious rebuke. "Gentlemen do not pry. I do deplore this modern obsession with questions as a form of conversation."
His score of novels about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars constitute perhaps the mightiest serial literary achievement of the century. His admirers up until recently assumed that because Stephen Maturin, the Irish physician whose exploits as a naval surgeon, intelligence agent and naturalist provided one of the most captivating continuities in the series, was so closely modelled on O'Brian himself, the two must necessarily share the same primary characteristics, including nationality.
It was the impression that O'Brian sought elliptically to promote: and it was an artful deceit which survived intact for decades.
Patrick O'Brian was as much as an invention of the author as were the glorious characters with which he filled his 20 naval novels. Though he was attached to all his literary creations, the two characters who most engaged his interest - and the book-buying public - were Jack Aubrey, the English sea captain, and Stephen Maturin.
It was not merely O'Brian's erudition and his brilliant writing skills which make these novels such a triumph: it was his study of male friendship, through war, financial disaster and even love for the same woman, which early on began to captivate a small but loyal band of readers who for years assured him of a modest income.
After service with the undercover British Special Operations Executive during the war - or so it appeared in his own carefully elliptical conversational allusions - Richard Patrick Russ, son of an engineer, changed his name by deed poll to Patrick O'Brian. He lived with his second wife, Mary, for a while in Wales before moving to Collioure in France. He wrote artful but largely unread novels and short stories and survived through his translations of Henri Barbusson's Papillon and the works of Simone de Beauvoir.
Even with the publication of the first of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, Master and Commander, in 1970, his income was small.
His writing style was unique. He would write one page with one hand, the next with the other, in immaculate fountain-pen calligraphy. He and Mary would discuss the resulting text over lunch and under her supervision he would produce the compromise draft in the afternoon. In the evening, they would drink their own wine and listen to music, of which, like Aubrey and Maturin, he had a prodigious knowledge.
He had not intended Master and Commander to be the start of a series; but at least he had not performed a Reichenbach Falls on either of his two characters, so that, prompted by a small critical success, he could quite plausibly write a second, Post Captain, and then a third, HMS Surprise - this last standing alone as one of the great works of fiction in the past half century.
As the series unfolded over the decades, he was ignored both by serious critics and by the broader reading public, presumably because both groups assumed he was no more than a highbrow C.S. Forester. It is true his novels are intensely and technically nautical, often involving thrilling sea chases and battles, but of far greater importance are their other ingredients: marvellous humour, astonishing scholarship and wise observations about the human condition.
He also wrote two substantial but largely ignored biographies of Picasso and the naturalist and intelligence agent Joseph Banks.
Finally, in his 80s, his greatness as a novelist was generally accepted by critic and public alike. He was truly a born storyteller, and Patrick O'Brian was the greatest of all his literary creations.