Brian Moore was a journeyman writer, prodigious in his output, author of 20 novels - not counting a number of pulp fiction books written under a pseudonym in the early 1950s - covering topics from 17th century France to Belfast in the second World War.
But for me his abiding legacy will be that work in which religion and faith were the major themes. Belief, and the loss of it, was a recurring subject for Moore.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), his first novel, was a case in point. Not only did he manage to catch the despair of a middle-aged alcoholic Belfast spinster, the smallness and slights in her life, but the story achieves a real depth of conviction when Miss Hearne, a devoted Catholic, begins to entertain doubts about her faith.
This passion was in effect his own bitterness at the Catholic church and the bigotry of his native city. But he was determined not to write an autobiographical, coming-of-age novel. Using Joyce's characterisation of Bloom as a model, he chose a character as distant from himself as he could imagine, a "sodality lady", to carry his theme.
Moore always managed to make his authorial voice invisible, and this capacity for literary ventriloquism served him well.
He wrote well about women - I am Mary Dunne (1968) was written in the first person, a daring innovation for a male author at the time. In Cold Heaven (1983) the central character, Marie, is a lapsed Catholic troubled by visions she does not believe in. Amazingly, Moore created a tense metaphysical thriller around the theme of a reluctant visionary.
He then moved into other genres, producing a run of political thrillers such as Lies of Silence and The Colour of Blood, both short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Statement, a controversial novel inspired by the French war criminal Paul Touvier.
Indeed, one of Moore's greatest strengths was that no two of his novels were ever the same. Though not a stylist, he wrote fluently and with a spare precision. His modesty of presentation, his use of popular genres often hid his range and versatility and the quiet ambition of his work. Never a best-seller, he wanted very much to be read; in this he was eminently successful.
Mary Morrissy is the author of A Lazy Eye and Mother of Pearl