Jack Higgins Thrills for 50 Years
Thriller novelist Jack Higgins (born Harry Patterson), has authored more than 60 novels in a writing career spanning 50 years – and he is still counting his blessings.
Eight years ago, Higgins, 79, was diagnosed with essential tremor syndrome, a progressive neurological disease. It made him shake so much that two years ago he found he could not even pick up a pen and was going to give up writing.
Then while visiting a friend, he suffered a seizure, fell and hit his head. He ended up in the hospital as a result — and overnight his tremors disappeared, which allowed him to write again.
“In a way it is a bit like Lazarus. It has been a blessing late in life — this unprecedented cure. People have got in touch with me who have got this crippling thing to say what can they do. I can’t tell them what to do. I was just lucky,” he said.
Higgins 1975 breakthrough novel The Eagle Has Landed
Higgins did a stint as a soldier in the British army and then a teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Besides using the Higgins pseudonym, he also wrote novels under the names James Graham, Martin Fallon and Hugh Marlowe.
His latest novel, A Darker Place, released this month, is his 16th featuring Irish hero Sean Dillon.
In a recent interview Higgins spoke about his career:
Q: Did you think “The Eagle Has Landed” would be your turning point?
A: “At the time I was writing for Collins Publishers and it was a good thing when they took me up. But when I wrote “Eagle” the director who handled me rang me up and said what is this book? He said it sounded like a bird book. I gave him the pitch … the book was about German paratroopers dropping in to grab Winston Churchill.
He said that was the worst idea he had ever heard in his life and my readers would hate me as I was not giving them any heroes. Anyway the book was published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston who realized they had something special on their hands and it came out in America to be a sensation.”
Q: How did that changes things for you?
A: “It was rather Harry Potter-ish. Obviously no one will get to that level that (J.K. Rowling) did. But suddenly you were known to everybody and everyone wanted to know you and copy you.”
Q: Why have you used so many pen names?
A: “I used all the other names as I was writing books more as a hobby when I was an academic than for the money. I discovered I could write three books in a year but needed a different name on each otherwise the publishers would not use that many in a year.”
Q: How did you settle on Jack Higgins?
A: “My mother was a Higgins from Northern Ireland. I was born in England, she left my father when I was a few months old, a marriage breakdown, and she decided to get out and took me back to Belfast to her extended family, the Higgins family. Jack Higgins was a great uncle of mine. When I was a child if I was ever at his house he opened a little drawer under the stairs as he put his coat on and there would be three or four handguns and he’d put on in his pocket. He was a militant Orangeman.”
Q: What is your proudest achievement?
A: “People are always going on about the OBE’s and honors that Britain hands out but I’ve never had anything like that…there is a famous program in England called Desert Island Discs and people always said it was only a few thousand people who have been asked to do that program and I have been blessed by appearing on it twice.”
