It's my life

The epic 20-novel sequence which detailed the lives and adventures of sailor Jack Aubrey and surgeon Stephen Maturin during the Napoleonic Wars turned novelist Patrick O'Brian into something of an institution in literary circles.

His impressive international reputation was possibly embellished when he died suddenly in January this year at the age of 86, three chapters into the 21st Aubrey-Maturin novel.

The corpse may be barely cold, but biographer Dean King shows that the life of O'Brian himself is as fascinating as that of most of his characters.

O'Brian was born Richard Russ in 1914, worked in the intelligence service during the war, married and fathered two children - and dropped the lot in 1945 to start a new life as an entirely different person.

Suddenly the Englishman became an Irishman born of aristocratic stock, and he lived out his new life with his second wife at Collioure, the French seaside town made famous by Picasso in the shadow of the Pyrenees.

The Child Support Agency would have asked a few questions today, such was the hardship to which his first family was condemned, and nobody can be sure exactly why O'Brian needed to do it in an age when authors were in little danger of being overburdened with celebrity unless they wished for such an outcome.

But it clearly unblocked something in his mind because the tales kept coming with a remarkable consistency of quality. All those admirers could have become something of a strain for in the twilight years, says Dean King, O'Brian became increasinly snobby, rude and arrogant.

A very revealing biography of a professionally secret man.

RACHEL LAMB