LONDON — Jack Higgins, the best-selling British author who wrote “The Eagle Has Landed” and other espionage novels, has died, his publisher said. He was 92.
Higgins’ publisher, HarperCollins, said the author died at his home on the island of Jersey on the English Channel surrounded by his family, the BBC reported.
Higgins wrote 85 novels between 1959 and 2017 and sold more than 250 million books, the network reported.
It is with great sadness that HarperCollins shares the news that Henry Patterson, most commonly known to the general public by the pseudonym Jack Higgins, has died at the age of ninety-two, at home in Jersey and surrounded by his family. Our thoughts are with them at this time. pic.twitter.com/UBCyqxz3lF
— HarperCollinsUK (@HarperCollinsUK) April 9, 2022
His final book was “The Midnight Bell,” according to the BBC.
Higgins, who was born Henry Patterson on July 27, 1929, in Newcastle, served in the military before studying sociology at the London School of Economics, according to The Associated Press. He became a teacher in Leeds and began writing in his spare time.
His 1975 novel, “The Eagle Has Landed,” about a Nazi plot to kidnap Sir Winston Churchill during World War II, sold more than 50 million copies, the BBC reported. It was adapted into a film in 1976 starring Robert Duvall, Donald Sutherland and Michael Caine, according to IMDb.com.
In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Higgins said he remembers a pivotal telephone call from his accountant.
“He asked me what I wanted to get out of my writing,” Higgins said. “I replied that I wasn’t really sure, before adding as a joke it would be nice to make a million by the time I retired. He then said: ‘Well you’re a bloody fool. Because you’ve just earned that much this week. So what are you going to do about it?’”
Some of Higgins’ other works included “Comes the Dark Stranger,” “Hell is Too Crowded” and “To Catch a King,” the BBC reported.
HarperCollins CEO Charlie Redmayne described Patterson as a “classic thriller writer: instinctive, tough, relentless”, adding his novels “were and remain absolutely unputdownable.”
Jonathan Lloyd, Patterson’s literary agent, added that “I had the privilege of being at Collins Publishers when we received the manuscript of ‘The Eagle has Landed.’
“We all knew, with a rare certainty, that we would be publishing an instant classic.”
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