How often does one come across an author who deals primarily in the thriller, yet misses out on major commercial success, but gets nominated for two Bookers, and traverses multiple genres, earning critical approval as a writer of mainstream, crime, espionage and historical fiction? One did in Julian Rathbone, who died on February 28 in Hampshire.

An echo of the title, A Spy of the Old School (1982), ran through Rathbone’s career, hinged on his very 19th-century faith in the primacy of the writer’s imagination. Rathbone was an outsider, somewhat like the mongrels of history he created, somewhat a lonely spy, who didn’t quite do the expected. He rather used the façade of the thriller to spy on the more fundamental questions of life and the historical contexts that defined them. His thrillers would tend to uncanny depths while his more ostensibly serious fiction might flaunt a theme of crime. By the same token, he wouldn’t keep the present out of his historical fiction.

Rathbone was born in Blackheath, London, in 1935 and was the great nephew of the Basil Rathbone of Sherlock Holmes fame. At Magdalene College in Cambridge, he took a tutorial with F.R. Leavis, but despite his lifelong regard for the man, never became a Leavisite. Three years spent teaching in Turkey made him a libertarian leftist and he set his first four novels there. King Fisher Lives was his first contender for the Booker in 1976, a feat matched by Joseph in 1979, the latter set in Spain during the Peninsular War. But it was perhaps Graham Greene’s (Rathbone’s most obvious influence) praise for Lying in State (1985) that came the closest to his sense of creative fulfilment. The Last English King (1997), the most commercially successful of Rathbone’s historical novels, fictionalises the Norman invasion from the Saxon perspective while his last work, The Mutiny (2007), studies the Indian revolt of 1857.

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