Harry Patterson Celebrates 50 Years of Writing

Posted on January 21, 2009

Novelist Harry Patterson - who is known to readers as Jack Higgins - is celebrating his 50th year of writing this year. Reuters reports that Higgins made a remarkable recovery from a neurological disease that almost forced him to give up writing. The recovery gave him a second chance at writing late in life.

Reuters quotes Patterson as saying, "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."

Patterson's latest novel is A Darker Place. His best known novel is The Eagle Has Landed. Patterson told Reuters that a director at Collins Publishers told him the Eagle was the "worst idea he had ever heard in his life" and that his readers would hate him for writing it. The director could not have been more wrong. Holt, Rinehart and Winston published the book and it became a bestseller as well as blockbuster movie.