orig. Richard Patrick Russ
born Dec. 12, 1914, near London, Eng.
died Jan. 2, 2000, Dublin, Ire.
British writer.
He was the eighth of nine children; an early marriage ended in divorce, and after World War II he married again, changed his name, and moved to a small, secluded coastal town in France near the Spanish border. He received little critical notice until age 54, when he began publishing his 18th-century seafaring series featuring Capt. Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin; it eventually numbered 20 books (196999) and was compared with the works of Herman Melville , Anthony Trollope , and Marcel Proust .