Higgins' Nest Egg

Chris Hallam marks the 50th anniversary of a bestselling wartime thriller

- By Chris Hallam

It was during a drunken conversation in Berlin that the young Harry Patterson first stumbled upon the story which would one day inspire him to write one of the truly great, popular thrillers of the 20th century. The year was 1948, and Patterson was doing his National Service with the Royal Horse Guards on the East German border when he fell into conversation with a Soviet soldier. The Russian told him of a wartime plot by the Germans to kidnap Winston Churchill during a prime ministerial visit to Norfolk in 1943. Patterson, then still a teenager, was fascinated.

He never forgot the tale and, 26 years later, returned to this subject matter when he began working on a new novel during a holiday in rural north Norfolk in 1974. By now, the middle-aged Patterson (who had been born in 1929) had been writing books with only moderate success for 15 years, as a means of topping up his income from his day job as a lecturer at Leeds Polytechnic. Patterson adopted many pen names during his career including James Graham, Martin Fallon and Hugh Marlowe. For his latest work, he went by the name Jack Higgins.