British novelist Henry Patterson, the bestselling author of “The Eagle Has Landed” has died, his publisher said Saturday. He was 92.
“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 (the British crown dependency) and surrounded by his family,” his publisher wrote on Twitter. “Our thoughts are with them at this time.”
Patterson was born on July 27, 1929, in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne but grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
According to the BBC, he wrote 85 novels between 1959 and 2017, selling more than 250 million books.
In 1975, using the pseudonym Jack Higgins, he published the World War II novel “The Eagle Has Landed,” about a fictional German plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, which went on to sell over 50 million copies worldwide.
Jonathan Lloyd, his literary agent said that he was pretty certain that the book was going to be a classic.
“I had the privilege of being at Collins Publishers when we received the manuscript of The Eagle Has Landed,” he said according to inews.co.uk. “We all knew, with a rare certainty, that we would be publishing an instant classic.”
The book was also made into a film of the same name, starring Michael Caine and Donald Sutherland, which opened in December 1976.
HarperCollins U.K. CEO Charlie Redmayne described Patterson as a “classic thriller writer: instinctive, tough, relentless,” according to the BBC.
And his novels “were and remain absolutely unputdownable,” he added.
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