Julian Rathbone

Mar 5 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE SPRANG forth in a fedora hat from a revered clan of thinkers, bankers, Unitarians, reformers, poets, shipbuilders, non-conformist politicians and all-purpose do-gooders, who provided Liverpool, where they had settled in the early 18th century, with its first university, libraries and public buildings – while spinning around the educated middle-classes a sense of moral and social purpose.

It is, perhaps, ironic, that the best-known Rathbone to the wider public was Basil, who served with the Liverpool Scottish battalion during the Great War, before becoming Sherlock Holmes in numerous films.

Julian Rathbone ruefully noted that his great uncle had been a fine actor before raising the magnifying glass of the great detective, though he admired his limpid delivery to Errol Flynn of the line “You have come to Nottingham once too often”, when playing Guy of Gisbourne in the Adventures of Robin Hood.

Although his family was from Liverpool, Julian was born in an aunt’s nursing home in south London, and was rocked in a cradle under a blanket decorated with snowdrops. He returned to Liverpool, but was packed off to a boarding school in Dor- set, before reading English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where among his fellow students were Bamber Gascoigne, the writer and high-necked quizmaster, and the late Sylvia Plath, writer, wife of the poet Ted Hughes and feminist martyr.

Julian’s parents weren’t married, a fact he dealt with in an essay, My Life As A Writer. This illegitimate status denied him considerable loads of “dosh”, which would otherwise have come his way.

But, if that had happened, Rathbone, married to Alayne, might not have worked so hard. After university, he taught English in Turkey and this provided material for his first four thrillers, published between 1967 and 72. But after the death of his father in a road accident, Rathbone lived near his grieving mother in Bognor Regis, where he taught.

Many of his 37 novels had settings in England’s lost past, but his purpose was to draw out human nature against a background of great events. He was twice nominated for the Booker Prize, in 1976 with King Fisher Lives and Joseph three years later.

His last published novel was The Mutiny (2007), about the great uprising of 1957 in India.

Hugely admired by fellow writers, Rathbone had suffered a long illness.

Julian Rathbone, writer; born February 10, 1935, died February 28, 2008.