Henry Patterson (July 27, 1929 – 9 April 9, 2022), better known by his Pen Name "Jack Higgins", was a British note author, best known for writing thrillers and espionage novels.
His most famous work is probably The Eagle Has Landed (1975) which was made into a movie in 1976. He wrote 77 novels which have sold more than 150 million copies.
The following tropes can be found in his novels:
- Adventurer Archaeologist: Gavin Kane, hired by a woman to find her missing archaeologist husband in 1939 in Sheba. It just so happens that the temple site said husband has found is also being used as a base by ... Nazis! Sheba was actually one of his earlier books — initially published as Seven Pillars to Hell in the 1960s — but it's no wonder he had it republished after the success of the Indiana Jones movies.
- Author Avatar: The nameless narrator who appears in the Bookends of stories like The Eagle Has Landed, Night of the Fox and Flight of Eagles is this.
- Back from the Dead: Kurt Steiner, the joint protagonist of The Eagle Has Landed who dies at the end of the story, is revealed to have actually survived at the start of the sequel, The Eagle Has Flown. Narrowly averted in the case of Sean Dillon (see the entry for Plot Armor below).
- Body Double: Used a few times, most notably for Winston Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed and Erwin Rommel in Night of the Fox.
- Bookends: Some of his World War II stories have these, usually involving an Author Avatar trying to find out what happened in the war and speaking to survivors. The most notable example is The Eagle Has Landed — he first finds out about the story when he visits the village in the prologue, and after the story has been told he finds out about the Twist Ending in the epilogue.
- City with No Name: DS Nick Miller, the protagonist of The Graveyard Shift, works in one of these. It's in Northern England, and that's all we're told.
- The Film of the Book: A few of his novels were been made into films, notably The Wrath of God and The Eagle Has Landed.
- During the War: World War II is the setting of quite a few of his stories — The Eagle Has Landed, The Valhalla Exchange, Night of the Fox, Luciano's Luck and Cold Harbour to name but five. Some of his contemporary thrillers — Thunder Point, On Dangerous Ground — have their prologues take place during this conflict, leaving a MacGuffin for the characters in the main plot to find.
- Generation Xerox: Brigadiers Munro and Ferguson are British intelligence chiefs who operate independently of MI5 and MI6, reporting directly to the Prime Minister — Munro in the World War II stories, Ferguson in the contemporary (1990s) thrillers.
- Historical Domain Character:
- Two British Prime Ministers, Winston Churchill and John Major, are assassination targets in (respectively) The Eagle Has Landed and Eye of the Storm (although Churchill doesn't actually appear in the former, as it's revealed at the end that the "Churchill" the German commandos try to kill is actually a Body Double).
- Adolf Hitler is a minor character in several of the World War II stories, like The Eagle Has Landed and Sheba, usually appearing in the first few chapters to set up the adventure. SS chief Heinrich Himmler and spymaster Wilhelm Canaris sometimes appear alongside him.
- The Valhalla Exchange is based on the premise that Martin Bormann
escaped from Berlin after Hitler's suicide; so too is Thunder Point. - John Dillinger is the protagonist of Thunder at Noon (later rewritten and republished as Dillinger).
- The Duke of Windsor (formerly Edward VIII) is targetted by German intelligence (in the form of real-life SS officer Walter Schellenberg) in To Catch a King.
- Former Queen Elizabeth II appears in the prologue of Exocet.
- MacGuffin: Among them, some important documents that Martin Bormann took out of Berlin in 1945 (in Thunder Point) and a secret treaty signed by Mao Zedong granting all of Hong Kong to Britain in perpetuity (in On Dangerous Ground, published three years before the handover).
- Pen Name: Originally, he wrote under "Harry Patterson" — although he also used the pen names "James Graham", "Martin Fallon" and "Hugh Marlowe" because his publishers told him that the reading public wouldn't tolerate more than one book a year from the same author. He started using "Jack Higgins" in the late 1960s, and the last novel for which he didn't use that name was To Catch a King (1979). A few of his earlier works have since been rewritten and republished under the name "Jack Higgins", in some cases with a different title — thus, Seven Pillars to Hell by Hugh Marlowe (1963) and Sheba by Jack Higgins (1994) are the same story, with some minor revisions.
- Plot Armor: Sean Dillon is a good example of this. Higgins originally wanted to end the first book in which he appeared, Eye of the Storm, by killing him off. However, he was talked out of it and rewrote the ending before sending the manuscript to the publisher. The character went on to be the protagonist of over 20 novels.
- Ripped from the Headlines: A few examples...
- Wrath of the Lion (1964) concerns a last-ditch attempt by the OAS to take revenge on Charles de Gaulle over Algerian independence. Although in this one, they're using a submarine rather than a paid assassin.
- Exocet (1983), which is about British intelligence trying to stop Argentine agents buying Exocet missiles during The Falklands War, begins with an SAS officer demonstrating how easy it is to break into Buckingham Palace ... a few months before Michael Fagan did so.
- Confessional (1985) is about a race to stop a rogue assassin who intends to kill the Pope ... four years after Mehmet Ali Ağca tried to do just that.
- Eye of the Storm (1992) is a fictionalised account of the 1991 mortar attack on Downing Street.
- The Starscream: When Heinrich Himmler appears, he's invariably this to Adolf Hitler.
- The Troubles: Forms the backdrop to several of his stories, such as A Prayer for the Dying, Confessional, The Violent Enemy and Drink with the Devil. Two of his best-known protagonists, Sean Dillon and Liam Devlin, are ex-IRA men.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: His two best-known characters, Liam Devlin and Sean Dillon, are both sympathetically-portrayed ex-IRA men whose loyalties are rather fluid. Devlin, the joint protagonist of The Eagle Has Landed, is working for German intelligence in that book. Dillon, who is first seen orchestrating an attack on Downing Street in Eye of the Storm, is later blackmailed into working for British intelligence. In a couple of novels, Devlin is shown to have been Dillon's mentor.
