Brian Freemantle, who was born in Southampton and lived in the city or Winchester for much of his life, has died aged 88.
Following a distinguished career as a roving international reporter on the Daily Express then foreign editor on the Daily Mail, Brian became a prolific author, publishing 80 books and selling more than 10 million copies worldwide.
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Born in June 1936, the son of sailor Harold and Violet, Brian left Bitterne Park School with two O-levels and became a reporter on the New Milton Advertiser.
He was a well-known face in the Daily Echo’s Above Bar offices during the days that all the national newspapers had representatives on the South Coast, quickly becoming one of the most valued ‘firemen’ on the Daily Express, ready to head to the world’s trouble spots at a moment’s notice.
He earned a burst of machine gun fire at his departing car boot from a Russian guard at the Czechoslovakian border, accidentally sprinted onto the front line rather than to safety in Vietnam and suffered a brain haemorrhage while covering the 1968 US election.
Brian moved to the Daily Mail in 1971, devising the Operation Mercy airlift Vietnamese orphans four years later, just before he left to pursue his writing career full time.
With the aid of thousands of pounds donated by readers, he chartered a Boeing 707 filled with makeshift cots to rescue 99 children who would otherwise have been at the mercy of the Viet Cong.
For years, Brian spent his daily commute between Southampton and London scribbling unsellable fiction before, finally, Goodbye to an Old Friend, his 19th attempt at a novel, was published in 1973. He gave up journalism to write full-time two years later.
Latterly he lived in a house overlooking the Cathedral Close in Winchester. In 1983 he secured a £35 rate reduction in the valuation court on the grounds that he had to endure the sight of the drug addicts, glue sniffers and fornicators with whom the Close was then thronged.
Brian Freemantle married, in 1956, Maureen Tipney, a television make-up artist. She survives him with their three daughters
He began to publish espionage fiction in the early 1970s, at a time when seemingly every reporter who had knocked about the world a bit fancied himself as the next John le Carré. Freemantle was one of the few such journalists to enjoy enduring success as a novelist, his books eventually selling more than 10 million copies.
He earned a reputation for authenticity: Miles Copeland, one of the CIA’s founding agents, described his early novels as “virtual case histories of the East-West war of dirty tricks”. Freemantle observed that much of his raw material came from Eastern European embassies in London, where the officials – “who are more or less open spies and make no bones about it” – were often flattered enough by a novelist’s interest to divulge operational details.
The first of his Charlie Muffin novels Unlike many spy novelists, he chose not to suppress his sense of humour. It achieved its finest expression in Charlie Muffin, despised by his upper-crust colleagues in British intelligence as “an outdated anachronism” from the postwar years “when manpower desperation had forced the service to reduce its standards [and] recruit from grammar schools”.
Although his colleagues deprecate “the Marks & Spencer shirts he didn’t change daily and the flat Mancunian accent”, Charlie is one of the Service’s most successful and hard-working operatives. The improbably beautiful women he beds are alarmed by his brown feet, stained by the dye running from his Hush Puppies in the course of long hours of legwork in the rain.
The first novel in the series, Charlie Muffin (1977), was adapted by Keith Waterhouse as a film in 1979, with Jack Gold directing and David Hemmings suitably crumpled in the lead role.
Although his own service would have been as happy as the Soviets to see his demise, Charlie was still in harness long after the Cold War ended. Red Star Falling (2013), the 14th and last novel in the series, saw Charlie in danger in post-Soviet Russia, discovering that the only thing to have changed about the KGB was its name.