Alexander Fullerton: 1924-2008

Alexander (Sandy) Fullerton was a much-loved author of modern British naval fiction, whose writing career spanned over fifty years. Born in Suffolk and brought up in France, he enrolled as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth at the age of just thirteen. He first served in the battleship Queen Elizabeth, before being transferred and serving with distinction as gunnery and torpedo officer of HM Submarine Seadog during WWII. He was a fluent Russian speaker, and after the war served in Germany as the Royal Navy liaison with the Red Army, before being released from the Navy.

His first novel Surface! (1953), written on the backs of old cargo manifests whilst working for a Swedish shipping company, sold over 500,000 copies and needed five reprints in six weeks. After coming ashore, he worked as first a sales rep and then sales director for a division of Heinemann Publishers. He lived in South Africa for a while, which inspired his books The White Men Sang (1958) and The Yellow Ford (1959), and would eventually leave publishing to become a professional writer in 1967. He returned to the UK in 1959, and over the years he lived in Perthshire, in the west of Ireland, and for the final years before his death in West Sussex. A modest and charming man, he once wrote on an author questionnaire under ‘Special Interests’: “Nothing all that special – if I hadn't gone to Dartmouth in 1937 I would have gone into training with other hopefuls for the British Olympic Ski Team, but have never excelled at any other sport.”

He is perhaps best known for his nine-volume Nicholas Everard series, which ran from The Blooding of the Guns (1976) to The Gatecrashers (1984) and was translated into many languages, winning him fans all round the world. He later wrote a series of books featuring Rosie Ewing, a Special Operations Executive agent in France during WWII. This series started with Into the Fire (1995), and the last volume was Staying Alive (2006), the fifth Rosie novel. He was one of the most borrowed authors from British libraries for a number of years, and many of his books have been adapted as audiobooks. His 50th novel, the much anticipated Submariner, will be published by Little, Brown in May 2008. Harking back to his first book Surface!, it’s a claustrophobic and enthralling novel, set aboard a Mediterranean submarine during the Malta Campaign in WWII.

Recent books:

Submariner (Little, Brown: due 2008)
Staying Alive (Little, Brown: 2006)
Nicholas Everard – A Share of Honour: Omnibus Volume 3 (Time Warner: 2003)
Nicholas Everard – Mariner of England: Omnibus Volume 2 (Time Warner: 2002)
Nicholas Everard – Mariner of England: Omnibus Volume 1 (Time Warner: 2001)