Jack Higgins, author of ‘The Eagle Has Landed’, dies at 92

The boy was a poor student and once received nine strokes on the back for throwing snowballs at the school clock. At 15, he flees the boredom of class. After a series of odd jobs, he joins the British Army, where he discovers that he can shoot a rifle very accurately (using scopes) and is actually very smart. The tests put his IQ at 147, which is considered very gifted.

“The army gave me an idea of ​​what I was capable of,” he said years later.

He left the army and bounced from job to job – clerk, circus tent driver, streetcar driver, truck driver, factory worker, cigarette salesman – before deciding to settle down .

“I ran into a friend of mine in the park, and he said he was going to be a teacher,” Mr Higgins told London’s Evening Standard in 2001. be be one too.”

So he entered Leeds Training College, worked nights in a post office to pay his tuition, and obtained a teaching certificate in 1958. At the end of that year, he married Amy Hewitt, a student.

The following year, his first novel, “Sad Wind From the Sea”, an adventure set in China, was published under the name Harry Patterson. It had modest sales.

By then, the one-time failure in class had matured intellectually. He taught high school history in Leeds, England. He graduated with a degree in social psychology and sociology from the University of London in 1962, and for the next decade was a teacher and tutor at several colleges.

The modest success of his first works convinced him that he had to write many books if he wanted to live decently as an author, and that he probably had to use several names.