Manning O'Brine

Manning O'Brine was an Irish writer of thrillers and television screenplays about whom surprisingly little is known. His date of birth is uncertain: at least one authoritative source gives it as 1915; the dust jacket of his last American publication, however, says that he was born in Connemara, Ireland, in 1913 with dual Irish and Italian citizenship. Internet booksellers frequently give his date of death as 1977. All of his novels concern espionage and/or secret agents and often feature sadistic Nazis who have survived World War II and are hunted down and killed.

The New York Times review of No Earth for Foxes closes with these lines: "The jacket copy has a sentence about O'Brine that is a real stopper. 'He killed his first Nazi in Heidelberg in 1937 and his last one in Madagascar in 1950.' Try to top that one."

The backcover blurb for the 1976 American paperback edition says in addition that O'Brine was a former British secret agent.

During World War II, he was parachuted into Occupied France, was captured by the Gestapo, escaped from a train taking him to Buchenwald, and served in Algeria, Yugoslavia and Italy. He has been awarded medals from many nations.

The dust jacket of Pale Moon Rising is somewhat more restrained in its biographical details, although certainly testifying to an unusually varied, and perilous, life:

He studied art and architecure at Rome University and became a scenic designer. He was a Commando during the War, carrying out many missions in France, North Africa and Yugoslavia. He then fought in Palestine with the Israelis against Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion, and subsequently arrived in Cairo where he took on the job of managing a stranded Opera company. He returned to Italy and, whilst working in Rome Film Studios, wrote the story for Fellini's first film "Rome:Open City". Manning O'Brine lived in Sussex with his wife and four sons.

O'Brine began with a series of seven books about Michael the O'Kelly that were somewhat light-hearted in tone. He then wrote four novels that were grimmer and more realistic in nature and for which he received a certain amount of critical praise. These books are: Crambo, Mills, No Earth for Foxes, and Pale Moon Rising, the latter being set in wartime France. A number of common characters appear throughout these books, such as Pavane and Crambo, but the most important one is generally Mills, who is obsessed, as apparently O'Brine himself was, with tracking down and killing Nazi war criminals.

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