Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. His thrillers are worldwide bestsellers. The product of someone

who by his own admission was, quote, a clever bugger who didn't fit into the system.

As a child he read everything but never did well at school, but eventually he became a teacher and he started to write by night a steady stream of adventure stories that allowed him to pay off the mortgage and ultimately write full time.

Then suddenly when he was 45 it all took off.

He wrote The Eagle has landed and moved from successful everyday author to the world's number one.

It was his 27th book and many more have followed since

because this multi-millionaire storyteller is still writing

and at the age of 76 has no intention of stopping.

I'm one of only a handful of British authors who's been just as successful in America

as Britain he says they can't take that away from me. He is Harry Patterson, otherwise known as Jack Higgins.

Jack, it's a phenomenal record, really. I take it that anyone, if anyone had told Harry Patterson when he was a

young man in the 50s in Leeds that he was going to have this kind of success he'd have

laughed would he? Absolutely. In fact I know that sounds very mundane to say this, but I can remember in those days I knew I wanted to be a writer because it always loved books and reading and that kind of thing in spite of not being too good at

school but the thing which really hit me having rather inferior jobs and money being short supply I had this idea that there might be money in writing and writing short stories and things like that and so I was always scribbling away and to be honest in my head was the idea of

just making a few Bob. Is that all it was about? To a great degree yes except that I enjoyed doing it but when when you said to people I want to write and I might make a few Bob writing did they laugh at you

They actually call me dat Harry and did laugh at me because within my environment and the

working class level I was at.

It just wasn't the sort of thing that people could take seriously.

But it wasn't just a kind of passing thought, passing ambition of yours, was it?

It was something that you you walked around dreaming

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