John Lodwick

The novels were admired by the author Somerset Maugham. A few years after Lodwick’s death, Anthony Burgess wrote: “He is not afraid of rhetoric, grandiloquence; his knowledge of foreign literature is wide; his mastery of the English language matches Evelyn Waugh’s.” He warned, nevertheless, that because of his early death he was “in danger of being neglected”, and indeed D. J. Taylor has written that in the post-war years Lodwick’s “doomy romanticism sat queerly alongside the comic realism of a Waterhouse or an Amis: Lodwick’s reputation did not survive the 1960s.” He has been described as an “odd-man-out” among his literary contemporaries, and credited with a “picaresque and romantic” imagination.

Son of a father in the Indian Army, who died in the sinking of the SS Persia just before his son’s birth, Lodwick attended Cheltenham College and the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. He spent some time working as a journalist in Dublin before moving to France. He later recalled writing several unpublished novels during this period, but in a contrasting account stated that he wrote only plays. He joined the French Foreign Legion at the outbreak of World War II, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1940. His prize-winning first novel, which he began to write while stranded in Vichy France, Running to Paradise, is a fictionalised account of combat with the Legion and experiences as a prisoner of war. Subsequently, he served as an officer in the Special Operations Executive, parachuting behind enemy lines to work undercover as a saboteur, and, in the rank of captain, served with the Special Boat Service on raids in the Mediterranean and the Aegean. He was mentioned in dispatches in 1945.

John Alan Patrick Lodwick (2 March 1916 – 18 March 1959) was a British novelist.