Patterson’s early thrillers, written (under several different names) to supplement his wages as a comprehensive-school teacher and later a university lecturer, had been standard fare. It was the Irish Troubles – reviving memories of his boyhood in Belfast, where he and his mother had once been in a tram that was shot at by Catholics – that prompted him to be more ambitious, in such fine thrillers as A Prayer for the Dying (1973). 

His books were also thoroughly plausible, the result of painstaking research. He once injured his back jumping off the stage of the Albert Hall when trying to work out how the pianist-cum-terrorist in Solo (1980) could escape in a hurry mid-concert.

He took care to make sure that The Eagle Has Landed was “50 per cent documented historical fact”; indeed, it was so believable that he once saw a retired postman claiming on television to have taken part with the other residents of Higgins’s fictional Studley Constable in their battle against the German kidnappers.

Higgins published prolifically into his late 80s – he would write all night and then reward himself with a bacon sandwich and champagne at dawn before going to bed – and kept a good deal of the fortune he earned thanks to his status as a tax exile in Jersey.

Some of his later books repeated not just situations and stock characters but wodges of dialogue, but his devoted fans seemed not to mind. And at his best he produced half a dozen or so novels that deserve a place among the roll call of classic “civilised thrillers”.