Tributes have poured in for Allan Massie, the acclaimed Scottish author, historian and journalist who died on Tuesday, aged 87.
In a career spanning more than 50 years, Massie wrote prolifically for newspapers across Scotland, with 3500 book reviews in The Scotsman alone. He also penned dozens of fiction and non-fiction works that gained international recognition.
Throughout his journalism career, he expanded into sports, covering cricket and rugby, providing “astute analysis”, according to Scotland rugby manager Gregor Townsend.
In 1978 he began to write novels, starting with Change and Decay in All Around I see. He would go on to write 25 novels as well as various biographies, anthologies, critical studies and historical accounts.
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By the 1980s he started as a writer in residence at Edinburgh where he worked with young writers of the future like Ian Rankin, whom he introduced to Bodley Head, his editor who helped him to publish his first Rebus novel. “I was in my infancy as a published writer” Rankin said, “but Allan was there at the delivery! We kept in touch forever after. I’ll always be grateful to him.”
Although his next novel, The Last Peacock (1980) won the Frederick Niven Literary Award, it was somewhat overshadowed by his later novels. The following year, with The Death of Men, which also won an award at the Scottish Book Festival, marked his move towards the fictional territory his best works sat in.
He himself pointed to the mid-European trilogy of A Question of Loyalties (1989), The Sins of the Father (1991) and Shadows of Empire (1997) as his finest pieces. Others are drawn to his Roman empire series, or the moral complexities of his Bordeaux Quartet, which concluded in 2015 with End Games in Bordeaux.
While missing out on Britain’s top literature award, at least two judges of the famed Booker prize have previously said he deserved it, and his works have earned him critical acclaim across the world, with a particularly sizable audience in France thanks to the help of his publisher Bernard de Falois. In 2007 the French awarded him a Knighthood of the Order of the Arts and Letters, six year before his 2013 CBE.
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Massie was born in 1938 in Singapore to a family of Aberdeenshire farmers. His father was working on a rubber plantation in Malaya, but the family returned to Scotland shortly after his birth. However, his father, Sandy, then returned back to Singapore in 1940 to fight the Japanese in the Second World War, spending four years as a prisoner of war suffering brutal conditions.
He and his wife divorced after the war, and Massie, along with is brother and sister, was brought up by their mother in Kintore and Inverurie.
After winning a scholarship to Glenalmond College, he won another to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read history, graduating in 1960. He then taught at Drumtochty Castle School in Kincardineshire, which was run by Robert and Elizabeth Langlands, the parents of his future wife Alison.
After the school closed in 1971, he moved to Rome, where he taught English as a second language. He married Langlands in 1973 and their children Alex, Claudia and Louis, all work in the media, as a journalist, TV producer and chief editor at Agence France Press TV respectively.
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