Douglas Reeman

Douglas Edward Reeman (15 October 1924 – 23 January 2017) was a British novelist of the sea, born in Thames Ditton, Surrey.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1940 at the age of sixteen and served in the Second World War and later in Korea, reaching the rank of lieutenant, and afterwards worked for the Metropolitan Police and London County Council before writing full time. His first novel, A Prayer for the Ship, appeared in 1958.

Over about sixty years he wrote some 68 novels, mostly Royal Navy fiction set in the Second World War or the Napoleonic era, which sold around 34 million copies in twenty languages. Under the pseudonym Alexander Kent he wrote the Richard Bolitho series of Napoleonic naval novels; he published other fiction and non-fiction under his own name.