Henry Patterson (27 July 1929 – 9 April 2022), commonly known by his pen name Jack Higgins, was a British author.

[3] Jack Higgins was born Henry Patterson[4] on 27 July 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne to an English father and a Northern Irish mother.

[1]When his mother remarried, the family relocated to Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, where Patterson won a scholarship to attend Roundhay Grammar School for Boys.

[9][1] After leaving the army, he returned to education at Beckett Park teacher training college in Leeds and studied for a BSc sociology degree as a London School of Economics external student, taking his finals in Bradford in 1961.

The growing success of his early work allowed him to take time off from his teaching, which he quit eventually to become a full-time novelist.

East Of Desolation (1968), A Game For Heroes (1970) and The Savage Day (1972) are notable among his early work for their vividly described settings (Greenland, the Channel Islands, and Belfast, respectively) and offbeat plots.

The third phase of Patterson's career began with the publication of Eye of the Storm in 1992, a fictionalised retelling of an unsuccessful mortar attack on Prime Minister John Major, by a ruthless young Irish gunman-philosopher named Sean Dillon, hired by an Iraqi millionaire.

Cast as the main character for the next series of novels (22 out of 43 published between 1992 and 2017), it is apparent that Dillon is in many ways an amalgamation of Patterson's previous heroes—Chavasse with his flair for languages, Nick Miller's familiarity with martial arts and jazz keyboard skills, Simon Vaughan's Irish roots, facility with firearms and the cynicism that comes with assuming the responsibility of administering a justice unavailable through a civilised legal system.