His father, John Lambden Ross, came from a prosperous part-Scottish, part-Cuban family that owned a shipping company called the Thistle Line.
[3] Together with their two children, they lived in a series of rented houses and flats variously in south London, Bognor Regis, and the Southbourne district of Bournemouth.
[9] After a brief period of imprisonment, he settled in London where he soon found a job as a scriptwriter on government propaganda documentaries, working alongside poet Dylan Thomas.
He published two more short-story collections, in addition to the novel Of Love and Hunger (1947), which Anthony Powell rated as highly as the work of Patrick Hamilton and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Maclaren-Ross had by then reinvented himself as a writer of popular BBC radio drama, notably the thriller series Until the Day She Dies, which was broadcast on the Light Programme.
Only part of this had been completed when he suffered a fatal heart attack in November 1964 aged 52, his demise probably hastened by years of alcoholism, amphetamine-taking, and stress.
It added that his short stories:took him into the wartime literary world, where he became a conspicuous figure in Soho and Fitzrovia, blossoming out after his demobilization as a tall, slightly theatrical-looking gentleman with a silver-knobbed stick.
Then he turned his attention further back: first to his unhappy prewar period as a salesman, which became the subject of his one really serious novel Of Love and Hunger (1947) then to his childhood as son of a none too prosperous Scottish father, dividing his retirement between France and a melancholy-refined English seaside.
But in spite of his interest in, and encyclopaedic knowledge of, the thriller form in both novel and film his own incursions into the medium were never really successful, either in the artistic or in the commercial sense.
His manuscripts were unforgettable, tiny neat writing with a slight slope and the odd baroque decoration, written perhaps in the Mandrake Club or in a pub.
The reviewer for The Times stated, "He wrote with economy and a formal elegance that marvellously suited his detached attitude to whatever in his surroundings seemed odd, ridiculous or wild; down it all went in curt graphic dialogue and deadpan description.
The best-known of these are the bohemian novelist X. Trapnel in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (v.10 Books Do Furnish a Room) and as Prince Yakimov in Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy.
Prompted by the publication of Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, Paul Willetts's much-praised biography, all of his finest work came back into print, attracting praise from the likes of D. J. Taylor, Lucian Freud, Philip French, Virginia Ironside, Sarah Waters, and Harold Pinter, who dramatised a couple of his short stories for BBC radio.
[18] With comparable enthusiasm, critic and novelist D. J. Taylor hailed Maclaren-Ross as "one of the great unsung heroes of the literary 1940s and at his best a figure to rank with Orwell, Connolly and Waugh".