Booker Prize short-listings in 1976 and 1979[3] brought critical recognition, and although major commercial success remained elusive Rathbone's work appeared regularly, gaining a loyal readership and increasing popularity both at home and abroad.
Rathbone wrote in different genres and "refused to be pigeonholed ... his output included crime novels, eco-thrillers, future fiction, film scripts and quirky historical narratives, and he also edited a fine non-fiction work about the Duke of Wellington".
[2] Rathbone created four characters who appear in more than one book, permitting a certain grouping, while never taking over the heterogeneous spirit of his work or deflecting him from the pursuit of wider fictional interests.
As a writer, perhaps the nearest Rathbone came to an acknowledged antecedent was Graham Greene, whose weaving of the thriller and mainstream strands of fiction, together with the exploration of wider spiritual and political matters, often set in foreign locations, clearly struck many chords both with Rathbone's vocational subject-matter and belief in the novelist's ability to address human life on as broad a front as he likes, with the finished work of fiction as the only credential he needs.
A Last Resort is probably the most Joycean of Rathbone's books, in its use of accumulation of mundane detail to create an almost surreal portrait of a country whose identity is dissolving in front of its face.
Over a writing career of forty years, during which the world might be said to have changed out of recognition, it is notable how few of Rathbone's preoccupations and perceptions have dated, while many have been prescient and remain as relevant as they ever were.
In his latest book The Mutiny, dealing with the Indian rising against British rule in 1857, the same commitment to clarity of vision is evident, an equal openness to all experiences and forces involved in the event, which continues unashamedly to put Rathbone in the line of the great novelists of the 19th century.
Following within fifteen years of Elizabeth Longford's two-volume biography, which re-established Wellington as a subject for serious study, Rathbone's book is a radical and original departure from the normal run of biographical accounts.
Based on detailed research into both Wellington's collected correspondence and the battlefields of the Peninsular War, it counterpoints extracts from the letters with Rathbone's own elucidations and comments.