His date of birth is uncertain: at least one authoritative source gives it as 1915;[1] the dust jacket of his last American publication, however, says that he was born in Connemara, Ireland, in 1913 with dual Irish and Italian citizenship.
The backcover blurb for the 1976 American paperback edition says in addition that O'Brine was a former British secret agent.During World War II, he was parachuted into Occupied France, was captured by the Gestapo, escaped from a train taking him to Buchenwald, and served in Algeria, Yugoslavia and Italy.
[3] The dust jacket of Pale Moon Rising is somewhat more restrained in its biographical details, although certainly testifying to an unusually varied, and perilous, life: He studied art and architecture at Rome University and became a scenic designer.
He then fought in Palestine with the Israelis against Glubb Pasha and the Arab Legion, and subsequently arrived in Cairo where he took on the job of managing a stranded Opera company.
A number of common characters appear throughout these books, such as Pavane and Crambo, but the most important one is generally Mills, who is obsessed, as apparently O'Brine himself was, with tracking down and killing Nazi war criminals.
In a bitterly worded and ironic forward to No Earth for Foxes called "A Note from the Author", O'Brine writes in 1973 or 1974 that: ...it remains a nightmare reality that, in 1965, ex-Nazis held 21 ministerial and state secretarial appointments in West Germany alone; 128 were generals of the Bundeswehr; 828 were high judges, court counselors, public prosecutors; 245 were with embassies and consulates of the Bonn Foreign Service; 297 were in key positions in the police and secret services....