Raven is remembered for his ten-novel sequence Alms for Oblivion and its baroque, supernatural sequels The Roses of Picardie and September Castle; as well as The Feathers of Death, an exploratory early army novel dealing with homosexuality between officers and "other ranks".
Although he possessed a first-class intelligence, this was not matched by his application, and his university career was punctuated by regular crises over money, misbehaviour and an apparent inability – or, more likely, unwillingness – to connect actions with their consequences.
Raven, his scholarship funds exhausted, withdrew from King's,[7] and attempted to earn a living as a writer, gaining a small income as book reviewer for The Listener.
During his earlier National Service, Raven had briefly served as an officer cadet in the Parachute Regiment, and in 1947 was on a posting in India, during the final months of British rule there.
He was subsequently commissioned into the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, before being seconded to the 77th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery at Rollestone Balloon Camp in Wiltshire, where he saw out his service.
[8] In 1953, after university, he secured a regular commission with the King's Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI), serving in West Germany and Kenya, before receiving a home posting to Shrewsbury.
At almost 30 years of age he had no career or prospects, but from his studies of the classics he had developed a lucid writing style, derived, as he said, from the Army's admirable instruction to be "brief, neat and plain".
This, allied to his ready and disrespectful wit, was allowing him to survive precariously in journalism when, in 1958, he was employed by publisher Anthony Blond: "I had picked him up through Hugh Thomas who was editing a symposium for me, called The Establishment.
[10] As a consequence of this arrangement, during the remainder of his working life, Raven became one of Britain's most prolific writers in a range of genres including fiction, essays, personal reminiscences, polemics, theatre, screenplays and magazine journalism.
Quoted by Brooke Allen: "I've always written for a small audience of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, sceptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad)".
His ten-novel sequence Alms for Oblivion is usually regarded as his best achievement – A. N. Wilson thought it "the jolliest roman-fleuve"[15] – though it is likely that he gained wider public recognition for his TV work, especially the adaptation of The Pallisers (1974) and Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978).
Raven's obituary in The Guardian observed that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess.
The early novels are robust satires of the English upper set of the mid-1950s, but the later tend to a more detached and philosophical tone, becoming concerned with the occult and supernatural, and including strange happenings.
These books were written strictly for money, and received little critical acclaim,[2] but Raven had fun killing off many of the survivors from the earlier sequence, usually in absurd and/or humiliating circumstances.