Obituary: Francis King, novelist

Francis King, who died on Sunday at the age of 88, was one of the finest and most remarkable of English novelists of our time. If his admirers believed his work went too often unremarked, and received less attention than it deserved, this was perhaps because he did not engage in self-promotion, in shouting his wares from the rooftops.

He was the most diligent and professional of writers, and one whose openness to experience and interest in other people kept him writing into old age as freshly and perceptively as in his youth. He published his first novel, The Dark Tower, in 1946; his last, Cold Snap, in 2010. Few can have matched such a span.

Francis was born in 1923 in Switzerland where his father, an official in the Indian Civil Service, was receiving medical treatment. His early childhood was spent in India, then, like so many children of the Empire, he was sent "home" for his education and to be shuffled between uncles and aunts.

His father died young, and Francis remained always very close to his mother, who also lived to a ripe old age. School at Shrewsbury was followed by wartime Oxford, his education there interrupted by a spell as a farm labourer when he registered as a conscientious objector.

After graduating, already a published novelist, he worked for the British Council, first in Florence (the setting of two novels), then in Greece, Finland and Japan. During his Greece posting, he suffered from depression; Japan restored him. He felt an affinity with the culture, partly because of its easy acceptance of homosexuality, and retained an affection for the country.

He was tempted to stay there as a teacher when he left the British Council, because leaving Japan meant leaving his lover, a boy who had been both his student and his chauffeur. Japan was the setting of one of his best novels, The Custom House (1961)

Back in England, he worked as a reviewer and, for 14 years, as the theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph, while continuing to write novels and short stories. He was a discerning and notably generous critic.

He was also not above hackwork, willing, for instance, to revise and indeed finish the last novels of his friend, LP Hartley, whose powers were failing. Intensely sociable, with exquisite manners, he had a wide acquaintanceship in literary London.

Among his many friends were Ivy Compton-Burnett and Olivia Manning; he admired the former greatly and was amused, if sometimes irritated, by Manning's self-importance and jealousy of other writers. Other friends included Angus Wilson, CP Snow and a host of less successful novelists to whom he was invariably encouraging. His fondness for gossip made his autobiography, Yesterday Came Suddenly, a delight. Francis had a strong sense of duty and of solidarity with other writers.He served as chairman of the Society of Authors, president of English PEN and president of International PEN, even though he found bureaucracy irksome.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote: "The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction." That was how Francis saw life, as the raw material of his art. He was alert to the oddities of human behaviour and subtle in probing the dark recesses of mind and spirit. Himself gentle and honourable, he was fascinated by meanness and evil, and had the ability to evoke them in his novels, though at the same time he showed a rare sympathy for the unfortunate and the weak, the victims of malice and stupidity.

This range of understanding was most fully shown in what was perhaps his best novel, Act of Darkness (1983). A psychological thriller set in India, it tells of the murder of a boy, and the implication of his death for his father, sister and governess. The novel displays a rare and disturbing insight into perversity and pathological behaviour. When it was published, Auberon Waugh wrote that its failure to win the Booker Prize was scandalous, a judgment in which he was not alone. Indeed, it is hard to explain why the Booker eluded Francis. He was a better novelist than many who have received the prize.

He accounted for his comparative lack of popular success partly by his unwillingness to write the same sort of book over and over again, partly by what he called "a deep streak of pessimism in my make-up". Consequently he came to be described in that damning phrase, "a writer's writer". Inasmuch as other writers admired his work, the description was fair, but he was always a novelist to delight the discerning reader.

For a long time he enjoyed harmonious relations with his publishers, first Longman and then Hutchinson. There were occasional disturbances, as when A Domestic Animal (1970), a novel about unreciprocated homosexual love, provoked the threat of a libel action from a Brighton neighbour, a former Labour MP, Tom Skeffington Lodge, who recognised himself in the character of a politician in the novel, even though Francis thought he had covered his tracks by making the character a woman. The legal costs incurred required him to sell his Brighton house and move to London.

In his old age, he fell out of fashion, and, in the new publishing climate, for the first time found difficulty in being published. Fortunately, Gary Pulsifer of Arcadia Books came to his rescue, and his last books appeared under that imprint. Their high quality proved Pulsifer wise, and the publishers who had abandoned Francis foolish.

Francis King is survived by his civil partner Deham Abdelkerim.