In a career spanning more than half a century, the Scottish writer Allan Massie, who has died aged 87 of cancer, wrote more than 20 novels and numerous works of nonfiction. His diverse range of subjects included The Caesars (1983), A Portrait of Scottish Rugby (1984) and critical studies of Muriel Spark (1979) and Colette (1986).
He was the Scotsman’s chief literary critic for more than 25 years, and as one of his editors there I looked forward to his faxed copy arriving invariably before deadline. Elsewhere he wrote columns, diaries, book reviews, essays and articles on everything from sport to the state of the nation for publications including the Spectator and Daily Mail.
However, it was for his novels that Allan preferred to be known. The first, Change and Decay in All Around I See, appeared in 1978. As its blurb candidly accepted, it followed “firmly in the paths” of Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank, Henry Green and Anthony Powell. Indeed, its main character’s name, Atwater, was borrowed from Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men. With a cast of drunks, gamblers and other dissolute characters, it examined a bohemian Britain in the process of renouncing its claim to greatness.
He returned to the theme in its successor, The Last Peacock (1980), about a matriarch on her deathbed in a Perthshire manse. The following year came The Death of Men, set in Rome where, in the 1970s, Allan had taught English as a foreign language. Taking as his starting point the kidnapping and killing in 1978 of the Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, he produced a political thriller that was perhaps overly indebted, as the Times Literary Supplement’s unimpressed reviewer suggested, to Graham Greene and John le Carré. However, Douglas Dunn, writing in Encounter, had no such misgivings: “One can only applaud Massie as perhaps the finest of living Scottish novelists.”
With his sixth novel, A Question of Loyalties (1989), which won the Saltire Society/Scotsman book of the year award, Allan finally found a voice and subject true to himself. It was the first of “a loose trilogy”, which included The Sins of the Father (1991) and Shadows of Empire (1997), set largely in occupied France during the second world war. Lucien de Balafré, the main character, is an aesthete with dilettantish tastes, who chooses to serve the collaborationist Vichy government because he believes it is his patriotic duty.
Throughout Allan’s fiction there are common concerns and themes, as he told me in 1990: “Difficulty of coming to firm moral conclusions. Interaction of public and personal life. Relationship of the individual to social background and landscape. Also, of how much people choose their own life.”
Being born in Singapore made him, he said, “quite a typical Scot, a child of the British empire”. Both his mother, Evelyn (nee Forbes), and father, Alexander, came from farming families in the north-east of Scotland. Having little money, Alexander took a job as a rubber planter in Malaya. When the second world war broke out he was captured by the Japanese and spent four years in a prisoner-of-war camp.
Allan was sent to boarding school, first to Drumtochty Castle, in Kincardineshire, then to Glenalmond college, in Perthshire. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he studied history “not very assiduously”. The broadcaster Colin Bell, who knew him at the time, said he was a prototype fogey in the Brideshead Revisited mould: “It never occurred to us that he was going to be a novelist.”
Thereafter Allan returned to Drumtochty, where he taught for 10 years and married Alison Langlands, the headteacher’s daughter. They went on to have three children, Claudia, Alexander and Louis.
Aware that his drinking was becoming problematic after he based himself in Edinburgh, with its many watering-holes, he moved to an estate near Selkirk in the Borders, where he rented a house. Writers, he acknowledged, are particularly susceptible to alcohol because they don’t have to turn up at an office, so there’s no threat of the sack. “They just get pleading letters from publishers.”
A non-driver, he relied on taxis and buses. He was addicted to Gitanes, citing smoking as one his hobbies in Who’s Who. Wearing a beret and a ghillie’s tweeds gave him a donnish, dandyish air.
Though he was mild-mannered and urbane in person, something seem to come over Allan when faced with a typewriter, and he enjoyed riling those in his homeland who did not share his admiration for Margaret Thatcher.
In 1997, he was one of few cultural figures in Scotland to oppose devolution. Writing on the eve of the referendum, he concluded: “A student of South African politics told me recently the powers given in the white paper to the Scottish parliament are almost exactly those which the South African apartheid regime gave to the Bantustans. Vote on Thursday for ‘Scotland – the new Transkei’.”
Allan’s personal values were “old-fashioned Christian” ones, which he explored in a series of novels about Ancient Rome. Beginning with Augustus in 1986 and concluding five books later with Caligula (2003), they purport to be the memoirs of the emperors or of people in their orbit. Gore Vidal, a fan, called Allan a “master of the long-ago historical novel”.
A series of four crime novels featuring Superintendent Lannes (2010-15), was much praised for its evocation of Bordeaux during the second world war. Though the books were not based on direct experience, it was the kind of praise that Allan was very happy to accept. In 2013 he was appointed CBE.
Alison died in 2022, and he is survived by his children.
• Allan Johnstone Massie, writer and journalist, born 16 October 1938; died 3 February 2026
