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Donald James Wheal 1931-2008Posted at 7:13AM Tuesday 13 May 2008 Donald Wheal, better known to fiction fans by his pen name Donald James, was a prolific book and TV writer whose career stretched for over fifty years. Born to working class parents in Chelsea's World's End, Donald wrote movingly of his family and Blitz childhood in his recent critically acclaimed memoirs World's End (2005) and White City (2007). Having survived the bombing which destroyed his childhood home and killed many of his friends and neighbours, Donald's family moved to the White City area of London. Obsessed with self-improvement, his father arranged for Donald to travel to France in 1946 and thus began the author's obsession with the history and politics of Post War Europe. His National Service eventually led to a commission and a spell as an intelligence Officer in Trieste. He later joined the Parachute Regiment before reading History at Pembroke College Cambridge.After Cambridge, and now married with twin daughters, he embarked on a hugely successful career as a TV scriptwriter on shows such as The Avengers, Space: 1999, The Champions, The Persuaders!, The Saint, Department S, UFO, The Protectors, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Adventurer and Mission: Impossible. Under the name Donald James he will be remembered for the bestselling novel The Fall of the Russian Empire (1982), which anticipated in uncanny detail the fall of Soviet Communism, and the three acclaimed thrillers Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim (1996-2000), set in a futuristic Russia of 2015 where totalitarianism had returned, and featuring his greatest fictional creation, Inspector Constantin Vadim. Donald lived in France with his third wife for many years and in the novel Walking the Shadows (2003), he explored the ghostly legacy of the Vichy years of World War 2. There followed Donald's two autobiographical memoirs of his childhood. He is also the co-author of the classic reference work, The Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich (new edition 2002). He also wrote novels under other pseudonyms such as Thomas Dresden and James Barwick (with Tony Barwick). Donald's novels are imbued with a rich humanity, a wry sense of humour and a sharp eye for injustice. He was blessed with an ever youthful, inquisitive mind, always open to fresh ideas and experiences. He was also totally self-effacing, never talking up his own accomplishments; in fact many of his closest friends didn't know of his family's straitened past until they read about it in his memoirs. In later years he was extremely moved by the mail he received from childhood friends after the the publication of World's End. Donald was at work on his last novel at the time of his unexpected death. Oliver Johnson
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