Background
Ethnicity:
His father was English and his mother came from an Irish stock.
Rennie Airth was born in 1935 in Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa. His father, Eric Airth, was born and grew up in England. He was a mining engineer who came to South Africa in pursuit of his profession and met and married his mother, Emily Dwyer, whose father was Irish. Harry Dwyer was his name and he had emigrated to South Africa, where he met and married his grandmother, who came of English stock. Airth also has a sister.
His family moved quite a lot as his father was transferred regularly from one mine to another. With the election of the Nationalist Government soon after World War II, the policy of apartheid was introduced and he had to grow up in a racially divided country which remained that way until he left for London at the age of 20, and did not change until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.
Education
Airth studied in South Africa and was educated in journalism.
Career
In the mid-1950s, Airth moved to England to work for the Reuters news agency. He worked for Reuters for about a dozen years, starting in London on the desk as a rewrite man and then later as a correspondent abroad. Initially, he was based in Europe, and was stationed in Geneva first and later in Brussels. But he also worked in various other European capitals during that time, most memorably Rome, where he was one of the Reuters team covering the Summer Olympic Games that took place there in 1960. Later postings included Washington during the Kennedy Administration, Havana, and Saigon.
When Airthwas working in Vietnam, that was the time he first decided he wanted to pen fiction for a living. At that point, he felt he had to decide what to do next. On the one hand, he could stay with Reuters, on the other he could move to a different branch of journalism and look for a job in a newspaper. But the urge to try his hand at fiction was growing and in the end, he opted for that, and like others, before him, settled down on a Greek island - it seemed to him the sort of thing aspirant writers did - and wrote his first novel. Unfortunately, it never found a publisher. It wasn’t a thriller; it was a novel that showed all too clearly the author’s attachment to the works of Graham Greene, a writer he admired then (and still does). But one of the lessons it taught him was that you have to break with your literary heroes and find your own voice. At all events, he left Crete and moved to Rome, where he wrote a book called Snatch, which couldn’t have been more different from his first attempt.
Snatch was a story set in Rome about a gang of hapless kidnappers who carry out their scheme by switching babies. It was later made into a not-very-successful movie (1976’s The Big Operator) starring Yves Montand. Written in a style that seemed to fit the time, it’s outdated now and Airth made no attempt to get it republished. His second book was entitled Once a Spy (1981) and featured a hero who had given up being an agent but been drawn back into the game to try to figure out why a number of his old colleagues were being murdered. After this he started to focus on his John Madden series, which he initially started in 1999 and has been continuing ever since.
A sequel, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, was published in 2003, and a third book, The Dead of Winter, in 2009. Although Airth initially intended to write a trilogy about Madden, in 2014 he produced a fourth entry in the series, The Reckoning, and followed that with The Death of Kings (2017).
Now living in Italy he still writes to this day, as he continues on with his unique brand of award-winning fiction. Gaining critical and commercial success over the years, he’s been getting plaudits from all areas, as he sells both nationally and internationally across the world. With more books set to come from him in the near future, it appears that he’s not stopping anytime soon with plenty more planned on the horizon.
Views
Airth did think about being a writer from quite an early age and never really considered any other career possibilities, other than journalism. He found inspiration for his popular tale in a scrapbook about his uncle, a soldier killed in World War I.
Quotations:
"It would be awful to think one never learned anything from experience. But I can’t necessarily put my finger on what I’ve learned except to try to keep things simple and avoid anything that smacks of fine writing. As others have found, it’s often the passages you’ve taken particular pains over that call for a blue pencil. And yes, generally speaking, I wish I’d known what I know now about writing when I started."
Personality
Known for his particular attention to detail, Rennie Airth is highly regarded for his keen sense of accuracy and atmosphere. Another factor that has ensured his success is his ability to weave an intricate mystery into all of this, keeping the reader guessing right until the very end. With a strong imagination too, he’s able to make his stories highly entertaining and engaging, whilst ensuring they remain in the realms of believability at the same time.
