Dave Gemmell died in the early hours of this morning, four days before his 58th birthday, following a quadruple heart bypass last week (Monday, July 17). He had seemed to be making a good recovery, though when I spoke to him yesterday at his home he sounded exhausted.  He was struggling to make 500 steps a day as required, and had to “plan ahead to go upstairs”. He had been home for only a couple of days.

His wife Stella found him in his study this morning; it seemed he had been dead for some hours. There will be a post-mortem to find the cause of death, which is not yet known.  Stella rang us at about 10.30am. It was a huge shock.

Dave has been a close friend since the late 60s. When we met he was sports editor at the Acton Gazette, and I was a sub-editor. We went out for an omelette one lunchtime, and after that I frequently went round his flat, which was nearby, to play chess. After losing to him, I was rash enough to say I would never lose to him again. We played constantly until he did beat me, one day on the Broads. He would never play me again.

We kept in touch when I left London to come back to Norfolk, and he eventually moved down to Hastings. We met intermittently. He rose high in the newspaper world until he reached a crisis when he thought he had cancer and wrote a book about it – a fantasy book, which turned out to be a best-seller called Legend. It was the first of well over 20 books in the heroic fantasy mould, and he was a wonderful writer in any genre – especially good at characterisation and the poignant twist.

This brought him a certain amount of wealth, with which he was extremely generous to relatives and friends. He was a big man and a larger-than-life figure to whom you could listen for hours. He was a natural storyteller.

Recently he remarried and moved to a beautiful house in Sussex which we visited on three or four occasions. He had not been really well for a long time and hoped for a rejuvenated life after his operation. I shall miss him hugely. So will many, many other people.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5224868.stm