Joseph Hone

Joseph Marlow Hone (25 February 1937 – 15 August 2016) was a British writer of the spy novel. His most famous novels featured a British spy called Peter Marlow. The first of the series was The Private Sector (1971), set in the Six-Day War. Marlow's story continues in The Sixth Directorate (1975), The Flowers of the Forest (a.k.a. The Oxford Gambit) (1980), and The Valley of the Fox (1982). During his heyday, in the 1970s, Hone was favourably compared with writers such as Len Deighton, Eric Ambler and John le Carré. Early life and education Hone was born in London in 1937, son of Nathaniel Marlow Hone (1917-1959), of South Hill, Killiney, County Dublin, Ireland, and Morley House, Chippenham, Wiltshire, and Bridget, daughter of Michael Anthony, of Diltown, County Kilkenny. The Hone family were Irish landed gentry; his grandfather, Joseph Hone, was biographer to George Moore and W. B. Yeats. Hone recounts having been "given away" by his parents and taken to Dublin in his autobiography Wicked Little Joe (2009). He was educated at Kilkenny College and St. Columba's College, Dublin. Career Hone had a varied career, including working as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop in London, as a teacher at Drogheda Grammar School in Ireland, and with the Egyptian Ministry of Education in Cairo, Heliopolis and Suez. He also worked for a publishing firm, and in radio and television. In 1960 he became co-founder of Envoy Productions, Dublin, and co-produced a number of plays and musicals at the Theatre Royal, Stratford, East London. He was appointed Radio and Television Officer with the United Nations Secretariat in New York in 1968 and for the next two years he travelled to Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, India, Pakistan and the Far East, producing documentary programmes based on these travels. The Dancing Waiters (1975) was also based on these experiences. He produced a number of radio programmes for U.N. radio, later broadcast by the BBC. Hone held various positions in radio and television, including radio and then television critic for The Listener (1971–1980), and an overseas posting with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He died on 15 August 2016.