A Son of the Rock

On Monday myself and the good lady had an emotional day when we said our final goodbye to Eric Brown, Science Fiction writer, crime novelist, devoted husband and father, a dear friend, a gentle man and gentleman.

He had an interesting life which took in his origins in Haworth, Yorkshire, and a sojourn in Australia before returning to his Yorkshire roots then visiting India without first ever having tasted a curry. He soon learned to cook curries from scratch and was a devotee of that food from then on. He also spent some time in Greece. All of these influences fed into his fiction.

After his marriage to Finn they moved to Cambridgeshire before, with their beloved daughter Freya, coming up to Scotland to live in Berwickshire.

I first met Eric at a Science Fiction convention and immediately recognised him as one of nature’s good guys. It wasn’t until the move to Scotland that we were able to have extended conversations with him, though he and I had been emailing each other for a long time. In his emails he frequently would note a particularly good performance by Sons while usually bemoaning how Leeds United had fared. Football, SF and literature (probably in that order) were our perennial talking points, though the conversation would roam far and wide.

He always sought out a good curry house and would be disappointed when the fare wasn’t to his liking. I remember he told us a story about a meal in a curry restaurant in Dunbar where he said to the owner afterwards that it had not been formulated properly – only to receive the reply that that was how their patrons liked it. A year or so later he went to the same establishment to try to obtain for one of his own curries an ingredient which he had run out of. The owner was surprised Eric cooked his own curries and, being short of a chef, immediately offered him a job! Eric refused, no doubt courteously.

Eric sometimes solicited from me my comments on a story or novel he had not yet submitted to a publisher and never moaned at my nit-picking. He also took with very good grace my irritation at the use of the ‘time interval later’ turn of phrase.

(Edited to add: this was such a difficult post to write I knew I would miss out something. I had intended to say that the good lady and myself felt incredibly honoured when Eric dedicated one of his books to us.)

Eric, it was an absolute privilege to know you and call you friend. I still cannot bring myself to believe you have gone and that those emails will no longer drop into my in-box.

Eric Brown: 24/5/1960 – 21/3/2023. Much missed.