One year ago today, I awoke to a throat-tightening message on my phone. Herbie had died six hours and 31 minutes into the new year. It was not unexpected, but we had hoped he might bounce back, as he had done before. He was, after all, a man of wizardly skills. He was also an astonishingly prolific author.
Over the course of his 83 years, he wrote almost 120 books, of which he sold more than 10 million copies in at least 50 countries. His subjects embraced everything from extra-terrestrials to the Stone Age, the occult, dreams, druids, horror, ghosts, cats and, latterly, long-dead Egyptian pharaohs.
In the 1980s, he hit the international jackpot when he penned the enormously successful GrailQuest series. Based on the Arthurian legends of old, the eight game books propelled him to global stardom at the height of the genre’s Dungeons and Dragons golden age.
Then came the Faerie Wars Chronicles, a series of five fantasy novels aimed at young adults. In 2003, the first of these “malevolent, humorous, action-packed novels” reached No 4 on the New York Times best-seller list. The series achieved bestseller status in more than 20 countries, selling four million copies in France alone.
Herbie was subsequently inducted into the Wall of Fame at the Lucca Comics and Games, the largest comics festival in Europe. He shares the honour with Game of Thrones creator George RR Martin.
James Herbert Brennan was born in Gilford, Co Down, on July 5th, 1940, the son of grocers James and Sarah Jane. He worked for the Portadown News in his early years, as a journalist and as an editor. He also dabbled in hypnotherapy, counselling and marketing, being the director of various advertising and public-relations firms.
In 1961, he married Helen McMaster, with whom he had two daughters, Aynia and Sian. He subsequently moved to Dublin to work as editor of Scene Magazine for Norman Ames. In 1967, the magazine’s art director Jim Fitzpatrick pitched his now legendary picture of Che Guevara at Herbie and Norman. They felt it was too provocative and declined. Herbie subsequently penned a piece on how he felt like the record label who had passed on The Beatles.
Before he became a full-time writer in 1973, Herbie lived in the gate-lodge of the Hamwood estate outside Dunboyne, Co Meath. While sunbathing in Hamwood’s walled garden in 1972, he saw a young woman in formal dress walking towards him. She completely ignored his friendly greetings and then, to his shock, she “shimmered, faded and eventually disappeared completely, leaving a momentary sparkling in the air.” Herbie maintained that this was his first ghost.
In 1993, Herbie married Jacquie Burgess, a herbalist, psychotherapist, artist and author, with whom he lived in an old rectory in Tullow, Co Carlow. I became friendly with them soon afterwards, shooting the breeze over G&Ts in the garden, and devouring the contents of their fridge while starting into the writer’s game. In time, I would dedicate a book called 1847 to the golden couple.
Based in his druidic den in Tullow, Herbie built up a global fan club through his remarkable canon of fiction and non-fiction books. As well as all the fantasy and gaming novels, he whipped up a plethora of titles that he published under various pennames: Jan Brennan, JH Brennan, Maria Palmer, Cornelius Rumstuckle.
For several decades, he was obsessed by Nectanebo, the last native ruler of ancient Egypt. In 2019, he fulfilled his own enduring fantasy with the publication of his final novel, Nectanebo: Traveller from an Antique Land. It is a marvellous tale: brilliantly bats, frequently beautiful and utterly addictive. I think it safe to say that Herbie was in direct correspondence with Nectanebo himself to verify some of his theories.
Herbie launched his memoir, Enchanted Life – The Memoir of a Magician on February 21st, 2023.
