AS WAS HIS USUAL habit, Patrick O’Brian had begun his next novel, the nineteenth in the series, shortly after finishing his previous one, The Yellow Admiral. Although he had now scaled the pinnacles of literary appreciation, he would not win one battle terribly important to Mary and him. When the undeveloped land on the uphill side of the O’Brians’ house came up for sale, they attempted to buy it but were denied the right by the local housing authority. Instead, a French family was allowed to purchase it and began building a house abutting the O’Brians’ terrace. The noise, dust, and loss of the wild landscape that the O’Brians so cherished aggravated Mary’s already poor health. Her condition spiraled downward.
In March 1998, Mary died in a hospital in Perpignan. She was buried in a private ceremony in Collioure in a tomb built for the couple. O’Brian was distraught at losing his soulmate, the woman who took care of him and who was the only person whose creative input he took seriously. Although Patrick often acknowledged that Mary was his most trusted reader, the extent to which they collaborated was a secret she took to the grave.
In October, O’Brian published The Hundred Days, a novel that postpones the Surprise’s voyage to South America, carrying Aubrey and Maturin instead to the Mediterranean to prevent a Muslim plot to aid Napoleon, who has returned to the Continent from exile on Elba. The novel is most notable for the shocking death of Diana Maturin, in a carriage wreck, certainly an expression of the pain O’Brian felt as Mary’s health failed and she died.
That fall, the BBC aired a much publicized documentary about O’Brian and the publishing phenomenon surrounding his Aubrey-Maturin series. The show raised questions about O’Brian’s identity and led to an expose in the Daily Telegraph, which revealed that he was not Irish. O’Brian was deeply distressed at this revelation, particularly because he had recently been awarded an honorary doctorate from Trinity College in Dublin under the belief that he was Irish. The provost nonetheless remained supportive of O’Brian, who lived in rooms at the college that winter while working on the twentieth Aubrey-Maturin novel.
O’Brian dedicated Blue at the Mitten, which was published in November 1999, to his friends at Trinity College. In this novel, Aubrey and Maturin sail to South America in the guise of preparing a hydrographical survey of the Strait of Magellan and the southern coast of Chile. Prior to arriving there, Maturin, recovering from the loss of Diana, proposes marriage to Christine Wood, an anatomist living in Africa. In Chile and Peru, Aubrey wins several key battles, helping to assure the independence of Chile, much the way Thomas Cochrane once had.
As he had in 1993 and 1995, O’Brian visited the United States for various publicity and honorary events, including a conversation onstage with Walter Cronkite at the New York Public Library. He refused to answer personal questions and continued to make references to his Irish background, despite the public evidence to the contrary. The trip ended on a sour note when O’Brian, during a dinner in his honor at the New York Yacht Club, unwittingly made a disparaging comment about his dinner guest to her husband, who then reported the remark on the Internet. This ignited—unbeknownst to O’Brian—a fiery discussion on the topic of his alternately charming and disdainful personality.
Feeling weak, O’Brian cut short his stay in the United States. He returned to Collioure, where, belying his self-effacing public persona, he was sitting for a Perpignan sculptor who was creating a clay model for a bronze bust of him. He then traveled to Dublin, where he intended to lease a flat, in part to take advantage of Ireland’s generous tax laws for artists and writers.
Three chapters into his twenty-first Aubrey-Maturin novel, O’Brian died in the Fitzwilliam Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, on January 2, 2000. In a final ironic twist to his life, he died on the island where he claimed he had been born. At his request, his death was kept secret while his body was transported to Collioure. On January 11, he was buried next to Mary during a private ceremony attended by Nikolai and Natasha and their families, the mayor of Collioure, and a few close friends.
In the three decades since O’Brian wrote Master and Commander, the Aubrey-Maturin novels ascended from their sleepy literary-naval niche to acclaim as some of the best fiction of their time. By October 1999, according to Publishers Weekly, more than three million novels in the series had been sold.
O’Brian’s son, Richard Russ, now sixty-three, lives in London with his wife, Mimi. A mechanical engineer by training, Russ owns a company called London Screen Printing. They have two daughters, Victoria Russ, a corporate executive, and Joanna Hubbard, a schoolteacher.