Alexander Fullerton is a British author of naval and other fiction. Born in 1924 in Suffolk and brought up in France, he was a cadet during the years 1938-1941 at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth from the age of thirteen. He went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean, and spent the rest of the war at sea - mostly under it, in submarines.
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Alexander Fullerton's first novel - Surface!, based on his experiences as gunnery and torpedo officer of HM Submarine Seadog in the Far East, 1944–1945, in which capacity he was mentioned in despatches for distinguished service - was published in 1953. It became an immediate bestseller, with five reprints in six weeks, and sold over 500,000 copies. He has lived solely on his writing since 1967, and is claimed (by his publishers) to be one of the most borrowed authors from British libraries.
Alexander Fullerton's nine-volume Mariner of England series featuring his hero Nicholas Everard has secured his reputation as one of the finest of modern writers about naval warfare. As well as individual volumes, the series is also published in three omnibus volumes, each comprising three novels.
A series of novels based on the activities of real-life wartime secret agent Rosie Ewing (real name Rosie Quarry) based on her adventures in German-occupied France.
When Rosie Quarry (a wartime secret agent) read Alexander Fullerton's four novels, she wrote to him suggesting that he might like to hear the story of her first mission, when she'd parachuted into moonlit countryside near Cahors and made her way down to Toulouse to join the SOE network as a radio-operator and courier. Rosie was twenty-four at the time, when the expected life-span of a radio-operator was six weeks. The result was contained in the following 'prequel' to the quartet, which also describes the meeting between her and Fullerton: