2 weeks Ago By The Telegraph
James H Jackson, who has died aged 61, was a risk analyst and authority on counter-terrorism, and drew on his expertise to become a successful writer of thrillers; his range of achievements was made all the more impressive by his being, for most of his adult life, virtually blind. Jackson spent much of the 1990s outlining in Jane’s Defence Review and other journals the ways in which “terrorist groups would inevitably graduate from the traditional bomb, bullet and booby-traps to more ‘customised’ forms of terror.” The response of Western governments was, he recalled, “sclerotic”.
In 1997 he published his first novel, Dead Headers: dealing with the fall-out of an atrocity in Paris, it was intended “specifically as a warning of the future threat posed by mass terrorism”. “I was trying to get across that we needed to dead-head organisations like al-Qaeda – because a terrorist group on the defensive can’t function properly,” Jackson later recalled. “I was not happy to see so much in Dead Headers emerge into real-life.
” After two further topical thrillers, Cold Cut (1999) and The Reaper (2001), in 2005 Jackson found a publisher for a non-fiction title that had been repeatedly rejected a decade earlier: this was The Counter-Terrorist Handbook, designed to help ordinary folk to “reduce the chances of being caught up or caught out in a violent terror incident”. “I now know what to do,” The Daily Telegraph’s Cassandra Jardine noted after reading the book, “if someone lets off a grenade – take one bound away from it and lie down, feet towards the grenade, legs crossed to protect your genitals and hands over ears; running is a mistake as the impact will be worse further off. It’s handy, too, to know, if a dirty bomb goes off, to take off your clothes and bag them up as they will have absorbed 80 per cent of the radioactivity.
” By the time he published that book, Jackson still had around five per cent of his vision – he could see one letter at a time, “enough to allow me to visualise the shape of a paragraph, a page, a chapter”. Although he eventually lost his sight completely, he worked on happily with the aid of voice-recognition software. His poor vision sometimes caused him embarrassment.
On a visit to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, he “reached gently to touch the silver star marking the purported spot at which the Christ Child was born [and] succeeded only in goosing the ample behind of an aged nun who was prostrate in religious reverie”. However, he regarded his condition as primarily a blessing. “My blindness has taught me that there is a clear benefit to having something to struggle and push against in life.
[And] I have enjoyed the privilege of experiencing every day the quiet decency of the British public who unfailingly offer a helping hand.” He was born James Alexander Heitz, in London, on November 28 1962. His father, Helmuth Heitz, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, industrialist and big-game hunter whose safari companions had included Ernest Hemingway (whom he remembered as a pathological liar) and Hermann Goering, whom he had once got drunk in an effort to extract details of Nazi activities.
Helmuth died when James was 11, and his English mother Lucy, a dancer and children’s writer, subsequently married the eminent gynaecologist and ex-paratrooper Ian Jackson. James could claim to have known his stepfather for his whole life, having been delivered by him. James and his twin brother Julian were told at the age of 12 that they had inherited a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which causes the erosion of the image receptors on the retina, and would eventually rob them of sight entirely.
After Wellington College, James studied politics at Bristol University – by which time he had already started using a white stick – before going on to take an MA in War Studies at King’s College London. He was called to the Bar by Inner Temple, but never practised as a barrister. Instead he became a risk analyst, helping businesses and government departments to identify and minimise the risks posed to their overseas activities by terrorism.
History was Jackson’s true passion, and after the success of his early novels he came to specialise in period thrillers: subjects included the murder of Thomas Becket (Penance, 2019), the Children’s Crusade in the year 1212 (Pilgrim, 2008) and an attempt on Hitler’s life (Endkampf, 2013). Of Treason (2016), centred on the Gunpowder Plot, Frederick Forsyth declared: “There is no-one today writing fictionalised history, backed by ferocious research, like James Jackson ..
. The reading lamp just burns through the night.” Blood Rock (2008) had the Siege of Malta as its backdrop, and Jackson also worked as a consultant on Guy Ritchie’s proposed film on the same subject.
This led to one of the most memorable humiliations caused by his poor vision: at Ritchie’s office he started talking to somebody he assumed to be a secretary, only to be told it was Madonna. Latterly Jackson co-hosted the podcast Bloody Violent History with Tom Assheton, grandson of “Bomber” Harris. Jackson deprecated the “emotional incontinence” of “the post-Diana world” and any attempt to cast blind people as victims, preferring to navigate life with robust humour.
His agent Eugenie Furniss noted that “if I ever heard an assistant laughing uproariously, I didn’t have to ask who was on the other end of the phone”. James Jackson died in October of a suspected stroke, although his death was only made public earlier this month. He is survived by his mother, sister and twin brother.
James H Jackson, born November 28 1962, died October 18 2024.
