A small private funeral will take place shortly with a service of celebration of David's life in due course. For those wishing to send a tribute, please send a donation to the charity of your choice in David's name. If you do donate, the family would like to know how much is raised in his name so if you do, please mail me with the information (charity and amount) so I can collate the information to pass on. Obituaries will be appearing in The Independent (Contributor: John Clute),The Times (Contributor : Stan Nicholls), The Guardian (Contributor: Chris Priest), The Telegraph (Contributor: Andy McKay) this week (Tuesday onwards.) To sum up David has been hard, but to me, in the end, David was a man with a heart as big as he was tall, a man as he would have said "to walk the mountains with." It was a pleasure to know you David. May the source guide you and follow the prayer lights home.

Obituaries

The Times - Written by Stan Nicholls, (appeared 01/08/06)

David Gemmell, who has died following heart bypass surgery, produced thirty bestselling novels, and is widely regarded as this country’s most accomplished author in the heroic fantasy genre. He grew up in a tough West London neighbourhood where survival depended on being handy with your fists, the ability to run fast, or possessing a tongue glib enough to talk your way out of trouble. Although he employed all three at various times, the latter became the most finely honed weapon in his armoury; and in later years his talent as a raconteur and teller of anecdotes characterised his many personal appearances at signings and literary events.

Expelled from school at sixteen for gambling, Gemmell entered the world of work with little in the way of vocational skills and drifted through a number of casual jobs. These included labourer, lorry driver's mate and nightclub bouncer, a profession well suited to his robust six foot, four inch frame.

His mother, despairing at this waste of potential and recognising an embryonic talent in her son he wasn't aware of himself, arranged for him to be interviewed for a vacancy with a local newspaper. He wasn't keen and went just to please her. The fact that he was one of a hundred applicants, and almost certainly the least qualified, virtually guaranteed he wouldn't be picked. To be absolutely sure, he behaved arrogantly during the interview. This was mistaken for self-confidence and he was hired. He eventually rose to Editor-in-Chief of five South Coast newspapers and became a stringer for several nationals.

In the late ‘70’s Gemmell turned his hand to writing a thriller. But The Man From Miami, a novel about an assassin, failed to find a publisher. ‘It was so bad it could curdle milk at fifty paces,’ he admitted.

The circumstances surrounding the publication of his first novel were extraordinary. He developed an illness that had him passing blood, suffering from exhaustion and losing two stone in weight; symptoms indicating a cancerous growth. His doctor ordered tests and the prognosis looked grim. Convinced he had little time left, Gemmell decided to tackle the novel he had long had at the back of his mind. He turned out The Siege of Dros Delnoch in two weeks. No one wanted to publish it. In the event, the growth had been misdiagnosed; he didn't have cancer. The book was forgotten.

A friend visiting his home a couple of years later chanced upon the manuscript and read it. Fortunately this friend had an incisive eye, and pointed out the novel's strengths and weaknesses. Enthusiasm rekindled, Gemmell made one last attempt at getting it right. Retitled Legend, it was published in 1984 and has never been out of print.

Considered a classic in the fantasy adventure field, Legend is set in the dying days of the mighty Drenai empire. Its rulers, steeped in complacency and incompetence, fail to respond decisively when the warrior tribes of the Nadir unite against them. In seeking to appease charismatic Nadir leader Ulric, the Drenai succeed only in conveying their weakness and encouraging his ambitions. All that stands between the Nadir hordes and the heart of empire is Delnoch Pass. This is protected by a massive dros, or fortress, but its vastly outnumbered defenders are plagued by hopelessness and shambolic leadership. It's left to a disparate assembly of individuals, not all immediately recognisable as heroic, to hold the pass and deny chaos its triumph.

The novel’s central protagonist, Druss the Axeman, is nearing the end of his active life. A legendary figure - the book's title partly refers to him - he bears an awesome martial reputation. Now in his sixties, and subject to the ailments encroaching age brings, he has to put as much effort into mustering his own declining powers as commanding the defence. For him, time is as big an enemy as the Nadir. Druss is considerably more rounded and believable than the average fantasy hero, and there is an audacity in presenting an old man as the hero in this kind of story. But it works perfectly in engaging the reader's empathy.

Gemmell based Druss on his strong, independently minded stepfather, Bill Woodford. Characterisation is acknowledged as one of Gemmell’s major skills, and he attributed this to the fact that he frequently drew from real life. 'I grew up with men of violence,’ he explained on one occasion. ‘I understand men of violence. It means that when I write action scenes and when I have violent characters, I have a very strong feel for it.’ But his practice of basing characters on actual people got him into trouble. He used his journalist colleagues as the cast for his third novel, Waylander, published in 1986, and lost his job over it. ‘The managing director regarded it as a poisonous attack on his integrity,’ he recalled. This prompted Gemmell to turn to novel writing full-time, but he always credited the disciplines of journalism as laying the foundations for his pacey, concise prose style.

Legend instigated themes that remained pivotal to his work - the lone hero, often tortured by loss or doubt; the battle against advancing dotage; the pursuit of seemingly lost causes; complex villains, and the inclusion of elite, usually mystical, groups. A consistent thread in Gemmell’s fiction, and one which reflected his Christian beliefs, was the conviction that redemption was possible for even the most corrupt.

The success of Legend led to a string of bestselling fantasy novels, some standalone, many in multipart volumes, including the Drenai, Rigante, Sipstrassi and Hawk Queen series. His Macedon sequence, Lion of Macedon (1990) and Dark Prince (1991), set in the Greece of an alternate world, tells the story of military genius Parmenion and his protégé the young Alexander, future ruler of the ancient world's greatest empire.

Gemmell wrote one book under a pseudonym. Published in 1993 as by “Ross Harding”, White Knight, Black Swan is a gritty crime thriller. It was his only novel not to achieve bestselling status. At the time of his death he was writing the third in a trilogy retelling the legend of the siege of Troy. The first volume, Lord of the Silver Bow, was published in 2005. The second, Shield of Thunder, is due to appear this September.

Some critics labelled his novels macho. He always insisted that they were missing the point. 'There is no gratuitous violence in my books,’ he stated. ‘I tend to concentrate on courage, loyalty, love and redemption. I believe in these things. If there's anything I'd like my books to achieve, it would be to increase the desire of people to do good.'

This sense that moral choices have to be made is at the heart of his work. It gives his stories direction and forms his characters. In knowing that David Gemmell's books are suffused with a basic decency, that his characters strive to act honourably and do the right thing no matter how the odds are stacked, one knows the essence of the man.

He is survived by his second wife, Stella, and two children, Kate and Luke.

David Andrew Gemmell, novelist, was born on August 1st 1948. He died on July 28th 2006, aged 57.

/Stan Nicholls/

The Guardian (Appeared 01/08/06)

David Gemmell, who died on Friday aged 57, was a bestselling author of heroic fantasy books; his first novel Legend (1984), a tale of a fortress under siege, became a classic of the genre and is still in print.

He wrote it after being told, wrongly, that he was terminally ill and had only a short time to live. "It contained all I wanted to say about life," Gemmell recalled. "It was like finding yourself. I thought 'This is it! This is what I was intended to do!' "

Gemmell went on to write 30 novels in all, ranging from fantasy of the "sword and sorcery" variety to historical fiction, earning a reputation as a master story-teller. His themes were heroic adventure, leadership, personal heroism and the possibility of redemption.

His five bestselling fantasy titles were translated into 12 different languages and were recently launched on the American market. His fantasy books are grouped into series with such names as Drenai, Rigante and Sipstrassi; his classic Drenai titles, which began with Legend, included The Legend of Deathwalker (1996) and The Swords of Night and Day (2004).

Asked to explain the increasing popularity of the fantasy genre, Gemmell suggested that one by one, the supposedly real heroes of history - the likes of Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock, General Custer and Davy Crockett - had been debunked. "Societies need heroes," he added. "So we travel to places where revisionists cannot dismantle the great." For Gemmell, fantasy fiction was about "inspiring the reader to be better, stronger, more courageous." David Gemmell was born on August 1 1948 in west London, of Scottish descent. His Cockney mother taught herself Received Pronunciation, went on the stage and gave her son a love of history and myth. When he was about seven, the headmaster of his junior school read JRR Tolkien's fantasy The Hobbit to his class and the boy was hooked.

But in 1965 he was expelled from school for organising a gambling syndicate. To earn a living, he worked by day as a farm labourer, as a navvy digging foundations and as a lorry driver's assistant; by night he employed his powerful 6ft 4in, 230lb frame as a club bouncer in Soho. His first attempt at novel writing received a dispiriting response. "We are not normally this frank," wrote the agent to whom Gemmell sent the manuscript, "but when someone has no idea of plot construction, characterisation or narrative drive, we feel it is appropriate to advise you to rethink your career plans. You mention in your resumé that you are working as a lorry driver's mate for Pepsi-Cola. This is an occupation not without merit. Good luck with it."

On the strength of this advice, Gemmell became a journalist. Ordered to write a feature about a circus, he persuaded the lion tamer to let him watch a training session and put his head in the lion's mouth. "I have never smelt anything so foul as the breath of a big cat. It was almost toxic," he wrote. Gemmell graduated to freelancing for the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Express, and for a time edited newspapers in East Sussex, progressing to editor-in-chief and finally managing editor. He became a full-time writer in 1986 after being sacked for using the names of people he worked with in his hugely-successful third novel, Waylander. "The managing director," Gemmell reflected, "regarded it as a poisonous attack on his integrity." His most recent books were two historical novels about the siege of Troy, Lord of the Silver Bow (2005) and Shield of Thunder, which is due to be published next month. He recently delivered 70,000 words of the last in the trilogy.

Gemmell, who described himself as a psychopathic workaholic, could turn out a book in 20 weeks. He once tried to take a year off to give up smoking, quit - and found he could not write a line. Four months later, he trudged sadly into a newsagents and bought 20 Benson and Hedges. "The writing," he noted, "is now flowing".

He ignored reviews, some of which were very bad, preferring to think of the many readers who wrote telling him how his books helped them to endure life.

David Gemmell underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery a fortnight ago and had appeared to be making a good recovery, vehemently dismissing his editor's suggestion that he take it easy for a couple of months. He is survived by his wife Stella and a son and a daughter.

The Independent : John Clute (02/08/06)

David Andrew Gemmell, writer: born London 1 August 1948; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Udimore, East Sussex 28 July 2006. David Gemmell took only a few years of his life to construct a large career as an author of noir heroic fantasies, publishing his first novel, Legend, as recently as 1984. At least 30 followed, most of them burly, none of them careless. In a form of popular literature terribly prone to trash and repetition, his work was consistently tough-minded, energetically bleak, and solitudinous. His favourite protagonists are loners. They used to do something else, but this is what they do now: they fight to the last inch to save worlds not worth saving.

So successful was Gemmell at giving this kind of tale a personal fingerprint that, when his first publisher, Random House, relaunched its SF and fantasy list in 1988 under a new name, the new name was Legend. (When Orbit took the list over, he left Legend amicably.) Sales figures are hard to determine for writers in the midst of their careers, but Gemmell was certainly one of those - along with David Eddings (the likeness in the two names caused occasional mix-ups), Raymond Feist, Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin - whose titles sold in the millions.

Gemmell was born in London in 1948, growing up in a wide-boy culture dominated by violence, as he often attested, though he himself (as he might have put it) had a silver tongue, and survived. All the same, he was expelled from school at the age of 16 for gambling; and he had a wide range of job experiences of the sort that might fill the pages of a postwar British romanticist of the London demi-monde like Colin MacInnes or Gerald Kersh. He worked as a labourer, a driver's assistant, a bouncer, and much else.

In the 1960s he began to do freelance work for London tabloids, eventually becoming editor-in-chief of a small South Coast chain of papers. He wrote at least one novel which was deemed unpublishable, and may have been. He made it clear - though he was reticent on details - that he lived heavy. One habit he acquired almost certainly killed him: for almost all his life (including his final hours) he was a 40-cigarette-a-day man. From 1984 until his death, the main thing Gemmell did was work. Many prolific authors ease their way through two or three books a year by creating reader-friendly series - in the world of fantasy they often involve detailed descriptions of similar lives led in similar kingdoms ruled by dynasties whose interactions are soap-operatic - and by spending a lot of time changing the guard at Buckingham Palace: focusing on ceremonies and sideshows. Gemmell would have none of this. Exhaustingly, he put his bleak, weathered, veteran soldiers into extreme situations where inattention might cost a life, or a war; and he did so with a style which, though sometimes crude, conveyed with unfaltering intensity the cost of action.

He strongly admired the English author of literary fantasy Robert Holdstock, whose own mythopoetic story-arches often open to reveal, at their heart, a stress-blackened warrior who might have stepped out of the fantasyland Gemmell called Drenai. Both authors, who were born the same year, share a stubbornness common among writers who began to work in the 1960s: a sense that it was still worth the candle to tell large stories, even during a time when the huge cultural and financial costs of winning the Second World War were still being paid.

The 11-volume Drenai Saga, of which Legend is the first instalment, typically gathers a group of adventurers around the ageing, war-weary Druss the Axeman, who must defend a pithless declining empire from foes whose resources are unquenchable; the long recounting of Druss's bloodied holding of pass after pass reads a bit like news from the Russian Front in 1944.

Through all of this, Druss (who is already 60) knows he will not live to see the war won. The series is filled with fantasy characters, mages and undead and supernaturally gifted antagonists, but in the end the Gemmell work ethic undercuts any escapes implied by magic. The Gemmell hero must accept his lot. He knows he will lose, that the gods are not friendly, that he is mortal. For those reasons, he fights all the harder. It is not surprising that Gemmell's last, uncompleted series was to be a full, dramatic reconstruction in fictional terms of the Trojan War.

The first draft of the book which eventually became Legend was written while Gemmell believed he was dying of cancer. Perhaps because further omens of serious illness continued to haunt him, he spent the rest of his life working as though there were no tomorrow.

He married well; his second wife, Stella, and two children survive him. He was known for his generosity to other writers. But he was clearly driven to do one thing. At one point he gave up smoking for a few months, but doing so killed his ability to write, so he began again.

Last Wednesday, he left hospital after quadruple bypass surgery. On Friday, he died in front of his word processor. He had already gone back to work.

The Guardian (Chris Priest 02/08/06)

David Gemmell, the popular British author of heroic fantasy, has died suddenly at the age of 57. His writing career began as the result of a misdiagnosis of cancer in the early 1980s. With great energy he threw himself into the task of writing a novel before he died, determined to beat what he believed to be a terminal illness.

He wrote the book with speed and enthusiasm, working habits that soon became established. That first novel was Legend, published in 1984. It was an immediate success, and established Gemmell as the pre-eminent author in this particular genre of fantasy. With the mistaken diagnosis set aside, and the extraordinary success of this title (the book was later adapted as a graphic novel, and his publishers even renamed their fantasy imprint Legend), Gemmell settled down to producing novels on a regular basis. Over the next two decades he wrote more than 30 long novels. Most of these form part of several series of linked titles, although there are a few, similar, standalone novels. He wrote one conventional thriller, under the pseudonym Ross Harding. He was working on the final book in his Troy series (fantasies of alternative history) when he died.

David Gemmell was born in west London, and had a tough, troubled urban upbringing, reacting against the unwelcome presence in his life of a stepfather. He was expelled from school in his teens, apparently for organising a gambling syndicate. He found work as a labourer, then as a lorry-driver's mate. In the evenings he worked as a nightclub bouncer.

By the time he was in his mid-30s and writing his first novels, Gemmell was a journalist working for a chain of newspapers on the south coast of England, editing three of them. He also worked as a stringer for national newspapers. He wrote fiction during his lunch breaks, but also presumably during company time, because after the third book he was fired. He remained in East Sussex for the rest of his life, freelancing as a writer. The many thousands of admirers of his books particularly relished his storytelling ability and the quirky, believable characters he created. He was an unabashed entertainer, who made few pretentious claims about his books, all of which are driven by strong narrative, muscular and sometimes didactic prose and a series of violent or difficult encounters, often resolved by physical action or heroics. Gemmell said that he knew and understood violent men, which was why he enjoyed writing about them.

In his novels, typically, a self-doubting but charismatic warrior, together with a group of unlikely companions, overcomes the forces of darkness in a series of violent but often pyrrhic encounters. Gemmell once summed up the content of his novels with these words: "Love, friendship, honour, courage and redemption". He was fascinated by what he saw as the true nature of heroes (he believed them to be unreliably heroic), and this ambivalence runs through almost everything he wrote.

Like all successful novelists, he had his detractors. His critics complained of the repetitive nature of his plots, and the restricted, if colourful, vocabulary. Violent events occur in all his books, and generally provide the sole impetus for plot development. Gemmell was a generic writer within a specialised and somewhat esoteric genre of fiction: the sort of book you might imagine would be classified as "heroic fantasy" was exactly what he wrote, without innovation or noticeable individualism.

The ambivalence extended to his life. At first sight a conservative man, he was an advocate of capital punishment, a devout Christian, a collector of Louis L'Amour westerns, and an admirer of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone. But this was only one side of him. His background, through his mother, was socialist. After he became wealthy, Gemmell quietly supported many small charities and good causes. He gave generously to a women's refuge and to a rehab programme for young addicts, and he did much to encourage novice writers. In Hastings, where he made his home, he revived the fortunes and aspirations of the local writers' group, and established a short story prize, administered in Hastings but open to all comers. The Legend competition is still held annually. Gemmell always took an active role in the final judging and award ceremony.

He travelled often, and was visiting Alaska when the first signs of his final illness became apparent. He flew home at once, checked into a private hospital in London and underwent surgery for a quadruple heart bypass. Within two days of the operation he was taking physical exercise, and went home as soon as he was able. He resumed work on his novel, and when he died he was found slumped in front of his computer. He was a restless and fatalistic man, who enjoyed life and embraced the fruits of material success. He believed he had much more to achieve and would probably have recognised the appropriateness of such a prolific writer dying in harness, his work unfinished.

He is survived by his wife, Stella, and two adult children, Luke and Kate, by his first wife.

• David Andrew Gemmell, fantasy novelist, born August 1 1948; died July 28 2006