John Gordon Davis

John Gordon Davis (21 January 1936 – 5 November 2014) was a Southern Rhodesian writer of adventure novels. The worldwide success of his first published novel, Hold My Hand I'm Dying, prompted him to become a full-time writer.

Education and early occupations Of Welsh heritage, Gordon Davis was born in the town of Enkeldoorn in Southern Rhodesia (now Chivhu, Zimbabwe), to John Gordon-Davis and Iris Tilly. His father, the local bank manager, had grown up in Colesberg, South Africa, where his own father was at one time mayor. John Junior went to school at Bishops in Cape Town, matriculated at Umtata High School in the Transkei and obtained a BA in Political Science from Rhodes University in Grahamstown. While a student, he joined the Seaman's Union. He paid his tuition fees by working as a deckhand in the British Merchant Navy for two years, sailing around much of the world, and by joining the Dutch whaling fleet in the Antarctic. His experiences at sea later served as inspiration for his whaling novels Cape of Storms (1970) and Leviathan (1976).

Gordon Davis travelled widely as a graduate, at times accompanied by his then girlfriend Patti Dougherty. He travelled around the Americas, worked for a spell at a gold mine in Northern Canada, practised law in Toronto and hitch-hiked and drove around the United States. He also worked as a steward on the Union-Castle Line and the Cunard Line, and hitch-hiked through the Australian Outback. Whilst working as a clerk for the chief justice back in Rhodesia and going on circuit with him, Gordon Davis obtained a bachelor's degree in Law from the University of South Africa. He was called to the bar, working as assistant public prosecutor in the Magistrate's Courts in the years ahead of Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. He next became Crown Counsel in the Attorney General's Chambers.

Move to Hong Kong and switch to full-time writing Moving to Hong Kong in 1966, Gordon Davis worked there as Crown Counsel during the political and social upheaval of the Cultural Revolution in nearby China.

Residence in Spain Gordon Davis met his first wife, Patzi, in Hong Kong; they married in or before 1973. In that year, finding Hong Kong to be too expensive and not wanting to live in war-torn Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa, Gordon Davis moved to Spain with his wife. He bought a finca with a river running through it on the outskirts of Coín, a town near the coast in Andalusia, and had the property restored. He and Patzi separated in 1976, and in 1978 he married Rosemary, who was from Australia. Through the '70s, '80s and '90s he wrote thirteen more published novels. In addition, he wrote the non-fiction account Operation Rhino (1972) about the capture and transport of wild rhinos to a Rhodesian game reserve to protect them from poachers; a rescue operation that Gordon Davis was involved with. He and Rosemary divided their time between Spain and travelling, sailing around most of the world in a succession of yachts. From his home, after retiring from publishing novels, Gordon Davis taught a residential course in fiction writing for aspiring as well as published authors. The Times described Gordon Davis as being 'in the top echelon of international storytellers'.

His novels did not always impress the critics, with Kirkus Reviews describing Fear no Evil (1982) as 'nother loud, ineffectual Message novel' by Gordon Davis.

Published works , novel set in Rhodesia in the lead-up to the Bush War; adapted as a 1988 film titled Blind Justice, a.k.a. Hold My Hand I'm Dying , non-fiction book of colour photographs of Hong Kong by Ted Smart and Pat Fok, with accompanying text by John Gordon Davis , novel set on a whaling ship in the Antarctic , non-fiction account, set in Rhodesia, of the capture of wild black rhinos and their transport to the Gonarezhou game reserve to protect them from poachers , novel set in Hong Kong, charting the political tensions between British rule and communism , novel about an elephant hunter and his confrontation with a fearsome elephant known as Dhlulamiti , novel about a film-maker who sets out to save whales by sabotaging whaling ships , novel about the Triads secret criminal society in Hong Kong , novel set in the United States about a clandestine plot to release circus and zoo animals into the wild , novel in which Joseph Mahoney, the protagonist of Hold My Hand I'm Dying, has moved to England and builds a plane with the intention to revolutionise commercial flying , novel about a worldwide conspiracy that goes to the top of seemingly respectable governments and religious institutions , novel about a neo-Nazi plot in South West Africa (present-day Namibia) , novel about a woman living alone on an isolated farm in the Australian outback , novel; a political epic set in apartheid South Africa , novel set in Hong Kong in the last year of British rule , novel around South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission