Something is missing from Patrick O'Brian's "Master and Commander" novels - the obligatory "About the Author" blurb on the dust jacket.

No wonder. A single paragraph could never give justice to O'Brian's singular life.

He was born Richard Patrick Russ in 1914 in London (not Ireland), and died in 2000 at age 85. His life included secrets he did not want to share: a name change, the abandonment of a wife and children, service as a British intelligence agent during World War II and estrangement from his grown son and siblings.

O'Brian's father was a London physician who enjoyed experiments and inventions more than treating patients and who frittered away a family fortune. His mother died when he was 3, and the lonely boy took to reading and writing. His first book was published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1930, when he was only 16.

"Caesar," a best-selling children's adventure book, was about an animal that was half-panda and half-leopard. Other books quickly followed. By 1938, the New York Times Book Review gushed that this young author had "mastered the art of spinning an Oriental yarn" and that "if a better elephant story has been written we had the misfortune to miss it."

O'Brian married young to a woman who was almost illiterate. Shortly before World War II, after just three years of marriage, he abandoned her and his two children. Perhaps that pain caused him later to pen the haunting words in an Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin novel: "You do something profoundly dishonorable and you've killed something, you've killed a part of your honor."

His writing career was interrupted by the war, in which he served first as an ambulance driver in London during the blitz and later as a British intelligence agent.

While working as an ambulance driver, he fell in love with another driver, Mary Tolstoy, the wife of a Russian prince. At the war's end, they both endured bitter divorces and married just 10 days after O'Brian's divorce became final. This second marriage lasted 52 years, until Mary's death in 1998. They spent most of their married life in southern France.

Along with a new wife and life came a new name. Despite some name recognition as Patrick Russ, he officially became O'Brian.

Again he achieved critical success. His book "Testimonies" was praised in the New York Times Book Review as a "rare and beautiful novel." Other reviews compared him favorably with Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.

He put food on the table translating French works into English. He translated most of Simone de Beauvoir's books, and his translation of Henri Charriere's "Papillon" became an international best seller. His biography of Pablo Picasso (whom he knew) is considered one of the best.

Yet O'Brian did not find his literary calling until he wrote "Master and Commander" at age 52.

While he loved researching and writing this historical novel, sales weren't initially overwhelming. O'Brian churned out book after book, most originally selling between 5,000 and 10,000 copies.

Then, on Jan. 6, 1991, the editor of American Heritage wrote in the New York Times Book Review that O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books were the "best historical novels ever written." Reviewers in the Chicago Tribune dropped the word "historical" and praised him as "the best novelist in the world." At age 76, he had arrived. Critics compared him not just with C. S. Forester (the creator of the Horatio Hornblower nautical adventures) but with Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad.

In a phenomenal burst of late-life creativity, he wrote the last 11 Master and Commander" books between the ages of 70 and 85. After years of writing in near obscurity, the publication of an O'Brian novel became a semi-annual literary event in London, and his books were fixtures on British and American best-seller lists. The director of development at the San Diego Maritime Museum even named a son after Jack Aubrey.

In 1995, with 17 Aubrey-Maturin novels written and three still to come, O'Brian met his main character's namesake during a book tour in the United States. He took the boy in his arms, lifted him into the air, and said, smiling, "Oh, Jack Aubrey, I have waited so long and traveled so far to meet you!"

To the end, his novels carried no "About the Author" blurb. In the age of Oprah, he had successfully guarded his privacy with the tenacity and cunning of a convicted felon in a Rotary Club.