Somehow lawyers don’t seem to make as successful novelists as doctors (or even vets or ex-jockeys), writes James Morton.

Certainly, there have been some notable exceptions; in the 19th century, Harrison Ainsworth, Anthony Hope and R S Surtees, although they are more or less forgotten now. Nicholas Monsarrat and, in this generation, Frances Fyfield also spring to mind. Another who made the transition was John Brennan, who wrote as John Welcome and who died last year.

Born in 1914, Welcome, son of a Wexford solicitor, was educated mainly in England, first at Sedbergh and then at Exeter College, Oxford. There he hunted and, on his own admission, did little work as he read law. Back in Ireland, he was dismayed to find his was regarded as a ‘foreign degree’, which required him to serve three years of articles instead of just one.

In WW2, he served in the Royal Artillery, but in 1943 both his parents were killed in a fire and he returned to the family law firm to practise law, albeit reluctantly, for 40 years.

Relief came in his continuing interest in National Hunt racing and, through this, his real release from the law came in 1949, with his first novel Red Coats Galloping. He thought, if it was published under his own name, people would think he was neglecting the law practice. The first novel was followed by a string of racing thrillers, anthologies with his friend Dick Francis and biographies of racing personalities, such as the 19th-century jockey Fred Archer and owner-gambler Bob Siever. Suitably, he also wrote the biography of Surtees, a barrister who disliked the law intensely.

Welcome’s most successful novel came in 1976 with the bestselling Grand National, an early example of the blockbuster, in which, for one reason or another, the characters all needed to win the great race. It is a great read, but I’ve always thought his best was Bellary Bay, set in Kerry during the Irish War of Independence. Not too many literary or film characters rise from the grave – Dixon of Dock Green and Madigan spring to mind – but that’s what happened to its hero Stephen Raymond. Killed at the end of the hardback edition of the novel, the publishers wanted him alive for the paperback, and he appeared again in A Call to Arms. But fashions in fiction change and, sadly, Welcome could never find a publisher for the last of his trilogy.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor.