Writer crafted novels for seven decades

Very few writers can boast of publishing novels across seven decades, let alone maintaining a loyal readership in that time.

Jon Cleary could, selling more than eight million books and winning fans from You Can't See Round Corners in 1947 to Four-Cornered Circle, his 56th title, released in his 90th year. It is an astonishing record of creative production, especially when you add to it his copious film and television scriptwriting.

Now the faithful if suitably battered 1948 Olympia typewriter on which he wrote most of those works is still. Cleary died on Monday, aged 92. For the past three years, he had been frail and house-bound, attended by a full-time carer, "glad to be retired, and pleased I don't have to do anything any more". In and out of hospital with age-related heart problems and with his steel-trap memory stalling, he was stoic and sustained by his faith, awaiting what he called "the great silence".

Full report here Australian