Clavell won a Writers Guild Best Screenplay Award for the 1963 film The Great Escape. Clavell scripted the grisly science-fiction horror film The Fly and wrote a war film, Five Gates to Hell. In 1953, Clavell and his wife emigrated to the United States and settled down in Hollywood. In addition Peter Marlowe was said to be very important to Clavell as a character due to reports that Clavell suffered great mental anguish after his stay in Changi prison and wrote King Rat to deal with his experiences and memories of the time. Ancestors of the character Peter Marlowe are also mentioned in other Clavell novels. He is a thinly veiled fictionalization of Clavell placed inside his own works. In Noble House, set two decades later, he is a novelist researching a book about Hong Kong. Featured much more prominently in King Rat, he is an English FEPOW in Changi prison during World War II. Peter Marlowe is a character in the Clavell novels King Rat and Noble House, although he is also mentioned once as a friend of Andrew Gavallan, in the novel Whirlwind. He enrolled at the University of Birmingham, where he met April Stride, an actress, whom he married in 1951. Clavell was reportedly saved, along with an entire battalion, by an American prisoner of war who later became the model for 'The King' in Clavell's King Rat.īy 1946, Clavell had risen to the rank of Captain, but a motorcycle accident ended his military career. According to the introduction to King Rat, written by Clavell's daughter Michaela, over 90 percent of the prisoners who entered Changi never walked out. Changi was notorious for its poor living conditions.

Later he was transferred to Changi Prison in Singapore.Ĭlavell suffered greatly at the hands of his Japanese captors.

Wounded by machine gun fire, he was eventually captured and sent to a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Java. In 1940, when Clavell finished his secondary schooling at Portsmouth Grammar School, he joined the Royal Artillery to follow his family tradition.įollowing the outbreak of World War II, at the age of 16 he joined the Royal Artillery in 1940, and was sent to Malaya to fight the Japanese. His characters often serve as examples of these virtues.Ĭlavell was the son of Commander Richard Clavell, a British Royal Navy officer who was stationed in Australia on secondment from the Royal Navy to the Royal Australian Navy. Coming of age during the era of World War II, Clavell rejected fascism and communitarianism in favor of the virtues of capitalism and freedom.

An admirer of Ayn Rand, Clavell embraced the ethic of individualism.

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