The prolific author Julian Rathbone was a writer of crime stories, mysteries and thrillers who also turned his hand to the historical novel, science fiction and even horror — and much of his writing had strong political and social dimensions.

He was difficult to pigeonhole because his scope was so broad. Arguably, his experiment with different genres and thus his refusal to be typecast cost him a wider audience than he enjoyed. Just as his subject matter changed markedly over the years, so too did his readers and his publishers.

Among his more than 40 books two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Both were historical novels: first King Fisher Lives, a taut adventure revolving around a guru figure, in 1976, and, secondly, Joseph, set during the Peninsular War and written in an 18th-century prose style, in 1979. But Rathbone never quite made it into the wider public consciousness.

One of the Booker judges of King Fisher Lives, which contains episodes of incest and cannibalism, was Mary Wilson — the wife of the Prime Minister Harold Wilson — who was said to be horrified by its sexual content.

Rathbone did win various other literary accolades including a Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger and the Deutsche Krimi Preis.

Julian Christopher Rathbone was born in 1935 in Blackheath, southeast London. His great-uncle was the actor and great Sherlock Holmes interpreter Basil Rathbone, although they never met. He was brought up in Liverpool until he was 5 when war broke out and he and his parents moved to North Wales. He was educated at Clayesmore School, Dorset, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read English and took tutorials with F. R. Leavis. Rathbone was far from being in agreement with the narrow-minded Leavis view of letters, but respected his intellect.

After university he lived in Turkey for three years where he taught English and learnt about Third World poverty at first hand. While there he learnt that his father had died in a road accident — an episode he later turned into a novel, Blame Hitler (1997) — and returned to comfort his mother. Back in England he worked as a supply teacher in London and taught in a Camden secondary school until 1967 when his first thriller, Diamonds Bid, set in Turkey, was published. He moved to Sussex and became head of English at a comprehensive school in Bognor Regis, writing three more books with a Turkish background.

By 1973 he was able to take up writing full-time. He eloped to Spain with Alayne Pullen, 18 years his junior, who was later to become his wife, and they lived in Salamanca for several years. There he wrote Lying in State, an invention about a series of tape recordings made by Juan Perón, the Argentinian dictator, which he gave to a friend before he died. This novel, based on a true story, was included in its entirety in The Indispensable Julian Rathbone (published by the Do-Not Press), an anthology of the author’s writings, including extracts from his novels, journalism, reminiscences and poems, published in 2003.

Rathbone created four characters who were to appear in more than one book. Inspector Jan Argand was the first in The Euro-Killers (1979), Base Case (1981) and Watching the Detectives (1983). Renate Fechter, in charge of a German group of eco-police, appears in Accidents Will Happen (1997) and Brandenburg Concerto (1998). And Chris Shovelin, a private eye, appears in Homage (2001) and As Bad as It Gets (2003).

The Joseph of his novel of the same name moves from the era of the Napoleonic Wars to reappear in the world of German exiles in Victorian London as Charlie Boylan in A Very English Agent (2002) and then as Eddie Bosham in the United States in Birth of a Nation (2004).

Rathbone’s range of subject matter was broad. As a thinker of the Left with a concern for poverty and class division, an acute sense of social injustice and a distrust of authority, he examined the use of food as a weapon of superpowers in ZDT (1986) and The Pandora Option (1990), and in Sand Blind (1993), about the First Gulf War, he considered the malevolence of the mighty in creating conflict to test new weapons and feed their insatiable consumer needs.

The novel that sold particularly well and that might have made his fortune had the option for it to be made into a film ever been taken up was Rathbone’s take on 1066, The Last English King (1997), about Harold Godwin and the English Saxons’ last stand at the Battle of Hastings.

Among his forays into non-fiction, Rathbone made a notable contribution in Wellington’s War (1984) to understanding the Peninsular War and the genius of the Iron Duke.

What comes across in the writing is a dry, cynical, sophisticated mind grappling with a corrupt world. James Joyce was his idol, but Graham Greene was the writer whose influence is most clearly detectable in Rathbone’s writing. A framed letter from Greene praising Lying in State hung in his study.

Rathbone was an atheist who, like many a thoughtful human being before him, had undergone a religious phase in his youth only to have a sudden realisation, on being dazzled by the yellow autumn leaves on some chestnut trees, that “this is life. It begins and ends right here with what you’ve got.” It was an epiphany, he said years later. “I never worry about whether my works will be read posthumously.”

Rathbone was a fierce-looking man with a charming manner and an equable temperament who was popular among those who knew him. He was a bit of a dandy who often sported loud ties and a trademark trilby. He relished once overhearing a youth say to another while passing him in a Nottingham street: “Look at that; that’s style.”

After Spain Rathbone and his wife lived for some time in France before eventually settling on the edge of the New Forest, just in Dorset, where they brought up two children.

He is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.

Julian Rathbone, writer, was born on February 10, 1935. He died after a long illness on February 28, 2008, aged 73