Watch a trailer for the 1971 movie of The French Connection

Robin Moore’s subjects as a writer included Pope John Paul II and the notorious former call girl, Xaviera Hollander with whom he wrote The Happy Hooker. In 1969 he wrote the novel, The French Connection, on which the acclaimed film was based.

He was born in Boston in 1925, and, after high school, his taste for an adventurous life brought wartime service with the Air Force. After manning guns above Germany, he studied at Harvard, graduating in 1949 and turning to television production in Manhattan.

That career was not boosted by using its shenanigans for a novel, Pitchman (1956), and he was taken on to work for the Sheraton hotel business, which his father had co-founded, to work for its Caribbean business.

Moore promptly found himself in the company of Fidel Castro, whose revolutionary forays he described in The Devil to Pay (1961) and, from Jamaica, he ran a small airline which did not balk at ferrying guns around the islands.

A contrary spirit, Moore fell out of love with the Sheraton hotel group, and a later novel The Fifth Estate (1973) takes none too charitable a view of what he regarded as an industry which overlapped with the Mafia.

For a time Moore settled down to run a smallholding in Jamaica while writing schlock paperbacks. But hankering for wilder action than mucking out pigs, he trained with the US Army’s Green Berets whose Vietnam service yielded his multi-million selling The Green Berets (1965). This was further promoted by collaboration with an injured staff sergeant, Barry Sadler, on the rousingly patriotic song Ballad of the Green Berets in 1966. The Green Berets was made into a film, starring John Wayne, in 1968.

Never predictable, Moore then settled in Boston to write the biography (1968) of Arthur Fiedler, the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, before returning to Manhattan, where he learnt of the case in which a French television presenter was prevailed upon to drive a heroin-laden car to Manhattan. Briskly told, The French Connection (1969) was transformed into William Friedkin’s masterly, high-pressure 1971 film with Gene Hackman as the cop, Popeye Doyle and a chase scene to end them all.

Moore wrote again of drugs rackets, including collaborating with Barbara Fuca, a mobster’s wife, on Mafia Wife (1977). There followed book-length accounts of rackets in Iran, Dubai, Rhodesia and Moscow.

If as prescient as Graham Greene in eyeing a hot spot, his prose style was hardly as elegant, but served its purpose. At the New York Police Department’s Narcotic Department a “blue-uniformed sergeant scanned each entrant with sad eyes as though he had seen everything twice and wished that he didn’t have to again”.

Moore staved off the onset of Parkinson’s disease sufficiently to tour Afghanistan for his book The Hunt for Bin Laden (2003).

He is survived by his fifth wife, Helen, and by two daughters.

Robin Moore, writer, was born on October 31, 1925. He died on February 21, 2008, aged 82