FEW recent novelists have enjoyed so successful a career as Ted Allbeury, writer of more than 40 popular books. The achievement was all the more remarkable since he was already 56 when he wrote his first novel.

A Choice of Enemies (1973) was set in occupied Germany and based directly on Allbeury’s wartime experiences in the Allied military government. It was written at a time of great unhappiness in his personal life, almost as therapy and with no intention of seeking publication. But a colleague showed the manuscript to the publisher Peter Davies, and it became an immediate success, setting the benchmark for his spy stories. He became so prolific — at one point producing four novels a year — that he also wrote under two pen names, Richard Butler and Patrick Kelly.

Allbeury was consistently one of the authors most borrowed from public libraries, and always received the maximum payment under the public lending right, on one occasion receiving a penny more than Barbara Cartland, a statistic in which he took great delight.

His style was direct and fast-moving, with the good guy usually winning. Unlike other spy writers, his principal concern was with characters. The gadgets were there, but only ever in a supporting role. His descriptions of the countries in which the action took place always had the ring of authenticity, and readers were amazed to learn that he had never been to most of the places he wrote about.

His research technique was simple and effective. He studied in great detail the places he was intending to set a novel in, studying books, maps, diaries and memoirs. He used radio and satellite receivers to watch the domestic programmes of the countries concerned, and was helped in this by his ability to learn foreign languages readily. He could get by in French, German, Russian and Italian as well as Swahili and Amharic. He made few notes, committing his research to memory. He wrote all his novels in longhand using a pencil.

Of his many books his favourite, and perhaps his best, was The Lantern Network (1978). A story of the Special Operations Executive in occupied France, with a linking story set in the London of the 1970s, it showed Allbeury at his most fluent.

It had sympathetically drawn characters and a mystery that endured to the end of the book. It was not difficult to see Allbeury in its leading character, Nicholas Bailey. Bailey was Allbeury’s mother’s maiden name.

Theodore Edward Le Boutillier Allbeury was born in Stockport during the First World War. His father died in Africa when Allbeury was 5, and with his mother and sister he moved first to Birmingham and later to Ilford in Essex. His secondary education began at Ilford County High School and concluded at King Edward’s Grammar School, Aston, when the family finally returned to Birmingham. The school is within earshot of Villa Park and it was clandestine trips there that confirmed Allbeury as a lifelong, though low-profile, supporter of Aston Villa.

His first job on leaving school was in the drawing office of an iron foundry, his early talent for drawing having been recognised by a neighbour who worked for the company. At the outbreak of war he replied to an advertisement in The Times recruiting linguists for special work in the Army. He was interviewed in the back room of a barber’s shop off Trafalgar Square — a meeting so bizarre that it intrigued him all his life and was worked into many of his books in one guise or another.

Once accepted, he promptly taught himself basic French and German, and joined the Intelligence Corps as a private. He served in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Italy, and then in Germany as an officer in the Allied military government. He left the Army in 1947 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel and returned briefly to his prewar job in the foundry.

He also ran his own advertising agency, J. W. Southcombe. By this time he had a well- recognised ability as a copywriter and photographer, which, in later life, he regarded as his lifeline if his books suddenly failed to sell. But in the early 1960s he gave it all up to farm chickens on the Isle of Oxney in Kent, which incidentally allowed him the opportunity to achieve another ambition — breeding German Shepherd dogs. He showed at Crufts on a number of occasions and once won a place in his class.

In truth, Allbeury was never suited to farming, and he returned to advertising by starting a PR company with a friend. In 1965 the company was involved in promoting a pirate radio station, King Radio, which broadcast from a disused fort in the Thames Estuary.

Allbeury decided that a different approach entirely was needed, so he bought out the shareholders, changed the format to sweet music aimed at women and named it Radio 390, from the wavelength on which it broadcast. It was immediately successful, as was Allbeury’s own weekly programme of nostalgic music, Red Sands Rendezvous. This he compiled in the living room of his house in Chelsea, and despite the King’s Road traffic clearly audible in the background he received many fan letters saying how brave it was of him to go out in all weathers to the fort.

Radio 390’s last broadcast was on August 15, 1967, when, along with all the other pirate radio stations, it was closed under the Marine Offences Act. He stood for election in 1968 as Liberal candidate for Petersfield, but narrowly lost. He returned to PR.

In a biographical note he once listed “several wives” among his educational influences. But in 1974 he met and married Grazyna, who was the love of his life. They were happily married until her death in 1999.

He is survived by a son and three daughters.

Ted Allbeury, novelist, was born on October 24, 1917. He died on December 4, 2005, aged 88.