Brian Cleeve was born in Essex of a Limerick family in 1921, and settled in Dublin in
the mid-1950s.
His
short fiction includes The Horse Thieves of Ballsaggert (Cork, Mercier Press 1966).
His novels include Far Hills (London, Jarrolds, 1953); Portrait of My City (Jarrolds,
1953);
Birth of a Dark Soul (Jarrolds, 1953, published in Boston as The Night Winds,
[Houghton Mifflin, 1954]); Assignment to Vengeance (London, Hammond, 1961);
Death of a Painted Lady (London, Hammond 1962); Death of a Wicked Servant
(London, Hammond 1963); Vote X for Treason (London, Collins 1964); Dark Blood,
Dark Terror (Hammond, 1966); Violent Death of a Bitter Englishman (New York,
Random House, 1967; London, Corgi 1969); Exit from Prague (London, Corgi 1970;
in America as Escape from Prague [New York, Pinnacle Books 1973]); Cry of Morning,
A Novel of Modern Ireland (London, Michael Joseph, 1971); Tread Softly in This Place
(London, Cassell 1972); The Dark Side of the Sun (Cassell, 1973); A Question of
Inheritance (Cassell, 1974); and A Woman of Fortune (Dingle, Brandon 1993).
He edited A Dictionary of Irish Writers, Volume 1 (Cork, Mercier 1967);
Volume 2 (Mercier, 1969); Volume 3 (Mercier 1971); and with Ann Brady,
A Dictionary of Irish Writers, revised edition in one volume
(Dublin, The Lilliput Press, 1985). He also published a number of
mystical books in the 1980s. He died in 2003.