Alexander Fullerton

Alexander Fullerton (1924–2008) was a British author of naval and other fiction. Born in 1924 in Suffolk and brought up in France, he was a cadet during the years 1938–1941 at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth from the age of thirteen. He went to sea serving first in the battleship Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean, and spent the rest of the war at sea – mostly under it, in submarines.

Alexander Fullerton's first novel - Surface!, based on his experiences as gunnery and torpedo officer of HM Submarine Seadog in the Far East, 1944–1945, in which capacity he was mentioned in despatches for distinguished service - was published in 1953. It became an immediate bestseller, with five reprints in six weeks, and sold over 500,000 copies. He has lived solely on his writing since 1967, and is claimed (by his publishers) to be one of the most borrowed authors from British libraries.