James Vance Marshall author page

James Vance Marshall biography

James Vance Marshall was a pseudonym of Donald Gordon Payne, an English author of adventure novels and travel books. He was born in London in January 1924 and was educated at Dulwich College Preparatory School and Charterhouse School. During childhood he travelled with his parents to New Zealand and parts of Australia’s east coast, experiences connected with his later writing about those places.

Payne deferred a place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm in 1943. He trained at Sealand and Kingston, Ontario, gained his wings, and served as a Swordfish pilot with Squadrons 811 and 835 on Atlantic and Russian convoys in 1944 and 1945. After the war he studied at Oxford, worked as an editor and ghost writer for Christopher Johnson, and then became a full-time writer.

As James Vance Marshall, Payne wrote Walkabout, a survival novel about Mary and Peter, two children stranded after a plane crash in the Australian outback, and an Aboriginal boy who helps them find food and water. Walkabout was published in 1959, and a later NYRB Classics edition was published on 17 January 2012 with an introduction by Lee Siegel.

Payne also wrote A River Ran Out of Eden in 1962 and White-Out in 1999 under the James Vance Marshall name. He used the pseudonym Ian Cameron for The Lost Ones, The Mountain at the Bottom of the World and The White Ship, and he used the name Donald Gordon for Riders of the Storm, a 2002 official history of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.