My friend Chris Peachment, who has died aged 74, was a journalist, art critic and author who wrote for the Times and Independent newspapers, as well as historical fiction and thrillers.
In the early 1980s he was film editor of the London listings magazine Time Out, where I worked with him as a senior subeditor. I soon learned that if you changed a comma in his copy there would probably be consequences – but then you mostly didn’t need to.
Chris was born at RAF Gatwick, West Sussex, to Peggy (nee Bunse) and Wg Cmdr Gower Peachment. He followed his father into the RAF when he left school, but after various unsettling incidents as a trainee pilot, decided that being an airman was not for him. Later, though, it bequeathed him an affectionate nickname, The Wingco.
Leaving the RAF in 1970, he completed a one year stage-management course at the Central School of Speech and Drama, and afterwards became a stage manager at the Citizens theatre in Glasgow before joining the Royal Court theatre in London, where he was involved backstage in putting on the world premiere of the Rocky Horror Show in 1973, as well as plays for Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard.
Changing tack in the mid-70s, he became a student at University College, London, gaining a first-class degree in English literature before moving into journalism as an arts critic. That led to Time Out in the 80s then other editorial positions on the Times and Sunday Correspondent newspapers.
Macmillan published two of Chris’s historical fictions, Caravaggio: A Novel (2002) and The Green and the Gold (2003), the latter about the elusive poet Andrew Marvell. He also provided waspish columns in the late 90s for the Erotic Review before leaving London with his wife, Vivien, for Crete, where he relished the kinder climate and tavernas. He kept writing, self-publishing brisk thrillers, and indulged his passion for building scale models of early – and complex – aeroplanes.
An essentially private person, Chris patrolled that reserve with a self-deprecating but always astringent humour. He was erudite about the arts and music, not to mention the precision of a Ferrari V12 engine, and never wore his knowledge with condescension, whether discussing the Renaissance development of linear perspective in art or the aerodynamics of a P-51 Mustang’s laminar-flow wing section.
Before his death Chris became a Catholic; he desired answers to many questions that he felt were but partially answered by philosophy, science and technology.
Vivien survives him.
