If the true writer is an outsider, few have perfected this role as subtly as Brian Moore, whose finest work was always marked by his surest personal qualities: intelligence, curiosity and an abiding sense of justice.
His sudden death on Monday at the age of 77 brings to a close a literary career which began more than 40 years ago with the publication of his outstanding debut, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in 1955. Although he left Ireland in 1948 - settling first in Canada and later in California, which became his home - this most detached of men never lost his Irishness and in time, was to admit he had come to see himself as an Irish writer.
Themes of guilt, sin and religion have always preoccupied him. "I'm interested in them as themes - I'm not obsessed. I'm interested in people who struggle with these things. But I have never suffered from them myself. I was never personally convinced by religion."
With the calmness of a man discussing his favourite TV show, he said "There is no such thing as heaven. I've never believed in God. I still don't. But I am certainly fascinated by those who do."
Calm, shrewd and opinionated, Moore was a self-exile who never made a campaign of having left his country. He was witty and relaxed, with a brisk, businesslike walk, natural good manners and an expressive, fine-boned face which made one think of a bird.
He could easily have been a spy, such was his quiet anonymity and ability to merge with the background, the best place from which to listen and observe.
He had come to view the oft-quoted reference to him as Graham Greene's "favourite living writer" as "a bit of an albatross", and while admitting to having disliked the grim, depressed Belfast of the 1930s, he spoke about his native city with respect rather than sentiment.
Above all, Moore - thrice-Booker short-listed - was the personification of the professional novelist, a worker-writer, a craftsman; not an artist, perhaps. Yet at his best, Moore always proved his versatility, with books as diverse as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965), I am Mary Dunne (1968); The Doctor's Wife, short-listed for the 1976 Booker Prize, Black Robe (1985), and his taut thriller, The Colour of Blood Booker short-listed in 1987.
His early books have echoes of the quiet, emotional explorations of William Trevor. But during the last 12 years of his life, from The Colour of Blood onwards - possibly due to his screenwriting skill - he was at home working within the political thriller genre.
It suited his cinematic eye and spare prose. With time, he became more interested in themes and issues than in character.
There was no temperament, no pretension. Neither an autobiographical nor a confessional writer, his attitude towards his work remained confident and practical.
The Statement - which he described as "a novel with a knife in it" - is a highly political book, openly taking on French history and the wartime crimes perpetrated by the Vichy government as well as the anti-Semitic attitudes of the Catholic church in France; but Moore stressed "I don't think novels do change the world."
He noted criticism without retreating into defensiveness. "No one likes getting a bad review," he once said to me. "And if you are not a best seller - and I'm not, I've never been one - a bad review is very damaging."
Born in Belfast in August 1921, Moore was the fourth child and second son in a doctor's family of nine children. He was raised in an atmosphere of conservative Catholicism mixed with staunch nationalism. His mother was a native Irish speaker from Donegal, while Eoin MacNeill, a founder of the Gaelic League and the Irish Volunteers, was an uncle by marriage.
Moore attended St Malachy's College - later immortalised in The Feast of Lupercal (1957) - where he was good at English and enjoyed writing essays. There he began reading fiction, discovering many of the writers who were to remain lifelong favourites: Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky.
Considering his regard for 19th century fiction, it is interesting that he never felt comfortable with a strong authorial presence and preferred his readers to interpret his stories without a helping nudge.
The family was comfortable, living in a fine house on Clifton Street, aware of being Catholic in a community of Protestants. Moore's father, the first Catholic to be elected to the Senate of Queen's University, was highly successful - "My father was a great getter of exams," he has said.
In time Dr Moore became the head surgeon of Belfast's Mater Hospital, situated across the road from Crumlin Road jail and just a few hundred yards away from the Moore home, which was demolished about three years ago.
Two of his brothers followed the family tradition and became doctors, but by the age of 20 Moore knew medicine was not for him. Disgusted then as he was to remain throughout his life by Ireland's neutrality, he set off for the war and volunteered in a civilian capacity as a non-conscript. Initially, serving with the British Ministry of War Transport, Moore developed his father's strongly anti-British sentiments.
He was posted to North Africa, moving on to Anzio, where he witnessed the Allied landings, and worked as a port clerk in Naples for two years before joining the United Nations relief and rehabilitation organisation in Warsaw.
He saw the invasion of southern France as well as the Russian retreat. At no time, either in interviews or through his work, did he draw on his wartime experiences as a way of glamorising himself. This is highly significant, both in understanding the man and appreciating the range and diversity of his fiction.
From Poland he went to Canada - though not in pursuit of a career. He had fallen in love with a Canadian economist, 10 years his senior. It was 1948. His love remained unrequited.
Moore was distressed, but not so devastated as to be unaware he was in a strange country with no job. On becoming a Canadian citizen, he started working as a proof-reader on a Montreal newspaper. This led to reporting, but it didn't take him too long to realise he was better at feature writing.
When a friend succeeded in having "a really dreadful novel" published, Moore decided to have a shot at fiction. So good is his fine first effort, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne - a novel which has never been out of print - that it does no disservice to Moore to say it remains one of his best, if not his best, book.
It is not a typical first novel. Far from being an account of angst-ridden adolescent sexuality, it is the moving story of a lonely, middle-aged spinster whose only hope of romance is thwarted by mutual delusion. It was born of a chance comment he overheard from a woman in conversation with his mother, who referred to "my brother-in-law who was to have been".
Excellent British reviews eased the novel on to the US market and Moore was on his way. The Feast of Lupercal was followed by An Answer from Limbo in 1962.
In 1990, I stood with Moore outside his old home, then a derelict building, time having added further damage to that done during the Blitz. It faced onto an equally derelict Orange hall, overlooked by a bronze statue of King Billy astride a horse up on the roof.
Moore looked at the house with a thoughtful, wry expression. He gave the impression of someone slowly adjusting a lens in order to refocus on something he thought he had forgotten but clearly had not. He could remember the former glory of what seemed to me to be a shabby, rundown street. "It used to be very busy, it was full of doctors' houses."
As a boy he had watched many of the annual Twelfth of July parades coming down the street to stop at the Orange hall "where the dignitaries had gathered". The Moore children stayed inside, peering through the windows.
There was a military barracks behind the old house, and a modest cemetery of which Moore remarked "Henry Joy McCracken is supposed to be buried there."
Five years later, in October 1995, Moore's controversial novel The Statement was published and he noted the unveiling of the first public memorial to the Society of United Irishmen in Belfast at that same Clifton Street cemetery. Members of the United Irishmen - William Drennan, Thomas McCabe, the Simms brothers - are buried there.
The grave by which the plaque is placed holds the remains of Mary Ann McCracken, described on her headstone as "the beloved sister of Henry Joy McCracken. Born 8 July; wept by her brother's scaffold 17 July 1798; died 26 July 1866". Moore spoke of her devotion to her brother and described it as "heroic, beyond love".
Despite a public campaign, efforts to preserve the Moore family home failed and its demolition that same year made way for a car park. So there will be no memorial plaque marking the birthplace of Brian Moore.
In some ways, this reflects the relatively low profile Moore has in Ireland. He really was one of those writers readers tended to forget until the arrival of a new book again alerted people to his presence.
Some of his better books, such as Black Robe, which examined the tensions affecting a community of missionary Jesuits in 17th century Canada, did not receive due praise. Others, such as the unconvincing Lies of Silence, Booker-short-listed in 1990, succeeded beyond merit. His prose could be atmospheric; it could also be flat.
Three years ago he was pleased to be still excited by writing. His last book, The Magician's Wife (1997), a study of love, religion and politics, set in 1850s France and Algeria, balanced Islamic ways against those of the West. Always the writer, Moore loved researching, plotting, exploring the moral dilemma.
On the day Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize, Moore was standing waiting to be photographed for a newspaper interview. His reaction to the news was typical: "That's Ireland's fourth one", adding in his modified but still unmistakably Belfast accent, "Seamus will be picking up a handy cheque for that."
