Christopher Robbins began his career in journalism at the age of 16 when he started writing jazz criticism for the Daily Telegraph. Since then he wrote for numerous newspapers and magazines in Britain, Europe and the USA.
Christopher wrote six non-fiction books. The Test of Courage is the biography of Michel Thomas, concentration camp survivor, French Resistance fighter, and Nazi hunter.
The Empress of Ireland, a memoir of his friendship with the Irish film director Brian Desmond, won the Saga Award for wit, along with exceptional critical acclaim. The travelogue In Search of Kazakhstan was short-listed for the Authors’ Club Best Travel Book Award 2008 in the UK and (under the title Apples Are From Kazakhstan) for the Best Travel Books of 2008 in the US.
Air America, a worldwide bestseller when it was originally published, was made into a film starring Mel Gibson while The Ravens, a companion to Air America, charts the history of the men who flew in the secret air war in Laos.
Christopher lived in London and France.
He died on 24 December 2024, aged 66.
His investigative pieces for the Observer Magazine on CIA assassination plots led to his first book, Assassin, and encouraged him to write two books about the war in Vietnam, Air America and The Ravens – the former about the CIA’s secret airline in the Indo-China war, the latter about the pilots who flew during the secret war in Laos. “These were not anti-war polemics, but written with the happy cooperation of many pilots, and they described superbly the airmen’s courage, joys and disappointments – and sometimes their deaths.
Chris Robbins has given us an irresistible phenomenon: obstinate, brilliant, morally incorruptible and one of the bravest men you will ever read about.
A book of outstanding integrity. These are the heroes no one told you about.