[In the following essay, Hastings marks the centenary of Forester's birth with a retrospective of the author's works.]

‘It was not long after dawn that Captain Hornblower came up on the quarterdeck of the Lydia.’ Thus, in February 1937, C. S. Forester launched upon the billows one of the most famous figures in historical fiction with the first words of his novel The Happy Return. His highly-strung and much-loved mariner sailed on thereafter through the ten bestsellers which succeeded the first.

Today, Forester's reputation is in eclipse, overtaken in his own element by Patrick O'Brian, who is perceived—with some justice—as a writer of greater depth and staying power (though dear John Keegan remains passionately loyal to Hornblower, complaining that ‘nothing ever happens in O'Brian's books’). The recent television series based upon the Hornblower oeuvre lacked conviction. It is unusual to meet anyone under, say, 40 who has read The Gun or Death to the French.

But I noticed in the flyleaf of one of the books the other day that 1999 is Forester's centenary year. Before it passes I wanted to pay a debt of pleasure to the author on behalf of all his old fans, to recall the manner in which he gave a generation so much entertainment, and to suggest that he should still be revered as a great storyteller, even if a new wave of literary critics would argue that he does not deserve commemoration as a significant novelist.

Cecil Scott Forester was born into the professional middle classes, educated at Dulwich College, and began training as a doctor before he discovered his vocation as a writer of fiction. ‘Incredibly lean and lantern-jawed and earnest’, as he described himself, he spent a winter writing furiously by day and playing bridge professionally by night, eating well when the cards came his way, ‘and remarkably poorly when they did not’. Yet he suffered no long struggle for recognition. His first novel, Payment Deferred, an ingenious tale of murder and retribution, was published and became a bestseller when he was 27. It was later filmed, starring Charles Laughton. Forester was launched on a 40-year career of almost unbroken success, becoming one of the best-known novelists of his day, whose books were translated into a score of languages.

From the beginning history and military experience fascinated him, and came to dominate many of his books. He achieved a considerable mastery of the culture and manners of the early 19th century. He wrote extensively about the Peninsular War and, with an eye on his big American market, the experiences of the US navy. Always a passionate amateur sailor, he learned much about the sea by sailing his own boats, and as a passenger on merchant ships, then fashionable refuges for writers in search of tranquillity for their business.

He was an exceptionally astute observer of the ways of the English petit-bourgeoisie, among whom he found some of his most sympathetic characters. I have always loved his tale of Albert Brown, the illegitimate product of a coupling between a grocer's daughter and a Royal Navy captain in the 1890s, who joins the Navy as a not very bright boy seaman, and is taken prisoner by a German raiding cruiser in the Pacific in 1914, the sole unwounded survivor of his ship.

The German vessel is obliged to take refuge beside an uninhabited volcanic island for repairs. Brown escapes and, over three days and at the cost of his own life, so delays the German ship's departure that a British squadron is able to sink it with all hands. Beyond the brilliant narrative and descriptive passages, the wry essence of Brown on Resolution is that the world never knows what the dead hero has done. It is this element which saves the story from mawkishness. The book touches a central point about heroism and warfare: decorations can only be awarded to those whose deeds are seen by others. Yet the highest form of sacrifice is that which goes unobserved. Forester never saw action in his life, but his sympathy for the nuances of military life is remarkable.

In 1936 he turned this to exceptional account in The General, which remained his own favourite book, and mine too. I recommend it to anyone with no previous knowledge of the first world war who wishes to catch the dreadful flavour of the conflict. ‘Nowadays Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Curzon, KCMG, CB, DSO, is just one of Bournemouth's seven generals,’ he began, and went on to tell the life-story of a typical wooden-headed British officer whose virtues and limitations combined to sustain the nightmare of the Western Front.

I reckon I know the history of the first world war, the vernacular of life and death in the trenches, pretty well. I cannot fault any detail of Forester's account, or of his treatment of the way soldiers think and talk, the fashion in which their disasters come to pass. His portrait was flawed in only one important respect. In the novel, he likens the behaviour of British commanders planning their battles to savages frustrated in seeking to withdraw a screw from a piece of wood by the exercise of ever greater force and leverage.

They failed to understand, he wrote, that by the use of intelligence and craft, twisting the screw would achieve their purpose. Yet in truth, even among those of us who recoil from the insensitivity of Haig and his counterparts, I know scarcely any military historian who supposes today that the deadlock of the Flanders trenches could have been broken by such a simple formula as Forester's figure of speech implies. That significant reservation apart, The General, deceptively simple in construction and outlook, still seems superbly crafted and convincing.

Forester himself described the origins of the Hornblower saga, on a day in 1927 when he bought three dog-eared bound volumes of the old Naval Chronicle, trade newspaper of the Royal Navy throughout the Nelson era, in a secondhand bookshop. He took them to read on a long voyage in his own small boat. Nine years later he fled from an unhappy scriptwriting engagement with Irving Thalberg in Hollywood on a cargo boat bound for Central America. By the time he docked back in England, he had decided enough to see his publisher Michael Joseph and tell him, ‘I'm thinking of writing a novel about a naval captain in 1808.’ Joseph could scarcely say anything save, ‘Splendid.’ Forester added, ‘I think I'll call him Hornblower.’

The Happy Return presented Hornblower as a frigate captain dispatched to support a Central American revolution against Spanish rule, who is appalled to discover, after capturing a Spanish 50-gun ship and turning it over to the rebels, that Spain has meanwhile become England's ally. He is obliged to fight the Natividad a second time—while conducting an unconsummated love affair with Lady Barbara Wellesley, a sister of the Iron Duke whom Forester invented because he adored Wellington.

This first book, one of Forester's best, pictured Hornblower in mid-career. Those which followed faithfully built upon the portrait and the life the novelist had invented for 1808, to trace both the captain's earlier life and his later adventures. Hornblower was poor, of course, and while young married a wife he pitied but did not love (she was later killed off in childbirth, that last resort of any novelist stuck with an unwanted specimen of pre-20th-century womanhood).

Hornblower's high intelligence and professional skill were matched by a shyness and sensitivity which set him apart from his fellow-officers and induced long passages of melancholy. At sea, his ingenuity, boldness and luck never failed. Setbacks and disappointments in his threadbare personal life were always offset by triumph in action. Winston Churchill was a devoted Hornblower fan. One of his staff painted a moving portrait of the prime minister, in the darkest days of 1940, relieving despondency by burying himself in the pages of Forester, whose hero always found a way out.

Hornblower advanced through the ranks with greater speed and assurance than Patrick O'Brian's Captain Jack Aubrey: after a dramatic escape from France in 1811 in Flying Colours, he was knighted, made a colonel of marines and married Lady Barbara. In 1812 he became a commodore commanding a squadron in the Baltic, and in 1814 was raised to the peerage, heaven help us, for a series of amazing feats. By 1821, still only in his forties, implausibly he was flying his flag as admiral in the West Indies. O'Brian is more persuasive, both about the sluggish manner of his hero's advancement and in his profound sense of the pace of a floating society at the mercy of the wind.

Yet, for all that, the Hornblower books have always been popular boys' adventures; Forester's powers of description raised them to a standard which transcends a hundredfold the wretched creations of most bestselling thriller writers in modern times. Hornblower, with his morbid weakness for introspection, his austere tastes, the guilt that accompanied his infidelities, his social unease among the grandees to whose tables success and marriage had brought him, remains a great invention.

In Forester's lifetime, the captain made him rich and famous. The author described how ‘on a dozen different frontiers I could arrive with my baggage and present myself to a customs officer, and, with my name noted, the officers would say “Not—?”, and I would answer “Yes,” and my baggage would be instantly chalked … Hornblower was a kind of perpetual travelling companion.’

Forester remained a modest man, increasingly crippled as he grew older by the consequences of a stroke in his fifties, who was nonetheless fully aware of his remarkable powers of pleasing the public. A friend of my father's, I met him once in his old age—not very old, for he died when he was only 66—Latterly, he lived mostly in California for its climate, but continued regularly to visit London and to relish its theatres and restaurants.

A consummate professional, his stories reflected an uninhibited joy in the triumphs of England and empire, tempered by an affectionate scepticism about their weaknesses, which delighted his own generation, but bears no resonance for the young today. The African Queen, for instance, is acknowledged as a classic movie, but is much too little read as a superbly droll story. ‘For me,’ Forester wrote, ‘there is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning and continue to the end, and that is not quite the statement of the obvious it might appear.’

Today, it is indeed an unfashionably simplistic approach for a novelist who wishes to become a contender for any literary prize. A modern Forester would no more be a runner for such baubles than would Patrick O'Brian. The notion of a novel as a story is thought appropriate only for the lower slopes of creativity. So be it, among Booker judges. For myself, I shall continue to reread Hornblower every few years as long as I am above ground. I invite every like spirit to raise a glass to his creator's memory in this, his 100th vintage year.