[In the obituary below, the critic provides an overview of Clavell's career.]

James Clavell, the author of Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House and other richly detailed historical novels set in the Far East, died on Tuesday in Vevey, Switzerland. He was 69 and had homes in Vevey and Cap Ferrat, France.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, April.

Although historians sometimes disputed the historical accuracy of Mr. Clavell's novels, no one doubted his gifts as a storyteller, or his ability to draw the reader into a faraway time and place. "It's almost impossible not to continue to read Shogun once having opened it," wrote Webster Schott in The New York Times Book Review. "Yet it's not only something that you read—you live it."

His ability to deliver a gripping narrative and establish an exotic setting won Mr. Clavell millions of readers and great wealth. Tai-Pan and Noble House were stunning commercial successes, remaining on the best-seller list for nearly a year and selling millions of copies. For Noble House, Mr. Clavell received a $1 million advance, and in 1986, William Morrow & Company paid a record $5 million for his novel Whirlwind. Mr. Clavell described himself as "just doing my job, trying to entertain people and illuminate the world and perhaps bridge East and West." He was, he said, "just a storyteller."

Mr. Clavell was born in Sydney, Australia, but was taken back to England by his parents while still an infant. His father was an officer in the Royal Navy. After completing his public schooling, Mr. Clavell joined the Royal Artillery in 1940. He underwent training for desert warfare, but after Japan entered the war he was sent to Singapore. In 1942 he was captured on Java and sent by the Japanese to the infamous Changi prison near Singapore, where only 1 in 15 prisoners survived.

"Changi became my university instead of my prison," he later told an interviewer. "Among the inmates there were experts in all walks of life—the high and the low roads. I studied and absorbed everything I could from physics to counterfeiting, but most of all I learned the art of surviving."

On returning to England with the rank of captain, he suffered a motorcycle accident that left him lame in one leg, ending his military career. He spent a year studying at Birmingham University and worked at odd jobs. Through his future wife, April Stride, an aspiring ballerina and actress, he became interested in directing films. He worked in film distribution for several years and in 1953 headed to the United States, working briefly in television production in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where he bluffed his way into a screenwriting job.

He wrote The Fly (1958) and Watusi (1959) and helped write The Great Escape (1963), which won a Writers Guild award for best screenplay. He wrote, directed and produced several films, including Five Gates to Hell (1959), Walk Like a Dragon (1960) and, more memorably, To Sir, With Love (1967), which cost a little more than $500,000 to make and took in $15 million at the box office.

During a writers' strike in 1960, Mr. Clavell first tried his hand at fiction. The result, King Rat (1962), was the story of an upper-class Englishman and an amoral, wheeler-dealer American who meet in Changi prison and, against the odds, become friends. The novel was praised as a gripping narrative and a classic of the prison-camp genre. The novel was made into a 1965 film starring George Segal, Tom Courtenay and John Mills.

In writing King Rat, Mr. Clavell found his imagination returning once again to the Far East. He had become an American citizen in 1963 but temporarily moved his family to Hong Kong, where he plunged himself into researching a historical novel, Tai-Pan, about the founding of the crown colony. The novel's hero, Dirk Struan, is the first taipan, or merchant overlord, determined to establish an outpost of British power on the unpromising soil of Hong Kong. The fruit of his labor is the Noble House trading company, whose story Mr. Clavell continued in his next novel, Noble House.

Shogun, set in Japan in the year 1600, follows the adventures of the fictional John Blackthorne, whom the novel presents as the first Englishman to reach Japan. Five rival warlords are scheming to become shogun, or supreme military dictator. One of them takes Blackthorne under his protection, hoping to use his Western knowledge as a lever to displace his rivals. Like its two predecessors, the novel was long (1,207 pages), densely researched and bubbling with character, incident and historical pageantry.

In 1980 Shogun was made into a five-part television miniseries that starred Richard Chamberlain and Toshiro Mifune and was seen by 120 million viewers, the largest audience for a mini-series since Roots. A 1990 Broadway musical based on the novel was not successful. Tai-Pan was made into a television movie starring Bryan Brown in 1986, and Noble House was made into a four-part television mini-series in 1988.

In his 1986 novel Whirlwind, Mr. Clavell shifted location, turning out a historical novel on Iran in the tumultuous weeks after the fall of the Shah in 1979. Although most critics found the novel too long, at more than 1,100 pages, and far less enthralling than Mr. Clavell's previous works, Whirlwind immediately shot to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for more than 20 weeks. Gai-Jin, published in 1993, explored the clash of East and West in 1860's Japan.

Mr. Clavell also wrote Thump-o-moto, a children's book, and The Children's Story, a political fable. All of Mr. Clavell's novels for adults are published by Dell, except for Whirlwind, which is an Avon paperback.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Michaela and Holly.