Fleet Street star and a legend in his lunchtime

Keith Waterhouse, novelist, journalist. Died aged 80.

Keith Waterhouse's mastery of the written word and wisdom gathered over 50 years on Fleet St made him one of the most acclaimed chroniclers of the late 20th century.

A career which produced more than 2000 newspaper columns and 60 books, including 16 novels and many plays, films and television scripts, will be most widely remembered for Billy Liar, his 1959 tale of an undertaker's clerk whose Walter Mitty-like fantasies of life as a big city comedy writer allow him to escape the painful monotony of life in a postwar Yorkshire town.

The wildly successful novel, made into a film starring Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie, had to be restarted by Waterhouse after he left the first 10,000 words in a taxi.

Recalling the incident, he said: "The best thing that happened to me - it was pretentious twaddle."

His creative zeal was famously matched only by his ability to withstand the rigours of a long Soho lunch.

It was only in May this year that he gave up his Daily Mail column, published twice a week for almost a quarter of a century after being tapped out on his Adler typewriter.

A life which saw Waterhouse garlanded by the journalistic profession and his name in lights outside West End theatres, for plays that included Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell - his lauded distillation of the exertions of his legendary drinking companion - began in humble circumstances in inner-city Leeds. He was the youngest of five children.

After leaving school at 14 with no qualifications, Waterhouse sampled work with a firm of estate agents and in a funeral parlour before joining the Yorkshire Post, where he could at last exercise his desire to write.

An ambition to join the eccentric elite of Fleet St was realised in 1951 when he joined the Daily Mirror, reporting from America, Russia and Cyprus. His talent for a crafted sentence and incisive phrase was spotted early on and he was deployed to draft articles and speeches for the Labour leaders Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson.

Paul Callan, the diarist and veteran Fleet St reporter, who worked with Waterhouse on the Mirror, said: "He always thought of himself very much as a journalist.

"You would read one of his sentences, so pared down and clear, and think, 'How on earth did he do that?"'

He was a renowned stickler for correct yet stylish use of language and subsequent generations of journalists have been taught to regard his Waterhouse On Newspaper Style as a classic of the genre.

Above all, he was a writer who used his experiences to inform his work. He was once mugged after giving an after-dinner speech in Coventry.

"On the way back to the hotel I was set upon by these two men who relieved me of my wallet and seemed intent on causing me some physical damage," he recalled. "Even as they were running away, I was composing the first two paragraphs in me head."

- INDEPENDENT