PARIS: The American author Larry Collins, who formed a team with the Frenchman Dominique Lapierre to write best-sellers including “O Jerusalem” and “Is Paris burning?”, died Monday in the south of France at the age of 75, Lapierre said .Collins died of a brain haemorrhage in hospital in the Riviera town of Frejus.

“A whole chapter of my life has gone,” Lapierre said.

Born in Connecticut in 1929, Collins came to France in 1954 to do his military service at the Supreme Headquarters of Allied Powers in Europe (SHAPE), then based outside Paris, where he met Lapierre at the canteen.

The pair specialised in highly-researched dramatisations of historical events such as the creation of Israel (“O Jerusalem”), Indian independence (“Freedom at midnight”), and — for their first book in 1964 — the end of the German occupation of Paris (“Is Paris burning?”).—AFP