Robert F. Mirvish Dies at Age 86

ATPAM member since 1980.

Author, playwright, and theatrical producer Robert Franklin Mirvish passed away at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada on June 24, 2007, at age 86, after a brief battle with cancer.

From 1943 to 1945, Mr. Mirvish served as a U.S. Merchant Marine radio officer aboard the Francis Parkman, the Francis Scott Key, and the Thomas H. Sumner.  His war service and career as a merchant marine radio officer served as the inspiration for many of his 14 novels, published in a dozen languages and more than 150 separate editions from 1953 to 1964.   In particular, his service during World War II on the treacherous North Atlantic conveys to Murmansk, Russia, provided the inspiration for two of his novels:  Red Sky at Midnight (published in 1955) and the critically acclaimed The Last Capitalist (published in 1963 by William Sloane Associates), which the Boston Herald called “a poignant story of survival and purpose.”  In addition to these serious novels about life on the conveys to Russia, Mr. Mirvish satirized his experience in the 1964 novel There You Are, But Where Are You? (published by E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc.). 

World War II was not the only inspiration for Mr. Mirvish’s novel.  His experiences at sea provided ample source material for his many novels, including The Eternal Voyagers (1953) and The Long Watch (1954).  His1961 fictional novel, Point of Impact (William Sloane Associates), published five years after the S.S. Andrea Dorea and S.S. Stockholm collided off the coast of Nantucket, chronicled life aboard a great ocean liner until the moment it collided with a heavily laden oil tanker.  E.B. Garside of the New York Times praised the novel, saying that “Mirvish’s score hits a new high in this story” and complimented his ability to “pull all the antecedent threads together in a crescendo of excitement.”

Born in Washington, DC in 1921, to David Mirvish and Anna Kornhauser, Mr. Mirvish grew up in Toronto, Canada and, when not at sea, lived in both New York and Toronto.  Although a successful novelist who was widely known throughout the world, in Toronto he was known as the kid brother to discount retail magnate Edwin “Honest Ed” Mirvish, whose volume-based / discount retail approach Robert Mirvish explored in his 1963 novel Business is People.

In addition to his career as an author and playwright, Mr. Mirvish served as the New York Representative for Toronto’s Royal Alexandra theater (purchased by brother Ed in 1963) and he co-produced the short-lived Broadway comedy A Minor Adjustment, in 1967.  In 1995, JeRM Productions, LLC and Georgetown University summer theater produced a stage adaptation of Mr. Mirvish’s novel Holy Loch (1964) in Washington, DC.

Mr. Mirvish is survived by his wife of 44 years, Lucille, his sons Anthony and John, grandchildren Benjamin, James, Matthew and Catherine, brother Edwin Mirvish and sister Lorraine Lazarus.

A complete list of Mr. Mirvish’s novels follows:

A House of Her Own (1953)

The Eternal Voyagers (1953)

Texana (1954)

The Long Watch (1954)

Red Sky at Midnight (1955)

Woman in a Room (1959)

Two Women, Two Worlds (1960)

Dust on the Sea (1960)

Point of Impact (1961)

Cleared Narvik 2000 (1962)

The Last Capitalist (1963)

Business Is People (1963)

There You Are, But Where Are You? (1964)

Holy Loch (1964)