I first knew Tony Holden, who died last weekend, through my pal David Blundy. They were hacks on Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, young guns making names for themselves covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was the mid-seventies and I, barely yet a Derringer, was just starting out as a reporter in Belfast for The Irish Times.
Blundy – always “Blundy” – was shot dead in 1989 during the civil war in El Salvador by a sniper who almost certainly had no idea who he was. Tony – always “Tone” to Blundy – lived on for a further 34 years, winning an enviable reputation as a biographer and poker player before suffering a stroke, aged 70, that left him semi-paralysed for the last six years of his life.
