While executing his diplomatic duties Parsons wrote fiction in his spare time and in 1968 – when he was working at the Foreign Office in London as assistant private secretary to the foreign secretary – he published his first novel, None of Us Cared for Kate, under the nom de plume of John Haythorne.  “Overly provocative Kate is dead,” announced the jacket blurb, “and although nobody was particularly crazy about her, she had been the personal assistant of the British Ambassador to a South-East Asian Kingdom, and the Foreign Office should try to find out who killed her, and why.”  The novel introduced readers to Haythorne’s hapless protagonist Oliver Mandrake, a “corpulent, easy-going, sedentary” diplomat who is sent into various danger zones as an unlikely troubleshooter. Hawthorne produced several further Mandrake novels, in which his bungler is confronted with snakes, lizards, Cold War villains and the bewitching wife of a military attaché.  Richard Edmund Clement Fownes Parsons was born on March 14 1928 to Richard Parsons, a GP, and his wife Winifred. His father was the doctor to the Royal Horse Artillery barracks in St John’s Wood.  Richard attended Arnold House School in St John’s Wood and Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight. His mother told him that he would not be able to join the Diplomatic Service since at that time a private income was required.  This had changed, he noted, by the time he had completed his degree in Modern History at Brasenose College, Oxford, and two years’ National Service in the Royal Army Educational Corps. He joined the Foreign Service (later the Diplomatic Service) in 1951, aged 23, initially in its African department, then run “by two men and a boy, and I was the boy”. His first taste of dealing with a crisis came in 1952 with the Turf Club riots in Cairo, when Egyptian nationalists killed a number of Britons.
Sir Richard Parsons, who has died aged 88, was a respected career diplomat who had a sideline as an author of crime fiction.