Known as Paddy to friends, admirers, and name-droppers alike, Sir Patrick combined a love of adventure with the erudition of an older age and the eclectic inquisitiveness that spawned his miniglossary of beggar slang from remote Greek villages.
His elegant prose, with baroque digressions into the arcana of history and folklore, furnished more than half a dozen books and earned a bag of literary awards.
At the age of 18 — after a disastrous career at a succession of schools, excluding a progressive establishment that promoted naked country dancing in a barn — Sir Patrick decided to walk from the Netherlands to Constantinople, modern Istanbul.
It was 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power.
As a British Army major 11 years later, Sir Patrick headed a team of British special operations officers and Greek resistance fighters who captured the German military commander of Crete, General Karl Kreipe. Eluding a furious manhunt, the small band spirited the disgruntled Kreipe over the island’s snow-topped mountains to a southern cove, from which he was shipped to Alexandria.
The action, for which Sir Patrick was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, reportedly prompted the infamous Nazi order to execute captured allied commandos. With a price on his head, he returned to Crete to coordinate covert operations.
The escapade was recorded by Sir Patrick’s fellow officer William Stanley Moss in his book “Ill Met by Moonlight,’’ later turned into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. The protagonists were reunited for a Greek television show in 1972, where Kreipe said he bore his abductors no ill-will, “otherwise I would not have come here.’’
Sir Patrick was born in 1915, of English and Irish descent. His father was Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor, a geologist working in India who, in his son’s words, “discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and — brittle trove! — a formation of snowflake.’’
