A SUCCESSFUL computer pioneer, author and screenwriter was also a leading figure in Helensburgh and district politics.

John McNeil spent 15 years of his life in the town, many of them while personally renovating the art deco mansion Green Park in Charlotte Street, before his death at the age of 64 on October 22 2004.

But he was known in the computer world as one of the co-founders of Britain's first major computer software company Logica, and in the literary world as a best-selling author of dramatic novels including Hoolet, a racy story about a serial killer set in and around the burgh.

Born in Oxford on December 16 1939, John grew up in London where he was academically brilliant but also misbehaved, eventually being expelled from his grammar school.

Despite this he won a place at London's Imperial College, graduating in 1961 with first class honours in aeronautical engineering.

But he decided against a career in the aircraft industry, and followed one of his maths professors into an infant and exciting new industry, computing.

He joined Scicon, an American company which was branching out in Britain, and quickly progressed from programmer to consultant to divisional manager and, aged only 29, to assistant general manager.

He did such a sterling job of helping BP model their oil business in the Middle East that they decided to buy the company.

In 1969, John and four others left to found Logica, one of the success stories of British computing.

The little company grew into an international plc, with thousands of staff projects underway in every significant area of commerce and government.

John led teams that developed the first UK bank cash dispenser, the first British word-processing system, and the British Gas national grid control system. He also set up branches in Australia and the Netherlands.

He left Logica in 1977 and joined Data Logic, heading its marketing and setting up a consultancy division.

Further major projects followed, including IT and communications advice to the police, war-gaming with the Ministry of Defence, and the development of an IT strategy for the Post Office.

It was while he waited to take up the post at Data Logic that he found a new diversion - writing.

He completed his first novel, The Consultant, in 1978. One of the earliest novels on computer crime, it was turned into a major TV series by the BBC, and it was the start of John McNeil's emergence as an author.

Spy Game, Little Brother and Hoolet followed, but while writing and business co-existed for some of the time, eventually the creativity drowned out commerce and he became a full-time writer.

John branched into preparing screenplays and wrote Crossfire, a BBC drama about the IRA, and Shoot to Kill, in Northern Ireland. He also became chairman of the Writers Guild of Great Britain.

An art enthusiast, in 1989 he moved to Helensburgh and bought Green Park, a 2-storey flat-roofed L-plan asymmetrical Art Deco house built in 1935, because it was big enough to display his collection of modern art.

He set about painstakingly restoring it through his own work as plasterer, glazier, roofer, plumber and electrician, and it took 12 years before he considered it completed.

In the meantime he joined a small energy conservation company, Heatwise, in Dumbarton in 1992, renamed it Solas - meaning "hope" in Gaelic - and turned it from a struggling venture into a thriving success, and in the process winning awards for business excellence.

Solas was a community business and a registered charity working specifically with the poor and elderly. It had no shareholders and any profit went straight back into the business.

John believed Solas showed the future, a source of local employment with low costs and high social benefits, and championed this message to anyone who would listen.

Throughout his life he made time for his other great love, politics. Always a socialist, he was an active Labour supporter in London in the sixties, but in later years he became a committed member of the SNP, serving as the chairman of the Helensburgh and district branch.

He was also a regular writer of letters to the editor of The Herald, and he had a great many strong views on a wide range of issues - yet his letters were always eloquent, principled and elegantly simple.

He was survived by his wife Mary-Ann, who died two years later at the age of 65, and son Rufus.