Before reading a biography, check the acknowledgments and any prefatory passages the biographer includes that identify the auspices that have assisted his narrative. Biography is a genre generated out of the peculiar politics of family relationships and literary history – often a fraught and fractured legacy.

Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturin series of 20 novels set during the Napoleonic wars – hailed as the greatest achievement in historical fiction – wanted no biography, ever. He treated with scorn anyone attempting to explore the sources of his work and his private life.

Why, then, has his stepson, who professes nothing but respect for O’Brian’s work and dismay at the efforts of the press and a previous biographer to plumb the novelist’s life, done the same himself? “No longer was it a case of there being no biography, as Patrick had vainly wished, but an entirely false impression would be retained for posterity. I decided it was my duty to counter this by describing the Patrick I had known so well,” Mr. Tolstoy explains.

“Entirely false?” In fact, Dean King’s “Patrick O’Brian: A Life Revealed” (2000) was well received, and, though Mr. Tolstoy does identify a few errors, Mr. King’s work stands up remarkably well even under Mr. Tolstoy’s hostile fire. In his biography, Mr. Tolstoy, who did not even meet O’Brian until 1955, when the novelist was 41, assumes a proprietary air that calls the value of this work into question.

He behaves more like an offended family member than a biographer. Reading “Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist, 1914-1949” (W.W. Norton, 512 pages, $29.95), I felt like someone who is brought into the family attic, shown a few heirlooms, and then ushered out. There are no source notes, but we are assured that Mr. Tolstoy’s information derives from “private papers. … Unfortunately, unusual circumstances prevent my providing details which would no doubt interest readers.” This is not sound biography.

Mr. Tolstoy attacks Mr. King because he relied upon the testimony of O’Brian’s estranged son. But Mr. Tolstoy was not even able to interview that son. O’Brian, a Londoner who reinvented himself as an Irishman – changing his last name from Russ to O’Brian in 1945 – left behind a wife, children, and a family whose existence he tried to obscure. It is precisely the testimony of those beings that Dean King so diligently and carefully exhumed.

Mr. King’s biography evinces profound respect for O’Brian’s work and life. As the critic John Bayley observed, “Dean King’s biography reveals in fascinating detail that the private man behind the novels was no less of a magician than the author who created them. This is a truly remarkable book which uncovers the secrets of a professionally secretive man.”

To be sure, Mr. Tolstoy adds nuances and information that Mr. King could not access, but his is only the first volume of a planned two, and gets nowhere near the period in which O’Brian wrote the novels he is famous for. Mr. King, on the other hand, begins his one-volume biography with a sensitive account of the deceptive man and the work that brought him renown.

I consider Mr. Tolstoy’s book an assault on the idea of biography itself. He dismisses, for example, the paradox that O’Brian wrote a penetrating biography of Picasso and another of Sir Joseph Banks, “the natural historian and longtime president of the Royal Society, an explorer, a friend of scientists, and a man of letters,” as Mr. King puts it. (The Banks biography is not mentioned in Mr. Tolstoy’s book.)

To the question of how O’Brian could be so opposed to biography when he indulged in it himself, Mr. Tolstoy’s sophistic argument is that Picasso was asking for it because he led such a flamboyant public life. But why did O’Brian have to write the biography? That is the question, Mr. Tolstoy.

Mr. Tolstoy quotes from a letter O’Brian wrote to William Targ of G.P. Putnam’s:

I particularly stress his [Picasso’s] early days, partly because they are of course essential to an understanding of the man & partly because they are very little known – not a single one of the authorities has much to say, & what little they do produce is invariably inaccurate. At least this book will establish who, what & when he was as a boy & a young man, & I believe that it will give a truer, more living picture than any that has yet been written.

Now that Patrick O’Brian is a great biographer. But it is Mr. King, not Mr. Tolstoy, who delivers the goods on O’Brian’s early life – despite having far fewer pages – and explains why he changed his name, invented a more heroic life’s story, and ended up writing novels that were rarely set ashore despite having never gone to sea (although he claimed to have done so).

I cannot help but think that Mr. Tolstoy is so angry with the interloping Mr. King that he has lost any perspective. It is Mr. King, not Mr. Tolstoy, who interviewed most of the members of the Russ family, while Mr. Tolstoy stayed in the attic sulkily sifting through his stepfather’s papers and wondering what old Patrick would have made of his stepson’s contravening his wish for no biography.

O’Brian had put up the “No Trespassing” sign, and no amount of sophistical argument can get around it. Not that Mr. Tolstoy does not try:

What he himself would have wished me to do I cannot say, but circumstances had changed so much since he asked me to destroy his papers that I cannot believe he would not wish me to put the record straight. On reflection it seemed too that his request had been somewhat ambivalent. Why did he not destroy them himself, when chance might have led someone other than me to be first to enter the house after his death? Then again, Patrick cannot have overlooked the fact that I owned far more of his personal papers than he did. Not only was there the voluminous body of letters he had sent me over the years, but at different times he had given me personal documents, memoranda, odd pieces of his writing and the like when planning our respective labours, which frequently overlapped.

This tortured reasoning shows why biography, no matter how many times it is forbidden, is a fruit we want to pick. If Mr. Tolstoy had only begun with that understanding, he might have produced a less tendentious biography – one that built upon Mr. King’s valiant efforts rather than attempting to banish them.

crollyson@nysun.com