They'd have to be saints not to feel a twinge of envy. Ah, you might say, Reilly knows how to turn out a nifty action thriller, but he's not really a literary writer. Well, if you want a literary whizzkid to eat your heart out over, there are quite a few around. Publishers' marketing departments love young writers, particularly if they're also provocative and sexy, and whether publishers intend to or not, they certainly fuel the myth of spectacular overnight success. Elizabeth Jolley suddenly burst upon the reading public when she was in her 50s, goes another story - ignoring the decades when she wrote steadily and was rejected steadily.
Some people work at their writing for a long time without actually writing anything down.
Josephine Hart wrote her bestseller Damage in six weeks, but that was at the end of a long process in her head. The only overnight success story I know of for an older writer that seems to have any grain of truth in it is the story of Mary Wesley. I hope it doesn't take anything away from her inspirational role for late-bloomers to question whether her writing actually started at 70. She once told an interviewer that before her first novel, she had written for years to amuse herself. He wrote his first novel in 1932, and his first collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, came out two years later.