Hearne's first published work was the novel
Voices under the Window, issued in 1955. Set in Jamaica in the late 1940s or early 1950s, it uses the framing device of a progressive politician's injury and death in a riot to narrate the story of a man who, born into racial and economic privilege, decided to cast his lot with the underprivileged. Hearne won the 1956
John Llewellyn Rhys Prize – awarded for the best novel written by a British Commonwealth author aged under 30 Hearne followed this with four novels written between 1956 and 1961 –
The Faces of Love,
Stranger at the Gate,
The Autumn Equinox and
Land of the Living – set in the imaginary island of Cayuna, which is a fictionalized Jamaica (the map of Cayuna included with the novels bears a remarkable resemblance to Jamaica), and which referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the
bauxite industry and the
Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the
Cuban Revolution. He also wrote a number of short stories, one of which, "At the Stelling", set in
Guyana, was included in the
Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Hearne then turned to the academy and journalism – writing a regular column for the
Gleaner newspaper, first under the
pseudonym Jay Monroe, and later under his own name, and administering the Creative Arts Centre (now the Sir Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts) at the
University of the West Indies, as the Centre's first secretary. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he collaborated with planter and journalist
Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers –
Fever Grass,
The Candywine Development, and
The Checkerboard Caper – involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym
John Morris.
Fever Grass is cited in the
Oxford English Dictionary as a source for the use of "
fuck" as a
noun. In 1985, he published his last novel,
The Sure Salvation, set on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the mid-19th century. The voyage ends in the imaginary British South American colony of Abari, also mentioned in
The Checkerboard Caper. ==Legacy==