Some follow the path of quiet desperation, drink too much, enter into unwise affairs or generally behave badly, but so what? So too do many other people who never dream of putting pen to paper. Others lead genuinely interesting lives which may or may not impinge on their writing, but for the most part writers are no different from the common herd. TS Eliot was once a banker, for goodness’ sake.

And yet literary biographies as a genre enjoy a popular following. Ever since James Boswell charted the life and doings of Samuel Johnson, readers take an interest, often prurient, in their favourite authors. No one, therefore, should be too surprised when potential subjects attempt to destroy evidence that might come back to bite them once they are dead and gone. To a certain extent that is what Arthur Ransome attempted in old age after he had achieved well-deserved acclaim for his Swallows and Amazons children’s stories, those quintessentially English yarns involving boys and girls messing about in boats and getting up to all sorts of unlikely adventures.

Earlier in his life, before he became as popular a writer as JK Rowling is today, Ransome engaged in a series of adventures that hardly impinged on his later writing. In this riveting but occasionally exasperating study, Roland Chambers investigates a very different Ransome from the moustachioed favourite uncle who produced utopian English romances. Far from being a bog-standard man of letters with a home in the Lake District, Ransome lived a portion of his life in Russia as it was going through the turmoil of the Soviet revolution, and he lived, if not to tell the tale, then at least to record some of its key moments and personalities.

For reasons which are not made exactly clear – a curious lapse, considering that Chambers has a background as a private investigator specialising in Russian politics and business – Ransome took himself off to Russia on the eve of the First World War and then yo-yoed back and forth between Petrograd and London throughout the conflict. Thereafter he drifted into journalism, becoming a foreign correspondent, and when the country was plunged into revolution in 1917 he made himself useful, getting to know the main players including Lenin and Trotsky.

That was a smart career move, and Ransome was equally quick to go with the flow into the world of espionage. Journalism and intelligence gathering have always been handy bedfellows for gadabouts, and it will come as no surprise that Ransome did some useful work for Britain’s special intelligence services. As a journalist he had to know the main players to do his job properly, and through his family background he enjoyed the trust of several leading politicians and diplomats. Later he did his best to play down that period of his life, but papers do not lie and Chambers has made good use of the Ransome archive at Leeds University, as well as delving deeply into the official records. To quote Robert Burns, Ransome was much more than “a chiel amang ye taking notes”: he did some very useful work for British intelligence at a time when the news coming out of revolutionary Russia was very sparse.

To the author’s chagrin, though, he has failed to nail down the rumour that Ransome was a double agent. So chaotic was the period and so ramshackle was the state of the revolution with its fluctuating alliances and its rapid changes in the balance of power that it seems unlikely. Throughout his time in Russia, Ransome was privy to some pretty rum goings-on and had an affair with Trotsky’s secretary Evgenia Shelepina, but that did not make him a traitor to Britain. While there is evidence that he was opposed to western intervention in Russia in the aftermath of the First World War, he also seems to have played his cards pretty close to his chest. Attempts to arrest him for treason came to nothing.

All this is narrated with a good deal of relish. At his best, Chambers cracks the story along at a grand pace and announces himself as an entertaining and skilful writer. But in common with many others who labour long and hard in the archives, he has found it difficult to let go of prized pieces of information. As a result there are too many choke points where the story collapses under the weight of information, some of it spurious and much of it unnecessary. He has also allowed himself to be ensnared by the “what if” syndrome which adds absolutely nothing to the tale being told. There are far too many examples of this kind of thing: “Had Ransome arrived in Russia four months earlier, he would have witnessed the entire nation converge on St Petersburg to celebrate the third centenary of the Romanov dynasty.”

Some deeper digging would also not have gone amiss, such as looking again at the role played by Colonel Alfred Knox, Britain’s influential military attache in Petrograd, and telling us a little bit more about RH Bruce Lockhart, the British diplomat turned spy who attempted to assassinate Lenin with another spy, Sidney Reilly. On the credit side, Chambers is first-rate in his ability to re-create the atmosphere of Russia during the revolutionary period and, like his subject, he has both an eye for detail and a capacity to make great events come alive. That takes some doing, and he has done it with wit and intelligence.

However, those wanting to know more about Ransome’s life as a writer will be disappointed. Chambers sprints deftly through the early period, when his subject worked as a hack in London before the First World War, and only a score of pages are devoted to the creation of Swallows and Amazons and the other bestsellers which followed in its wake. Perhaps that is just as well, as literary success did not make Ransome a happier man. On the contrary, he fell out with his friends, the Altounyan family, whose children had supplied the original inspiration, even going so far as to remove the dedication to them in later editions, and he behaved very badly to his daughter, from whom he was eventually estranged. Both these incidents, and the tetchy behaviour he demonstrated in old age, make him a lesser man and not at all the lovable old gentleman his many readers imagined him to be.

That could be the point. In the final analysis, this book is not really about how a certain writer came to be a bestseller, but about an ordinary Englishman (most certainly not the last) who was caught up in great events. On that level, Chambers has done us all a service by revealing the life of a most unusual person – one who had the good fortune to lead many different kinds of lives.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers. Faber and Faber, £20.