Barnaby Conrad - Telegraph After graduating from Yale in 1943, he went to work for the US State Department and was posted as a vice-consul in Spain, where he resumed his training as a matador under Juan Belmonte, fought under the name "El Niño de California"," and in 1945 was awarded the ears of a bull he had killed. He wrote about the sport for magazines and in two novels, The Innocent Villa (1948, about an affair with his housekeeper in Spain) and Matador (1952). After the war Conrad moved for a time to Lima, Peru, where he played the piano in a hotel bar, painted portraits and wrote for magazines. In 1947 the novelist Sinclair Lewis invited him to be his personal secretary. The job lasted for only a few months (it ended when Lewis decamped to Europe with Conrad's girlfriend), but the two men agreed to write a book together based on the conceit that Abraham Lincoln's assassin had escaped capture and embarked on a secret life in the American frontier. The idea evaporated in a haze of alcohol at the time, but in 2010 it came to fruition in Conrad's The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth. Matador, Conrad's novel based on the death in the bullring of "Manolete" (Manuel Laureano Rodríguez Sánchez), the bullfighter who famously came out of retirement in 1947 to compete with a younger torero and was fatally gored, sold three million copies and spent 50 weeks on the US National Best Seller List, turning Conrad overnight into a literary celebrity. With his royalties from the novel, Conrad opened El Matador, the San Francisco nightclub where he held court for the next decade. "There were so many characters then," he recalled. Down the street, Johnny Mathis was playing at Ann's 440 Club, Lenny Bruce was at the Swiss-American Hotel. You had Jonathan Winters at the hungry i and Phyllis Diller down at the Purple Onion.  El Matador was a place where Hollywood A-listers gathered to see and be seen - until the topless bar craze took off in the early 1960s. "I knew the club was finished when I looked outside one day and saw this topless shoeshine stand," Conrad recalled in an interview. His nightclub made it impossible for Conrad to continue his bullfighting career. In 1958, however, at the age of 36, he attempted a comeback during a charity event in Spain, only to be badly gored, leading to the incorrect reports of his demise. In the 1960s Conrad moved to Santa Barbara, where in 1972 he founded the Santa Barbara Writers" Conference, an annual get-together for authors, aspiring authors and publishers which continues to this day and features an annual Worst Opening Sentences competition. Conrad's other books include Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center (1986), about his battle to overcome alcohol addiction, and several more novels. But he never repeated the success of Matador. He is survived by his wife, Mary, and by two sons and two daughters. Barnaby Conrad, born March 27 1922, died February 12 2013