Desmond Bagley

Desmond Bagley (29 October 1923 – 12 April 1983) was an English journalist and novelist known mainly for a series of bestselling thrillers. He and fellow British writers such as Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean set conventions for the genre: a tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary hero pitted against villains determined to sow destruction and chaos for their own ends.

Biography

Bagley was born in Kendal, Westmorland – now in Cumbria – as the son of John and Hannah Bagley. His family moved to the resort town of Blackpool in the summer of 1935, when Bagley was 12. Leaving school not long after the move, Bagley worked as a printer's assistant and factory worker, and during the Second World War in the aircraft industry. Bagley had a stutter all of his life, which initially exempted him from military conscription.

Bagley left England in 1947 for Africa and worked his way overland, crossing the Sahara Desert and briefly settling in Kampala, Uganda, where he contracted malaria. By 1951, he had settled in South Africa, working in the gold mining and asbestos industries in Durban, Natal, before becoming a freelance writer for local newspapers and magazines. While there he met a local bookstore director, Joan Margaret Brown, whom he married in 1960.

In an afterword to his novel ''Windfall'', Bagley describes how as a freelancer for the Johannesburg ''Sunday Times'', he witnessed the 1960 assassination attempt against South African PM Hendrik Verwoerd.

When not travelling to research the exotic backgrounds for his novels, Bagley enjoyed sailing, loved classical music, films and military history, and played war games.

Bagley and his wife left South Africa for England in 1964, where they lived in Bishopsteignton, Devon. They settled in Totnes, Devon, from 1966 to 1976, and then moved to Guernsey until his death in 1983. Thereafter his wife continued to live there until her death in 1999.

Bagley died on 12 April 1983 at a hospital in Southampton of complications resulting from a stroke. He was 59.

Writings

Bagley's first published short story appeared in the English magazine '' Argosy'' in 1957, and his first novel, '' The Golden Keel'', in 1963. Between whiles he was a film critic for ''The Rand Daily Mail'' in Johannesburg from 1958 to 1962.

The success of ''The Golden Keel'' had led Bagley to turn to full-time novel writing by the mid-1960s. He produced a total of 16 thrillers, all craftsman-like and almost all bestsellers. Typically of British thriller writers of that period, he rarely used recurring characters in different books. Exceptions include Max Stafford (a security consultant featured in '' Flyaway'' and '' Windfall)'', Slade (a spy who appeared in ''Running Blind'' and '' The Freedom Trap''), and Metcalfe (a smuggler/mercenary in '' The Golden Keel'' and ''The Spoilers''). His work yielded five mostly unremarkable film adaptations: ''The Freedom Trap'' (1971), released in 1973 as '' The Mackintosh Man'' by Warner Brothers, directed by John Huston and starring Paul Newman and Dominique Sanda; ''Landslide'', made for television in 1992; ''The Vivero Letter'', filmed in 1998; and ''The Enemy'', starring Roger Moore in 2001. Probably the most successful adaptation was ''Running Blind'', serialised for television by the BBC
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