Desmond Bagley was an English journalist and novelist known mainly for a series of bestselling thrillers.
10 Facts About Desmond Bagley
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2.
Desmond Bagley's family moved to the resort town of Blackpool in the summer of 1935, when Bagley was 12.
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Desmond Bagley had a stutter all of his life, which initially exempted him from military conscription.
4.
Desmond 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.
5.
Desmond Bagley died on 12 April 1983 at a hospital in Southampton of complications resulting from a stroke.
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Desmond Bagley's first published short story appeared in the English magazine Argosy in 1957, and his first novel, The Golden Keel, in 1963.
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The success of The Golden Keel had led Desmond Bagley to turn to full-time novel writing by the mid-1960s.
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Desmond Bagley produced a total of 16 thrillers, all craftsman-like and almost all bestsellers.
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Desmond Bagley's work yielded five mostly unremarkable film adaptations: The Freedom Trap, 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.
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Desmond Bagley's works have been translated into over 20 languages.