Desmond Bagley website

Desmond Bagley

b. 1923 - d. 1983

Bagley was born in Kendal, Cumbria (then Westmorland), England, the son of John and Hannah Bagley. His family moved to the resort town of Blackpool in the summer of 1935, when Bagley was twelve. Leaving school not long after the relocation, Bagley worked as a printer's assistant and factory worker, and during the Second World War in the aircraft industry. Bagley suffered from a speech impediment (stuttering) 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. Also during this period, he met 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 were settled in Totnes, Devon, from 1966 to 1976, and then lived in Guernsey in the Channel Islands from 1976 to 1983. After his death in 1983, Joan continued living 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.

Desmond Bagley
English thriller writer (1923–1983)

Desmond Bagley 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.

from Wikipedia