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Portrait of Desmond Bagley Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1978)

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Bagley, Desmond

British author of thrillers born in Kendal, Cumbria (formerly Westmorland), in northwest England, an area known as the Lake District. His father was a miner who became ill and moved his family to Blackpool when Bagley was about twelve years old. There he ran a boarding house for actors. Desmond Bagley, who suffered from a bad stutter, left school when he was fourteen and worked in odd jobs at a...

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Literary figures

Max (James) Maxted

Gender: Male

In 1919, he is a young war veteran and famed as a fighter pilot. He wants to start a school for pilots, but when his influential father dies in a strange accident, the handsome and charismatic James ‘Max’ Maxted is obliged to investigate the case – which he succeeds in doing. After which, author Robert Goddard lets him be a double agent in a couple of novels, in which he battles with the German ma...

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