Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1978)
Sample of authors
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...
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...