Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (1986)
Sample of authors
Deighton, Len
The British author Len Deighton was born as Leonard Cyril Deighton in London. His father was a chauffeur; his mother worked in a hotel kitchen. He was a boy when he helped his father as a volunteer during the London Blitz. After leaving school he worked briefly as a railway clerk, and at the age of seventeen he joined the Royal Air Force Special Investigation Branch as a photographer. He then...
Literary figures
Joe Ryker
Gender: Male
A worn-out but effective police detective in New York, accustomed to violence and for that reason always armed with two revolvers. He is a disillusioned lone wolf and the main character in a suite of novels by Jack Cannon (pseudonym for Nelson DeMille). Disagreement about rights, however, meant that for a while several authors wrote books about Joe Ryker – and DeMille was forced to re-name his h...