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
Jack Tallon
Gender: Male
Police officer Jack Tallon is utterly bored by Pasadena, where he works, and gratefully accepts the offer of the job of police chief in little Whitewater. The very bigoted small-town population are wary of a stranger, and his is suspected – among other things – of rape. In three books by John Ball, Jack Tallon struggles not only to solve crimes, but also to deal with the suspicious attitude of the...