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
Simon Ark
Gender: Male
If you were to believe what he implies, he is a Coptic priest who is between 1,500 and 2,000 years old and who was condemned to forever wander the earth and battle against the devil. The tall, sun-tanned Simon Ark does this by solving a number of horror-like crime cases, many of them with an occult or religious background. The explanations in the short stories by Edward D. Hoch are, however,...