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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

Harriet Unwin

Gender: Female

She grew up in a children’s home in Victorian England and was forced to work hard. But the young Harriet Unwin struggles stubbornly until she gets a job as a maid and later as a governess. She also becomes unwillingly involved in some murder cases, described by Evelyn Hervey (pseudonym for H.R.F. Keating), which she solves by methods including pretending to be a detective and a journalist.

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