Desmond Bagley wrote 16 novels, becoming one of the world's top-selling authors, with his books translated into more than 30 languages. He was born in 1923 in Kendal and brought up in Blackpool, beginning his working life, aged 14, in the printing industry. After working in an aircraft factory during the Second World War, he decided to travel, working his way through Europe and southern Africa, and in 1951 joined the gold mining industry before becoming a freelance journalist in Johannesburg, where he wrote his first novel, The Golden Keel, in 1962. In 1964 he returned to England, finally settling in Guernsey with his wife, where he died in 1983.