Sehen Sie sich meine anderen Artikel an.

Nehmen Sie mich auf jeden Fall in Ihre Favoriten auf.

Reader's Digest Condensed Books.

Wildfire by Richard Martin Stern published by Secker and Warburg

Siege of Silence by A. J. Quinnell published by Hodder & Stoughton

The Sound of Distant Cheering by K. M. Peyton published by the Bodley Head

Night of Error by Desmond Bagley published by Collins

Desmond Bagley first wrote Night of Errors  in 1962, but withheld it from publication because he wanted to make revisions. Ideas for other novels distracted him and the revision was still unfinished when he died in 1983. Thanks to his wife the long-shelved manuscript, with his notes incorporated, has now been published posthumously, to the delight of his fans.

A friend of Bagley's once said that his books read like fictionalized versions of the National Geographic Magazine, because they were so full of detailed research into technical subjects. Bagley's reply was: I am an entertainer, not a pedagogue. I don't know if my readers are instructed while reading my books - that is not my aim. I do know that while doing research in odd corners of the world, I am giving myself a liberal education.

And educate himself he did. From humble beginnings as a miner's son in Kendal, where he was born in  1923, Bagley went on to leave school at fourteen. He was apprenticed as a printer's devil, and then spent the war years making parts in a Spitfire factory. Determined to broaden his horizons, he departed at the end of the war for South Africa, where he did a variety of jobs including coal and asbestos mining, before entering journalismn by writing a series of talks on scientific subjects for Durban's radio station. From Durban he moved to Johannesburg where he became a freelance reporter, and met his wife, Joan.It was in 1963, when Bagley was forty, that he first found success as a novelist with the publication of the Gold Keel. Like his subsequent novels, it bore the Bagley hallmarks of being strong on action, skilfully crafted and painstakingly researched and it set him on the first stage of a writing career that was to place him among the highest-paid writers of fiction in the world.

Throughout his life he travelled widely, learning as much as he could about subjects as varied as genetic engineering, computer science and, for Night of Error, oceanography. In 1965 he returned with his wife to Britain, settling first in Devon, where he produced a string of best-sellers, and then in Guernsey where he lived until his death. As an author who has succeeded in both entertaining and informing a wide audience, he is much missed.