At the time of his death in Southampton, England, Desmond Bagley was one of the most highly paid thriller writers in the world, with twenty million copies of his sixteen novels in print in twenty-three languages, in large print, in braille, and on tape. A film of The Freedom Trap (1971), released in 1973 as The Mackintosh Man by Warner Bros., starred Paul Newman and Dominique Sanda and was a box-office success. Mystery writer Reginald Hill (Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers, 1980) praises Bagley as "more consistently lively than [Hammond] Innes, less mechanical than [Alistair] MacLean" and argues that "action, authenticity, [and] expertise" are what make his books "outstanding in their field." He is one of the finest thriller writers because of his scrupulous but balanced attention to detail, his exciting use of first-person narration to plunge the reader into action and motive, and his sense of moral outrage and moral...