Inside Story with Humphrey

Michael Davies has been brave enough to step into the shoes of great thriller writer Desmond Bagley who captivated readers and movie goers with his multi-million selling spy and adventure stories. Bagley who died in 1983 would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. Publisher Harper Collins has bought his estate and commissioned Davies to write an original thriller in Desmond Bagley style and atmosphere. It is called Outback with a protagonist, Bill Kemp, described by the thriller author Jeffrey Deaver as being part James Bond and part Philip Marlowe, the taciturn detective created by Raymond Chandler. Davies’ task is made even more challenging because Outback is a sequel to Desmond Bagley’s posthumously published Domino Island, which came out in 2019 after being discovered among abandoned manuscripts in the author’s archive.

Outback’s story centres around an opal mine deep in Australia’s remote interior, where Bill Kemp faces an unknown enemy even more deadly than the vast, forbidding wilderness and the blistering Australian sun. And the other story With so many famous names swirling around Bagley’s legacy, Michael Davies will be telling how an author can move into another writer’s shoes. Several have done it with varying degrees of success with Tom Clancy, Ian Fleming, Vince Flynn and others. How much is their own creativity and how much are they confined by the footsteps they follow? To find out, join Michael Davies in conversation with Humphrey Hawksley on Goldster Inside Story at 12.00 on June 22nd.