Former Scarborough News journalist pens debut thriller at the age of 59

Michael Davies, who worked on the Scarborough News in the 1990s, has written his first solo novel to mark the centenary of bestselling author Desmond Bagley.

Davies previously worked on a posthumous Bagley novel, Domino Island, which was published in 2019 after being discovered as a first-draft manuscript in the Bagley archive.

Now he has written a sequel featuring the same protagonist, Bill Kemp, in an original new adventure set in Australia.

Outback honours the legacy of the multi-million-selling thriller writer, who travelled the globe for his meticulous research and wrote 16 bestsellers between 1965 and his death in 1983.

Davies said: “It was a huge privilege for me, as a lifelong Bagley fan, to be invited to work on Domino Island. Now, to mark his centenary, I am thrilled and delighted to have created an original sequel featuring a hero I feel I know extremely well. It’s been a real joy giving him new dangers to face and new foes to tackle.”

Publisher HarperCollins now owns the entire Bagley canon after publisher of estates David Brawn acquired the rights at the same time as striking the deal for the new novel with Michael Davies to mark the centenary.

Brawn said: “I am thrilled that we have been entrusted with Desmond Bagley’s legacy almost 60 years after Collins published the author’s first book, the timeless adventure The Golden Keel.

"Bagley was a fiercely intelligent and inquisitive storyteller, who travelled the world researching his innovative international thrillers, every one of them guaranteeing an exciting yet always plausible escape from the mundanities of everyday life.

“And to be able to mark the author’s centenary with a celebratory novel set in one of the few countries Bagley didn’t get to visit and write about before he died is a pure pleasure.

"Michael Davies has written a remarkable debut that captures the essence of a Desmond Bagley novel and reminds us just what a pleasure these books are to read.”

Outback takes Domino Island’s protagonist Bill Kemp – described by Jeffrey Deaver as “part James Bond, part Philip Marlowe, and all hero” – to an opal mine deep in Australia’s remote interior, where he faces an unknown enemy even more deadly than the vast, forbidding wilderness and the blistering Australian sun.

The book will be published on May 11 in hardback, ebook and a special audiobook edition narrated by Davies himself.

Desmond Bagley was born in Kendal in 1923 but moved as a youngster with his parents to Blackpool, where they ran a theatrical boarding-house.

He worked as a printer’s apprentice and aircraft engineer, but after the Second World War he travelled overland to South Africa, where he tried his hand as a mine worker, nightclub photographer and radio scriptwriter.

On returning to the UK in the 1960s, he began writing fiction, becoming one of the world’s most respected thriller writers over the next two decades.

Travelling to almost every continent to research his exotic storylines, he was described by The Times as a “craftsmanlike thriller novelist”.

He died in Guernsey, aged just 59 – the same age as the writer now continuing his legacy.

Five of Bagley’s stories have been adapted for film and television, including The Mackintosh Man, a 1973 Cold War spy thriller directed by John Huston and starring Paul Newman, based on Bagley’s novel The Freedom Trap, and Running Blind, an acclaimed BBC Television series filmed in Iceland in 1979.