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Gavin Lyall (1932-2003) | |
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British thriller writer and journalist, a former RAF pilot, who often took as his theme the world of flying. In the 1980s, Lyall wrote a series of spy thrillers, whose main character was Major Harry Maxim, Special Services, assigned to the Prime Minister’s Office. "Old pilots, ones who first trained on slow propeller-engined aircraft, cannot watch the countryside flowing past a train or car window without subconsciously evaluating fields for an emergency landing: length, slope, obstructions on approach, surface . . ." (from The Crocus List, 1985) Gavin Tudor Lyall was born in Birmingham, Warwickshire, the son of an accountant. He was educated at King Edward VI School, Birmingham, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he edited Varsity, the university newspaper. From 1951 to 1953 he served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. Lyall earned his B.A. with honors in English in 1956. After graduating Lyall worked as a reporter for Picture Post and then as a film director for the BBC Television. Between 1959 and 1962 he was a reporter and aviation correspondent at the Sunday Times, London. In 1958 Lyall married the writer and journalist Katharine Whitehorn; they had two sons. Lyall's first thriller, The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961), was drawn from his experiences in the Greek islands and the Libyan desert. The work, published by Hodder & Stoughton, gained an immediate success and in 1963 Lyall gave up his day job to become a full-time writer. The Most Dangerous Game (1963) was again narrated in the first person with dry Chandleresque humour. The story, set in the Finnish Lappland, featured a cast of tourists and agents and offered meticulously researched details and tidbits of local color and character. The rights of Midnight Plus One (1965), in which a pilot drives a crooked millionaire to Liechtenstein, were purchased by the American actor Steve McQueen, known for his fascination with sports cars. Orson Welles was hired by BBS to adapt the novel. Shooting Script (1966), about a former RAF pilot who flies a camera plain for a film company, took place in the Caribbean. Moon Zero Two (1969), a Hammer/Warner Bros. film, for which Lyall wrote the story with Frank Hardman and Martin Davison, portrayed the Moon as a Western frontier. The novelization was written by John Burke. Lyall's novels, in the tradition of Hammond Innes, Desmond Bagley and Alistair Maclean, reflect his love of outdoors and exotic places. After publishing Judas Country (1975), an aviation thriller set in the Middle East, Lyall realized that he had typecast himself in predictable forms. Lyall abandoned his outsider heroes and first-person narrative and started his Maxim novels with The Secret Service (1980), originally developed for a BBC television series. Major Harry Maxim, a former SAS officer hired as a Whitehall troubleshooter, was also the protagonist in The Conduct of Major Maxim (1982), The Crocus List (1985), and Uncle Target (1988). In the 1990s Lyall wrote a series of spy novels, which took the reader into the early years of the British Secret Service before World War I. Lyall received the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger Award in 1964 for The Most Dangerous Game and in 1965 for Midnight Plus One. Lyall served as chairman of the British Crime Writers Association in 1967-68 and he was a member of the Air Transport Users' Committee of the Civil Aviation Authority. His works of non-fiction include The War in the Air 1939-1945 (1968) and Operation Warboard (1972). Lyall's articles were published in such magazines as the Spectator, Lilliput, and Everybody's. Gavin Lyall died from cancer on January 18, 2003. For further reading: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa by William L. DeAndrea (1997); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery by Bruce F. Murphy (1999) Selected works:
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