HarperCollins snaps up estate to thriller writer Bagley and announces new novel for centenary

HarperCollins has snapped up the estate to thriller writer Desmond Bagley from Brockhurst Publications and will publish a new novel by Michael Davies to commemorate 100 years since Bagley was born.  

David Brawn, publisher of estates, struck a deal with the Guernsey company originally set up to manage Bagley’s business affairs.  

Bagley (1923-83) was a multi-million-copy selling author of 14 adventure thrillers between 1963 and 1982, plus three more published posthumously, all of which are still in print. Five of Bagley’s stories have been adapted for film and television, including “The Mackintosh Man”, a 1973 British 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. The Bagley canon now joins HarperCollins’s portfolio of dramatic rights, which also includes the works of his contemporary, Alistair MacLean. 

The new novel, Outback, is a sequel to Bagley’s posthumous Domino Island, which was published in 2019 after being discovered among abandoned manuscripts in the author’s archive. It is written by Davies, who edited Domino Island for publication. Outback takes the book’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. 

Outback will be published in May 2023 in hardback, e-book and audio. HarperCollins also control worldwide translation and film and television rights. 

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 début novel that captures the essence of a Desmond Bagley novel and reminds us just what a pleasure these books are to read.” 

Davies added: “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 Bill Kemp new dangers to face and new foes to tackle.”