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Portrait image of Amanda Cross

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Cross, Amanda

Carolyn Gold Heilbrun was a successful American academic, feminist and author of a series of mystery novels published under the pen name Amanda Cross, which came to have a major influence on future women crime writers. She was born to a Jewish family in East Orange, New Jersey. The family moved to Manhattan in 1923 where Gold attended Birch Wathen School. She enrolled at Columbia University, New...

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Portrait of Desmond Bagley Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (1978)

Sample of authors

Bagley, Desmond

British author of thrillers born in Kendal, Cumbria (formerly Westmorland), in northwest England, an area known as the Lake District. His father was a miner who became ill and moved his family to Blackpool when Bagley was about twelve years old. There he ran a boarding house for actors. Desmond Bagley, who suffered from a bad stutter, left school when he was fourteen and worked in odd jobs at a...

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