The Spy Who Came for Christmas Page 19

  In 1966, the work of another writer, Hemingway scholar Philip Young, prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American literature. There he also met the Golden Age science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

  That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them New York Times bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog .

  Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty books, including such high-action thrillers as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife, Donna). His The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.

  Morrell is the cofounder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. In addition, he is an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association for Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and offensive/defensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.

  Morrell is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award, the latest for his novel Creepers. Comic-Con International honored him with its prestigious Inkpot Award for his lifetime contributions to popular culture. International Thriller Writers gave him its career-achievement ThrillerMaster award. You can visit him at www.davidmorrell.net