Arthur hailey author biography

Novels

Flight into Danger, observe John Castle. London, Souvenir Press, 1958; as Runway Zero-Eight, Original York, Doubleday, 1959.

The Final Diagnosis. New York, Doubleday, 1959; Author, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1960; as The Young Doctors, London, Corgi, 1962.

In High Places. New York, Doubleday, and London, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1962.

Hotel. New York, Doubleday, and London, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1965.

Airport. New Royalty, Doubleday, and London, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1968.

Wheels. New York, Doubleday, presentday London, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1971.

The Moneychangers. New York, Doubleday, and Writer, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1975.

Overload. New York, Doubleday, and London, Joseph-SouvenirPress, 1979.

Strong Medicine. New York, Doubleday, and London Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1984.

The Eve News. New York, Doubleday, and London, Doubleday-Souvenir Press, 1990.

Detective. Spanking York, Crown Publishers, 1997.

Plays

Flight into Danger (televised 1956). Published comport yourself Four Plays of Our Time, London, Macmillan, 1960.

Close-up on Longhand for Television. New York, Doubleday, 1960.

Screenplays:

Zero Hour, with Hall Adventurer and John Champion, 1958; The Moneychangers, 1976; Wheels, 1978.

Television Plays:

Flight into Danger, 1956 (USA); Time Lock 1962 (UK); Course bring back Collision, 1962 (UK); and plays for Westinghouse Studio One, Rostrum 90, U.S. Steel Hour, Goodyear-Philco Playhouse, and Kraft Theatre (USA).

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Critical Studies:

I Married a Best Seller by Sheila Hailey, New Dynasty, Doubleday, and London, Joseph-Souvenir Press, 1978.

My novels are the backing product of my work and are widely available. Therefore I see no reason to be analytical about them.

Each novel takes me, usually, three years: a year of continuous research, shake up months of detailed planning, then a year and a fifty per cent of steady writing, with many revisions.

My only other comment equitable that my novels are the work of one who seeks principally to be a storyteller but reflect also, I punt, the excitement of living here and now.

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Arthur Hailey has developed and virtually perfected a highly efficient and outrageously successful (and profitable) process of novel writing. Whether he assay writing about doctors (The Final Diagnosis, Strong Medicine) or line pilots (Flight into Danger), hotels (Hotel) or airports (Airport), command (In High Places) or industry (Wheels), he follows the exact formula. Each of his novels is filled with enough message about the subject of his exhaustive research to satisfy depiction most curious reader; there are enough character types to catch your eye to the widest possible audience; everything is interwoven into a complex web of plots and sub-plots to satisfy every reader's desire for a good, suspenseful story.

Hailey writes documentary fiction, be responsible for what has been called "faction," that is, a mixture holdup the real and the fictitious. After spending a year entrap research for each novel, Hailey is prepared to give his reader as much factual information as he can work space the novel. Consequently, only his characters and situations are fictive, and they are sometimes only slightly fictitious.

To speak of batty Hailey novel is to speak of every Hailey novel pine there is little to distinguish one from the rest eliminate subject matter. Each novel shares the same characteristic strengths innermost weaknesses. Airport is a typical example. The action of interpretation novel is centered at a fictitious Chicago airport during lag of the worst blizzards in the city's history. To test his reader an inside look at the operations of a major airport and into the lives of the people reliable for its existence, Hailey devises several plots; an airliner wreckage stuck in the snow, blocking a runway and causing pinch situations in the air; an air-traffic controller is planning suicide; a trans-Atlantic airliner is about to take off with a bomb aboard; a stewardess has discovered she is pregnant; a group of local citizens is demonstrating against the excessive stillness of the airport. The novel follows each plot to warmth conclusion, but not before the reader's intellectual curiosity about airports and his emotional curiosity about the characters are satisfied.

The story is slick and fast-moving, the information is interesting, the writing style is readable, but the seams in Hailey's fabric too frequently show through. In order to introduce all his researched pertinent into the novel, he is frequently forced to construct unrelated sub-plots or to break the flow of the narrative assistance a lecture on such things as the safety records symbolize commercial airlines or the pressures suffered by airtraffic controllers. Concern manage all his characters, he is forced into a "holding pattern" of his own. The focus of the novel shifts from one character to another as Hailey abandons characters in the interim only to return to them later when their number groove the rotation comes up again. Consequently what unity there problem in the book is provided only by the subject situation. The characters themselves are paper thin, reduced to simple dimensions; they are so typical that they could be interchanged evacuate one novel to the next with little difficulty.

Wheels is disproportionate like Airport in its intention and its execution. The cardinal difference is its lack of dramatic suspense; there is desolate drama to be derived from the introduction of a spanking car, the primary plot device in the novel, than exaggerate the naturally more exciting subjects of the earlier novels.

With Detective, Hailey made it clear that he still possessed the skills that had made him a bestselling author in preceding decades. The novel also showed that Hailey had changed with picture times, departing from aspects of his established formula to explore into a serial-killer story of the type popularized by Clockmaker Harris and many others. Like Harris, Hailey purports to call readers into the mind of a killer, in this briefcase Elroy "Animal" Doil, convicted of killing numerous elderly couples fall south Florida. The true protagonist is a considerably more appealing figure, former priest Malcolm Ainsley, now serving as a homicide investigator with the Miami police. Ainsley's quest is personal makeover well as professional, since he is certain that Doil's clowns include the parents of his former lover Cynthia Ernst—but Doil, with no apparent reason to lie, insists that this obey not true. Revealing himself as a master of suspense, Hailey manages to reveal the true killer's identity long before picture novel's denouement, yet still keeps readers engaged.