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WILLIAM BAYER was born in Cleveland, Ohio, son of an attorney-father
and screenwriter-mother. In the 1940s his parents collaborated
on several mystery novels under the joint pen-name Oliver Weld Bayer.
He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, where he majored
in art history and from which he graduated cum laude in 1960. From 1963-1968
he served as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Information Agency, writing,
producing and directing documentary films. After that he became a full-time free-lance writer and
filmmaker. Several of his documentaries won awards including two Cine
Golden Eagles, and his feature, Mississippi Summer won
Best First Feature by a Director at the Chicago International Film Festival.
He has been a grantee of the National Endowment for the Arts and The
American Film Institute.
His first novel, In Search Of A Hero, was published in
1962. That was followed by two books on cinema: Breaking
Through, Selling Out, Dropping Dead and Other Notes on Filmmaking
(still in print) and The Great
Movies. A second novel, Stardust was published in
1974.
From 1972-1976 he lived in Tangier, Morocco with the woman who would
later become his wife, cookbook author Paula Wolfert. During that
period he wrote two novels set in North Africa: Visions
Of Isabelle (1975), based on the life of the turn-of-the-century
explorer and adventurer, Isabelle Eberhardt; and Tangier
(1978), his first crime novel, a story about expatriates living in Tangier
in which the main character is a Moroccan detective.
Returning to New York, he wrote the crime novels, Punish
Me With Kisses (1980) and Peregrine
(1981), which won the 1982 Edgar Allan Poe Award ("The Edgar")
for Best Novel. It was in Peregrine
that his series character, NYPD detective Frank Janek, was introduced.
Next came Switch (1985), a New York
Times Best-Seller, which became the source for the CBS mini-series Doubletake,
in which Janek was played by Richard Crenna. (Doubletake
would be the first of seven TV films in which Crenna starred as Janek;
see full list below). This was followed by a second
New York Times best-seller, Pattern
Crimes (1987) set in Jerusalem featuring Israeli detective, David
Bar-Lev,
Other novels include: "Blind Side" (1989); and two more Janek
novels, Wallflower (1991) and
Mirror Maze (1994)(French
edition won Le Grand Prix Calibre 38).
In 1994, he moved to San Francisco, where he wrote two novels using
the pen name David Hunt. The first David
Hunt novel The Magician's
Tale published by Putnam in 1997, won the Lambda Literary Award
for "Best Mystery." The second, Trick
of Light was published in October, 1998.
His latest novel, The Dream Of The
Broken Horses, a murder story set in an imaginary mid-western
city, was published by PocketBooks under his real name in February,
2002. The French edition, Le Rêve des Chevaux Brisés (published
by Rivages/Thriller, Paris) has won the prestigious "Prix Mystère
de la Critique" for best foreign novel, 2004.
Bayer's novels have been published in a dozen foreign languages, including French,
German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Hungarian,
etc. His psychological thriller, Tarot, is currently available
only in the French edition.
His new crime novel "City Of Knives," set in Buenos Airies, is now available in a French language edition. The theme
is intersecting personal destinies — strong characters, both North
and South American, whose lives criss-cross in that great labyrinthine capital
city. The tale encompasses: murder, neo-Nazis, authoritarian politics, political
corruption, tango and psychoanalysis. (The French title of the novel is "La Ville des Couteaux." U.S. publication not yet arranged.) |
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