Arthur Hailey Books in Order

If you want his biggest classics: Hotel → Airport
If you enjoy political and corporate drama: In High Places → Wheels → The Moneychangers
If you like medical and pharma stories: The Final Diagnosis → Strong Medicine
If you prefer media and terrorism thrillers: The Evening News → Detective
If you want aviation tension from the start: Flight into Danger / Runway Zero-Eight → Airport

Arthur Hailey was a British born, later Canadian novelist who built tense, highly readable stories around the workplaces many people take for granted. From hotels and airports to car plants and hospitals, he liked to show what happened behind the doors marked staff only, then push ordinary characters to their limits.

He was born on 5 April 1920 in Luton, Bedfordshire, the only child of a factory worker and a mother who loved books. As a boy he read anything he could find and started writing poems and short pieces, encouraged by a parent who let him skip chores so he could type.

Hailey left school at fourteen after failing to win a scholarship that would have kept him in the classroom. Instead he went to London as an office boy and clerk in the mid 1930s, learning how business paperwork moved while he dreamed about flying and kept scribbling stories on the side.

When the Second World War began, he joined the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot. He flew for Britain in dangerous conditions, eventually becoming a flight lieutenant. Years later, the discipline of flying and the feeling of being responsible for many lives would surface again in his aviation stories.

After the war he found postwar Britain grim and politically frustrating, so in 1947 he emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto. There he held a string of jobs in sales, real estate, and advertising, and edited a trade magazine for the bus and truck industry. All of it fed his interest in how organizations actually worked.

Writing never went away. In the mid 1950s he wrote a script called Flight into Danger about a passenger forced to land an airliner after the pilots fall ill. Broadcast live on Canadian television in 1956, it became a surprise smash, was remade around the world, and was later novelized as Runway Zero-Eight.

The television success gave him a new career as a full time writer, and Hailey began turning his ideas into novels. The Final Diagnosis took readers into the tense world of a struggling American hospital. In High Places moved to the Canadian prime minister’s office during the Cold War. Then Hotel, published in 1965, changed his life, spending almost a year on bestseller lists and allowing him to move with his family to California.

He followed that with Airport, about one snowbound night at a major Chicago airport, and with big novels on the auto industry in Wheels, banking in The Moneychangers, and the power grid in Overload. For each book he spent about three years, usually a full year on research, months sorting notes, then more than a year writing. He visited factories, control towers, car plants, hotel back offices, even jungle camps, convinced that readers would feel the difference if he got the details right.

After heart bypass surgery he kept going, turning to the pharmaceutical business in Strong Medicine, the world of network television and terrorism in The Evening News, and a Miami homicide squad in Detective. Across all of these books he returned to the same themes, showing ordinary professionals who care about their work trapped between ethics, profit, and personal loyalties. He often said he was a storyteller first, and he let the research support the plot rather than overshadow it.

Hailey married twice and raised six children, three from each marriage. In the 1970s he and his second wife Sheila settled in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, first for tax reasons and then because they loved the place. He slowed his publishing schedule but kept writing, reading, and sailing. On 24 November 2004 he died in his sleep at home, aged eighty four, leaving a shelf of books that still give readers a guided tour of complex systems wrapped in very human suspense.