William Diehl Books in Order

William Diehl was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York, on December 4, 1924. His life before novels was full of close calls, deadlines, cameras, and long stretches of work that gave him plenty to write about later.

World War II stayed with him.

As a teenager, Diehl joined the Army Air Forces and served as a ball-turret gunner on a B-24 Liberator. He flew 24 missions over Germany, experiences that later fed the danger, fear, and moral messiness in his fiction.

After the war, he found work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, beginning as an obituary writer and later working as a reporter and columnist. He stayed with the paper until 1955, freelanced for a time, and became the first managing editor of Atlanta magazine in 1960.

He also taught himself photography so he could illustrate his own stories. In the mid-1960s, while working as a photographer for the United States Information Agency, he met Martin Luther King Jr. and accompanied him on assignments in the South. Diehl was badly injured in a 1967 attack while traveling with King in Mississippi.

Then he turned to fiction.

Diehl began writing novels around age 50, after years in journalism and photography. A typewriter-shaped ice-cream cake at his fiftieth birthday party, melting before anyone could eat it, became a sharp reminder that he had stories he still wanted to tell. His first novel, Sharky's Machine, arrived in 1978 and follows a hard-driving Atlanta detective pulled into a case involving vice, politics, and old wartime secrets.

The book was adapted into a 1981 film directed by and starring Burt Reynolds. Diehl kept building stories around people under pressure: cops working ugly cases, reporters chasing dangerous leads, lawyers facing impossible clients, and men whose pasts refuse to stay buried. Chameleon moves through international business and espionage, while Thai Horse sends a former covert operative back through Hong Kong and Thailand.

His best-known later books center on Chicago attorney Martin Vail. In Primal Fear, Vail defends Aaron Stampler, an altar boy accused of murdering an archbishop. The legal battle, its secrets, and its aftermath continue in Show of Evil and Reign in Hell. Primal Fear became a 1996 film starring Richard Gere and Edward Norton.

Diehl also reached beyond the contemporary thriller. The Hunt, first published as 27, links the rise of Nazi power with American crime and political danger. Eureka looks back at California's rough early twentieth-century history while following a later investigation into a suspicious death. His novels tend to move fast, but they also make room for ambition, corruption, loyalty, and the price of survival.

He spent many productive years on St. Simons Island, Georgia, before returning to the Atlanta area. Diehl died of an aortic aneurysm in Atlanta on November 24, 2006, while living in Woodstock with his wife, Virginia Gunn. A final novel, Seven Ways to Die, was later published with Kenneth John Atchity.