David Craig Owen Thomas was a Welsh author of thrillers, most notably the Mitchell Gant series. The son of the Western Mail rugby union writer JBG Thomas, he was educated at Cardiff High School. He graduated from University College, Cardiff in 1967, obtaining his M.A. after completing a thesis on Thomas Hardy. Thomas became an English teacher, working in various grammar schools in the West Midlands, and was Head of English at the Shire Oak School, Walsall Wood. After unsuccessfully trying script writing for radio, Thomas wrote part-time, with his wife as editor, in two fields: philosophical... thoughts in books of essays; and techno-thrillers, a genre whose invention is often attributed to the better-known Tom Clancy, though many fans feel that Thomas was its true originator. Most of Thomas's novels are set within MI6 and feature the characters of Sir Kenneth Aubrey and Patrick Hyde. His best-known novel was Firefox, which brought him to global prominence and spawned a successful film adaptation, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. After publishing his third novel, the Cold War espionage thriller Wolfsbane, he left teaching altogether, in 1977.
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