David Hagberg

In an interview with The Writer Magazine, Hagberg spoke of his childhood inspiration to become a writer: "I really got the writing bug in the fourth grade when my Teacher read us Little House On The Prairie. At the end of the school year, she said the most astounding thing, 'This woman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, writes these books and she gets paid for it!' Wow! I thought. This is my gig! By the sixth grade, I was writing mystery stories in spiral notebooks."

During his service in the U.S. Air Force, an Assistant Dean of English at the University of Wisconsin, responding to Hagberg's inquiry about attending the school to learn how to make a living as a writer, told him, "Go home, have your wife get a part-time job, and give yourself 10 years. You'll know within five years if it's going to happen or not."

Hagberg's first book was published in 1975. "I started making a full-time living by 1980 or '81."

He apprenticed as a spy writer by contributing more than 20 "work-for-hire" entries in the Nick Carter-Killmaster series of espionage novels between 1976 and 1987. He also wrote "work-for-hire" novels based on the Flash Gordon comic strip.

Hagberg's writing career blossomed from writing commercial fiction novels to teaching writing courses, earning writing awards and judging in literary contests.

Like many "cloak-and-dagger" novelists, Hagberg has a professional background in espionage, having spent his stint of military duty as a cryptographer for U.S. Air Force Intelligence.[2]

Hagberg wrote a short story titled "Genesis" in Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50th Anniversary.

His work featured under multiple pseudonyms, including Sean Flannery, Nick Carter, David Bannerman, David James, Robert Pell, and Eric Ramsey.

Hagberg's writing style has been described[3] as a cross between Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming. His thrillers generally feature a combination of technical detail, timely plots and super-spy heroics.

On several occasions, Hagberg's plots have been echoed outside of his fictional worlds. In the novel Joshua's Hammer, for example, written in 2000, Hagberg gives a chilling account of a mega-terrorist plot by Osama bin Laden to kill thousands of Americans on their home soil, published a full year before the World Trade Center Attacks. His scenario of McGarvey tracking bin Laden to his urban lair in Pakistan and shooting him in the head—far from Tora Bora’s caves—was described and executed in Allah’s Scorpion (2007) four years before the eerily similar event echoed Hagberg’s novel.

His work has been well received by his colleagues in the crime writing community. Three of his novels, The Kremlin Conspiracy, False Prophets, and Broken Idols, were nominated for Edgars by the MWA in the "Best Paperback Original Novel" category. Three of his McGarvey novels, Countdown, Crossfire, and Critical Mass, won American Mystery Awards, given by Mystery Scene Magazine, for "Best Spy Novel."

• David Hagberg Collection at the University of South Florida