John Harris, who also wrote under the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy, was born in 1916.

He authored the best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them. He was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher. During the Second World War Harris served with two air forces and two navies.

After turning to full-time writing, Harris wrote adventure stories and created a sequence of crime novels around the quirky fictional character Chief Inspector Pel. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.