Donald Hamilton

Donald Hamilton was born in Sweden in 1916, came to America as a boy, took a chemistry degree and served in the Navy before he started publishing westerns and crime novels in the late 1940s. Matt Helm arrived in 1960 in Death of a Citizen: a wartime assassin who has spent fifteen years as a photographer and family man in Santa Fe and is pulled back into the old work. Twenty-seven books followed. Murderers' Row is the fifth of them and The Ambushers the sixth. Hamilton wrote Helm cold and procedural, which is the usual reason given for readers of the books disliking the two Dean Martin films of the mid-sixties, where the character is played for comedy. He also wrote on hunting, sailing and firearms, and died in Sweden in 2006.