Michael Davies Books In Order

Publication Order of Bill Kemp Books

Michael Davies is an award-winning author, playwright, screenwriter and journalist who moved into creative writing after a successful career in newspapers.

He was born and brought up in Northampton, the third of four brothers, to Kenneth and Wanda Davies, a chartered engineer and schoolteacher respectively. He landed his first job as a trainee news reporter on his local paper, the Northampton Chronicle and Echo, in 1982 and spent the next 20 years working on newspapers all over the UK, including the Scarborough Evening News, the Birmingham Evening Mail and the Oxford Mail, developing a reputation as one of the country’s leading newspaper designers.

After a spell editing the Oxford Mail, Davies left newspapers altogether, switching his attention to creative writing. He completed an MA in Television Scriptwriting at De Montfort University in Leicester but also wrote for the stage, winning the Bristol Old Vic Playwriting Competition with his play Rasputin’s Mother, which went on to tour the UK. Subsequent stage work includes Reality (Northampton Royal & Derngate), South Sea Bubble (shortlisted for the Lyric Hammersmith Playwriting Competition) and MacHamLear (UK and Ireland tour).

As well as maintaining his work in non-fiction, writing theatre programme essays for the West End and across the UK, Davies is a published poet and short story writer. Alongside the composer Michael Blore, he wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Tess, a large-scale adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s much-loved novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which received standing ovations at workshop performances at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon.

A lifelong fan of the bestselling thriller writer Desmond Bagley (1923-1983), Davies was delighted to be invited by publisher HarperCollins to work on an undiscovered Bagley manuscript, Domino Island, to prepare it for publication in 2019. It was the third Bagley novel to be published posthumously, after Bagley’s widow Joan completed two others, and takes the total number in the official canon to 17.

Following the success of that project, and to mark the centenary of Bagley’s birth in 2023, Davies was asked to write an original sequel featuring the same protagonist, Bill Kemp. Jeffrey Deaver described Bill as “part James Bond, part Philip Marlowe, and all hero”. Outback was published by HarperCollins on May 11, 2023, in hardback, ebook and audiobook (read by Davies himself), with the paperback scheduled for October 26, 2023.

A new Bill Kemp novel, Thin Ice, has been commissioned for publication in 2024 to complete a trilogy.

Davies now lives on the Fylde Coast, in the north-west of England, with his wife Tricia. In a neat symmetry, he has four sons of his own.