| p:abstract
| - Donald Bengtsson Hamilton (March 24, 1916 – November 20, 2006) was a U.S. writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist mostly of paperback originals, principally spy fiction but also crime fiction and Westerns. He is best known for his long-running Matt Helm series (1960-1993), which chronicles the adventures of an undercover counter-agent/assassin working for a secret American government agency. The noted critic Anthony Boucher wrote: "Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of [Dashiell] Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told."
Hamilton was born March 24, 1916 in Uppsala, Sweden. He later emigrated to the United States, attended the University of Chicago (receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938), and served in the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. He was married to Kathleen Hamilton (née Stick) from 1941 until her death in 1989. The couple had four children: Hugo, Elise, Gordon, and Victoria Hamilton.
A long-time resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hamilton was a skilled outdoorsman and hunter who wrote non-fiction articles for outdoor magazines and published a book-length collection of them. For a number of years after leaving Santa Fe he lived on his own yacht, then relocated to Sweden where he resided until his death in 2006. A number of his Matt Helm novels are situated in the Santa Fe area and American Southwest in general; as Hamilton developed an interest in boating, many of the books began to have a nautical background as well.
Hamilton began his writing career in 1947, as American publishers began to experiment with issuing original paperback fiction. Most of his first eleven novels, published between 1947 and 1959, were typical paperback originals of the era: fast-moving, formulaic tales with lurid covers and limited characterization. The most interesting of them is, arguably, Assignment: Murder, (alternate title: Assassins Have Starry Eyes), in which a mathematician working on nuclear bomb design has to save his kidnapped wife from a pair of shadowy villains. At least three of his novels, however, from this period were first published as hardbacks by Rinehart.
The Matt Helm series, which began with Death of a Citizen in 1960 and ran for 27 books (ending with The Damagers in 1993 although another Matt Helm book, The Dominators, was completed in 2001-2002 and has yet to be published), was more substantial. Helm, a wartime agent in a secret agency that specialized in the assassination of Nazis, is drawn back into a post-war world of espionage and assassination after fifteen years as a civilian. He narrates his adventures in a brisk, matter-of-fact tone with an occasional undertone of deadpan humor. (en)
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| rdfs:comment
| - Donald Bengtsson Hamilton (March 24, 1916 – November 20, 2006) was a U.S. writer of novels, short stories, and non-fiction about the outdoors. His novels consist mostly of paperback originals, principally spy fiction but also crime fiction and Westerns. He is best known for his long-running Matt Helm series (1960-1993), which chronicles the adventures of an undercover counter-agent/assassin working for a secret American government agency. (en)
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