Walter Wager wrote for radio in the 1950s and soon began writing spy thriller novels. Over the next fifty years, Wager would author 24 novels, three of which - Telefon, Twilight's Last Gleaming, and Die Hard 2 - would become films. In 1976, Wager published one of his few works of fiction that wasn't set in a thriller mode, the critically acclaimed satire My Side, credited to "King Kong as told to Walter Wager." Wager died in 2004 in New York City.