Frank Smith was born in Canada and went to England at the age of six. At the age of 16 he went to work in Bletchley Park, the wartime station where enemy communications were being decoded with the aid of the famous Enigma machine. He began writing in the 1960s. The theme of the first five books, beginning with CORPSE IN HANDCUFFS, was espionage in the Cold War years, but when that came to an end he moved on to police procedurals featuring DCI Neil Paget and DS John Tregalles.