The son of famed aviator Valentine Baker, Denys Val Baker was born in Yorkshire, and became a professional writer in the late 1930s. His writing career spanned nearly fifty years, during which he produced numerous novels, autobiographies, hundreds of short stories and articles, and many volumes of non-fiction. Over the years many of Denys’ titles in the second-hand market continue to fetch high prices - which were good earners for the publishers in their day (one of his early novels had initial hardback sales of 100,000 copies in the US). With the publication, in 1994, of Tim Scott’s lovely biography of Denys, and the re-publication of Denys’ 1959 title Britain’s Art Colony by the Sea in 2000, Denys’ work began to re-surface.