Oswald Wynd was brought up in Japan by Scots missionary parents, returning to Scotland in 1932 to take up a place at Edinburgh University. During the war he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and sent to Malaya. He was captured by the Japanese after a week alone in the jungle, following the fall of Singapore, and spent over three years in a POW camp, during which he was mentioned in dispatches for his interpreting work. During the last year of the war he began a novel which won the Doubleday prize in 1947. He now lives in Scotland and writes thrillers under the pseudonym Gavin Black.