William Bayer (born February 20, 1939, in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American novelist, the author of Switch, among other works. Bayer has written a series of novels featuring fictional New York Police Department lieutenant Frank Janek. He has also written adaptions of his novels for television, and written for other TV shows. His books have been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch and Japanese. He has written two novels under the pseudonym David Hunt. He wrote and directed the 1971 feature film Mississippi Summer[1]
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Bayer is the son of attorney Leo Bayer and Eleanor Rosenfeld Bayer, later known as the screenwriter Eleanor Perry. He attended the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. in 1946; the Hawken School in Lyndhurst, Ohio from 1946–1953, and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy Exeter, New Hampshire in 1956. In 1960 he graduated cum laude from Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1962–1968 he served as a Foreign Service Officer with the United States Information Agency. He is married to cookbook author Paula Wolfert, and has lived with her in Tangier, Morocco; New York City, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; and in Newtown, Connecticut. They moved to San Francisco in 1994. They currently reside in Sonoma, California.
"Punish Me With Kisses" was praised by Gael Greene as "The best blend of sex and slowly growing horror since Looking for Mr. Goodbar.[2] His novel Peregrine won the 1982 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for best novel. The French edition of The Dream Of The Broken Horses was awarded the 2005 Prix Mystere de la Critique for best foreign crime novel. Bayer received the 1994 Prix Calibre 38 for the French edition of Mirror Maze, and the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for best mystery for The Magician's Tale. Mississippi Summer won the Golden Hugo Award for Best First Feature at the 1970 Chicago International Film Festival.[3][4]