Walter Wager

Walter Herman Wager (September 4, 1924 – July 11, 2004) was an American crime and espionage-thriller novelist. The movie Telefon, starring Charles Bronson, was inspired by his novel of the same name. His book 58 Minutes was adapted into Die Hard 2, starring Bruce Willis.

Education and career

Walter Wager was born in The Bronx, New York City, the son of a doctor and a nurse who had emigrated from Tsarist Russia. A 1944 graduate of Columbia College, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, he went on to a Harvard Law School degree three years later. Passing the bar exams but choosing not to practice, he went on to receive a master's degree in aviation law from Chicago's Northwestern University in 1949, while also serving as an editor of the Journal of Air Law and Commerce, then based in that city.

Afterward, he spent a year at the Sorbonne, in Paris, as a Fulbright Fellow. He spent a year in Israel as an aviation-law consultant for the Israeli Department of Civil Aviation, helping to negotiate a treaty on air space and working out of Lydda Airport in Tel Aviv. In 1952, he returned to New York City, where he worked for the United Nations, editing documents.