Oakley Hall (July 1, 1920 – May 12, 2008) served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. For twenty years he was the director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine and is the founder and general director emeritus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hall has published twelve mysteries, fourteen mainstream novels, two books on writing, and the New York Times bestseller The Corpus of Joe Bailey, and his novels Warlock and The Downhill Racers were both made into major motion pictures.