John Pearson, who worked for Ian Fleming at The Sunday Times and wrote his biography and then the the fictional biography of James Bond, making him the second James Bond continuation author (after Kingsley Amis), was born on 5th October 1930 in Epsom, Surrey.
As well as the biographies of Fleming and Bond, Pearson wrote about notorious gangsters, the Kray twins, as well as The Gamblers, about the Clermont Set and included John Aspinall, James Goldsmith and Lord Lucan, who notoriously disappeared without a trace after the murder of the family nanny.