Dale Brown

Navigator-Bombardier in Strategic Air Command

Brown served in the U.S. Air Force from 1978 to 1986 and left as a captain. Gale places him in Strategic Air Command. His publisher biography names the aircraft: he flew as a navigator-bombardier on the B-52G Stratofortress and the FB-111A, and his decorations include the Air Force Commendation Medal with oak leaf cluster and the Combat Crew Award.

The job gave him the idea for his first book. "While I was in the Air Force flying B-52s, I realized very quickly that very few people knew what we did," he told Voice of America in 2007. The other spark was the Reagan administration's space-based missile defense plan and the press coverage that followed it. "Several articles came out shortly after that, talking about how the Soviet Union and how China had used lasers to blind American reconnaissance satellites," he said. "So I wrote a novel about a lone B-52 crew and a heroic navigator flying halfway around the world to blow up this ground-based laser site."

Flight of the Old Dog, 1987

He wrote that novel while still in uniform, according to VOA and BookBrowse. Gale records that he left the Air Force in 1986, found a literary agent, and saw Flight of the Old Dog published in 1987 by Donald I. Fine in New York. Its navigator-bombardier, Patrick McLanahan, became the character Brown would return to for most of his career.

He was open about the comparison readers drew. "If I can be half as good as Tom Clancy I'll be thrilled," he said in an interview quoted by Gale. "I was in the military for eight years and did a lot of flying during that time. When I write about dogfighting, I've actually done it."

His second novel, Day of the Cheetah, came out in 1989 and spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list that year, Gale notes. He told Publishers Weekly at the time that "everything I write about really exists," and pointed to a laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, as the starting point for that book.

Five Years Ahead of the Hardware

Brown has described his method in the same terms for decades. "The underlying theme in all my books is to take technology that's on the drawing board or is just being introduced in testing phases, project four or five years into the future when these new devices will be operational and write about how these brand-new systems would be used," he said in an interview quoted by Gale. From 1990 he sat on the research advisory panel of Aviation Week, according to the same entry.

By 2007, when VOA interviewed him about Strike Force, that book was his 19th novel. He told the reporter that technology alone does not sell a thriller: "What people really buy novels for is to read about the personalities and read about the emotional conflicts, as well as the real-world military conflicts."

The output grew faster once he took on collaborators. From 2001 he and Jim DeFelice wrote the Dreamland series, named for a site in the Nevada desert where researchers design high-tech weapons and aircraft, Gale and BookBrowse both record. Two computer games were built on his novels, Megafortress and Act of War: Direct Action, he told Writer's Digest.

Nick Flynn and Arctic Storm Rising

In 2021 Brown started over with a new lead. Arctic Storm Rising opened the Nick Flynn series, and he told Writer's Digest that the change was deliberate: a move away from the high-tech military aviation that had carried the McLanahan books. By then he counted 46 earlier titles. His agent was Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group and his publisher was William Morrow.

The interview also gave a rare look at how he works. A book takes him about nine months to reach a final draft, which he compared to "giving birth." He writes an outline for each story, then said he will "usually put the outline away and let the story flow on its own."

Lake Tahoe and the Cockpit

Brown lives near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, with his wife, Diane, according to both Gale and his publisher biography. They have one son. Gale also lists an earlier marriage, in 1978, that ended; no second source confirms its details.

He never stopped flying. His publisher biography describes him as a multi-engine, instrument-rated private pilot who flies as a command pilot for Angel Flight West, a group of volunteer pilots who fly medical patients, and as a mission pilot with the Civil Air Patrol. Gale adds that he served as a director and volunteer pilot for AirLifeLine. Sources disagree on which Cessna he owns, so this article does not name the model.

No credible outlet has published an estimate of his net worth or the size of his book contracts, so this article gives no figure.

Sources

• Brown, Dale 1956- | Encyclopedia.com
• Dale Brown | Risingshadow
• Dale Brown author information
• Author Dale Brown Unveils New Techno-Thriller
• Dale Brown: On Giving Your Series a New Direction - Writer's Digest