AustLit

Novelist and playwright Lindsay Hardy was educated at Strathalbyn and Victor Harbor. He attended Adelaide University but dropped out. He was a salesman in Sydney when World War II broke out and he enlisted in 1939. He fought in El Alamein and in Papua New Guinea and was wounded by shrapnel in North Africa in 1942. In New Guinea in November 1943, already wounded, his left arm was then permanently injured by a grenade.

Hardy returned to Australia and began writing radio scripts in the late 1940s, first in Melbourne for Donovan Joyce, and then from 1950 in Sydney with Grace Gibson. It was here that he wrote the first three of his 'Major Gregory Keen' serials that made him a household name. These radio scripts were later to be re-written as novels. During the 1950s ten of his plays were broadcast around Australia and his novel Requiem for a Redhead was adapted for film.

In 1952 he married and moved to the USA to write for television, but not content with the treatment of his scripts in Hollywood he re-located to New York to continue writing and began Requiem for a Redhead, the first of his Gregory George Athelston Keen works to be written as a novel.

He probably went to Canada and then returned to London where he wrote two serials for Australia. Returning to Australia in about 1957 or 1958 he wrote four more serials.

Back in England in about 1959-1960 he wrote thrillers for the BBC and for ITV. He apparently stopped writing in the mid-1960s.

Many of Hardy's works were 'recycled' in another form, in some cases from a novelette to a radio serial to a novel to a television serial, and his stories were re-used in different ways.