David Francis Dodge was born August 18, 1910 in Berkeley, California. He joined a San Francisco accounting firm in 1934, then enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Dodge's writing career began when he joined a group of amateur playwrights, winning a local first prize for one of his one‐act plays. He then bet his wife Elva that he could write a successful mystery novel and published Death and Taxes in 1941, which featured a CPA detective. After WWII, he moved his wife and daughter to Guatemala where he continued to write mysteries as well as travel books. Dodge kept traveling, turning out his most successful novel, To Catch a Thief—filmed by Alfred Hitchcock—based on experiences in the South of France. In 1968, David and Elva settled in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico where they both died within a year of each other, he on August 8, 1974.