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Best known to filmgoers as the author of The Wanton Murders, upon which the 1957 Anne Bancroft mystery The Girl in Black Stockings was based, novelist, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster Peter Godfrey was born in South Africa in 1917. A highly prolific writer and staunch opponent of apartheid, Godfrey was exiled to London in 1962 for his political beliefs. He continued to work as a journalist for the London Times and also to write numerous stories and plays, and is particularly remembered by mystery aficionados across the globe. Once rated by the New York Times as one of the top ten thriller writers in the world, Godfrey died in London in 1992 at the age of 74. The Wanton Murders, included in an anthology of the author's work entitled Death Under the Table, is set near Cape Town's Table Mountain; however, its screen adaptation moved the action to a Utah spa town.