Twilight's Last Gleaming
Wager was best known as an author of crime and espionage thrillers. His novel "Viper Three" (Macmillan, 1971) was released as "Twilight's Last Gleaming", with Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark, in 1977. That same year, his spy novel "Telefon" (Macmillan, 1975) was adapted as the same-name movie starring Charles Bronson and Lee Remick. Wager's airport-based thriller "58 Minutes" (1987) became the basis for the 1990 action film "Die Hard 2", starring Bruce Willis. Additionally, Wager wrote a number of original novels in the 1960s under the pseudonym "John Tiger" that were based on the TV series "I Spy" and "". He also wrote the farce "My Side, by King Kong as Told to Walter Wager", published by Macmillan in 1976.