The author of 5 Hellgate Press books, Anthony J. Blondell was born in 1922 in the Union of South Africa. At the age of fifteen, he sailed before the mast on a Brigantine engaged in the guano trade, later serving on three tramp steamers.
In 1939, he joined the British Navy and trained as an antiaircraft gunner. He graduated gunner school on his seventeenth birthday and went on to serve on destroyers during the Battle of the Atlantic in the early days of WWII. By the time Japan entered the war, he had already served on two ships lost to the enemy.
In 1950, he joined the U.S. Army and served in Korea as an infantry platoon sergeant. During the Cold War, he was an undercover intelligence collection agent for the Army. He also served during the Vietnam War in Special Forces, as an Airborne (Green Beret) A Team sergeant. He retired from the Army in 1973 after thirty-four years of honorable military service.
For the next twenty years, Tony and his wife Paegel, a retired physician, lived on a fifty-seven-foot ketch on which they circumnavigated the globe three times. Both Tony and his wife passed away in 2010.
