William Bayer
American writer
William Bayer (pronounced “byer”) is an American novelist, the author of twenty-one books including The New York Times best-sellers Switch and Pattern Crimes.
Bayer has written a series of novels featuring fictional New York Police Department lieutenant Frank Janek. He has also written adaptions of his novels for television, and written for other TV shows. Switch was the source for seven television movies, including two four-hour mini-series. In all of them the main character, NYPD Detective Frank Janek, was played by the actor Richard Crenna. All seven movies were broadcast nationally by CBS in prime time.
Bayer's books have been translated into French, Italian, German, Dutch, Japanese, and nine other languages. He has written two novels under the pseudonym David Hunt, later republished in ebook editions under his own name. He wrote and directed the 1971 feature film Mississippi Summer which won the Best First Feature Award (the "Hugo") at the 1970 Chicago International Film Festival.
Personal life
Bayer is the son of attorney Leo G. Bayer and dramatist Eleanor Rosenfeld Bayer, later known as the screenwriter Eleanor Perry.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “William Bayer” as american writer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american writer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q534763. VIAF identifies the subject as 41836387. The Library of Congress control number is n81042696. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Bayer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.