Charles Hamilton Sorley was born in 1894 in Douglas, Isle of Man. He read history at Clare College, Cambridge University, and went on to become a barrister in the Middle Temple in London where he was a friend of C. S. Lewis and a member of the Cambridge Apostles group
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In World War I, he served with the Royal Flying Corps and was a prisoner of war in Germany from 1917 to 1918. After being awarded the Military Cross for gallantry in action, he went on to become a literary agent and publisher with offices in London and New York. In the 1930s, Sorley became increasingly interested in spiritualism and wrote about his experiences with mediums in his book The Case for Spiritism (1935).
In 1938, he began writing fiction under the pseudonym "D. D. Scott" which appeared under that name in The Saturday Evening Post from 1939 to 1944.
Sorley also began publishing fiction under his own name beginning with the novel Departure (1940) which was followed by The Enemy (1942), The Enemy Within (1943), and The Enemy Below (1944).