David Anthony Yallop (27 January 1937 – 23 August 2018) was a British author who wrote chiefly about unsolved crimes. In the 1970s, he contributed scripts for a number of British television shows, including Minder.[citation needed] In the same decade he also wrote 10 episodes for the ITV court drama, Crown Court.
His book, In God's Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I (1984), posited that Pope John Paul I, found dead at age 65 in his chambers barely a month after becoming pope in 1978, had been poisoned by secretive Masons who had infiltrated the Vatican and the Vatican Bank. Reviewers, and the Roman Catholic Church, dismissed the book as groundless conspiracy theory. The book made the New York Times Best Seller list for 15 weeks, was translated into multiple languages, and was repeatedly reprinted, selling over six million copies.[1]
