His best-known book is The Ninth Man, in which a daring Nazi spy penetrates the White House and nearly succeeds in assassinating President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He has also written six non-fiction books, including two popular university journalism texts (co-written with Edward Jay Friedlander).
Upon graduation, he went to work briefly as a sports writer for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, then was hired by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he spent the next five years.
He took a position at West Virginia University, where he taught courses in photography and earned a master's degree in journalism, with a minor in Broadcast Television.
Lee's first teaching job was at American University in Washington, D.C. His students included Tom Shales, who later won a Pulitzer for his TV criticism, and Rona Cherry, who became Executive Editor of Glamour Magazine.
He also wrote his first successful novel, Caught in the Act, about an American journalist forced to run for his life in Spain, and edited a non-fiction book, Diplomatic Persuaders, a collection of essays on international information agencies.
During that time, he wrote his second novel, Assignation in Algeria, and penned a number of magazine articles so he could use them as case histories in his magazine-writing classes.
He continued his Ph.D. studies during the summers for the next couple of years, and took a brief leave of absence at NYU to act as a visiting professor at Missouri, and finished his third novel, The Ninth Man.
He turned over his Poe notes to his wife, who by now was teaching at California State at Northridge and had published her first novel, Hard on the Road, with Doubleday.