Daniel Carney was born in Beirut in 1944. In 1963 he settled in Rhodesia and joined the British South Africa Police, where he served for three and a half years. In 1968 he co-founded the real-estate firm Fox and Carney in Salisbury, Rhodesia.

After his death, in 1987, ownership rights of his novels and the films based on his novels passed to his family. They have consistently withheld permission to reproduce Daniel's novels, and have opposed re-release or sales of the movies based on the novels. In 2005, Tango Entertainment released a 30th anniversary edition of The Wild Geese (1978). Allied Artists, the original backers of the film, collapsed before it could be released in the United States, which accounted for poor box office receipts in the US despite being the fourteenth highest grossing film, worldwide, of 1978.