Nikolai Nikolaevich Shpanov was born in 1896 in the city of Nikolsk-Ussuriysk, graduated from a classical gymnasium and studied at the shipbuilding department of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. In 1916 he graduated from the aeronautical school and served in the Air Force for 25 years. Shpanov began his literary work in the magazine "World Pathfinder" describing adventures on a balloon during the first aeronautical competitions in the USSR. Shpanov's first book, "In the Ice Behind Italy," was published in 1928 by the Young Guard publishing house. Among his pre-war books, the story "The First Blow" gained the greatest fame. The most popular work of Shpanov, written after the Great Patriotic War, is the novel "Arsonists." The novel "Hurricane" offered to readers continues the line of exposure of war provocateurs and revanchists from Munich to the present day, begun by the "Arsonists."