Writer David Goodis claimed the series was inspired by his 1946 novel Dark Passage, about a man who escapes from prison after being wrongfully convicted of killing his wife.

In the novel Passage (2001) by Connie Willis, the main character, Joanna Lander, references Bridey Murphy several times as she attempts to explain to her fellow researcher that she's certain of what she sees in the NDEs she's experienced.

In the book she attempts what E. M. Forster's novel "Passage to India" concluded was impossible: for a Westerner to truly get inside the frame of India's culture.

E. M. Forster fans can undertake their own private pilgrimage 25 km (15 miles) north, to the Barabar Caves, which were the setting for the "Marabar incident" in Forster's famous novel Passage to India.

Leading you along tributary streams of the Cauvery river, past groves of mango trees, sugar cane fields, and rice paddies, it is suddenly broken by the soaring mountain of solid granite which director David Lean made the location for the fateful picnic in his film of E. M. Forster's novel Passage to India.

He won the Prix Goncourt in 1943 for his novel Passage of rights.

The 2001 novel Passage (hardcover, ISBN 0-553-11124-8), by Connie Willis, follows the efforts of Joanna Lander, a research psychologist, to understand the phenomenon of NDEs by interviewing hospital patients after they are revived following clinical death.

His big break came in 1946 when his novel Dark Passage was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, published by Julian Messner and filmed for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall heading the cast.

Goodis stated that The Fugitive was based on his novel Dark Passage.

The 1924 novel "A Passage to India" should be read along with this book: it makes a complete experience.