Authors Similar like John Ferguson

David Magarshack

David Magarshack (1899 - 1977) was a Latvian translator and biographer of Russian authors, best known for his translations of Dostoevsky.

Magarshack was born in Riga, in present-day Latvia (Riga was then part of Russia), travelled to Britain in 1920 and became naturalised in 1931.

After graduating from University College London in English Language and Literature, he worked in Fleet Street and published a number of novels.

He was the biographer of Chekhov (1952, 1955 (US)), Gogol (1957), Dostoevsky (1962), Pushkin (1967), Stanislavsky (1951, 1976) and Turgenev (1954). Magarshack died in London in 1977.

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Alan Melville

Alan Melville was an English broadcaster, writer, actor, raconteur, producer, playwright and wit.

There are multiple authors with this name.

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A.E.W. Mason

Major Alfred Edward Woodley Mason (7 May 1865 Dulwich, London - 22 November 1948 London) was a British author and politician. He is best remembered for his 1902 novel The Four Feathers.

He studied at Dulwich College and graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1888. He was a contemporary of fellow Liberal Anthony Hope, who went on to write the adventure novel The Prisoner of Zenda.

His first novel, A Romance of Wastdale, was published in 1895. He was the author of more than 20 books, including At The Villa Rose (1910), a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Inspector Hanaud. His best-known book is The Four Feathers, which has been made into several films. Many consider it his masterpiece. Other books are The House of th

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John Dickson Carr

AKA Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn.

John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. It Walks by Night, his first published detective novel, featuring the Frenchman Henri Bencolin, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in Hag's Nook in 1933, Carr's other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale, who debuted in The Plague Court Murders (1934).

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Nicholas Blake

Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet Cecil Day-Lewis C. Day Lewis, who was born in Ireland in 1904. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and his wife Kathleen (nee Squires). His mother died in 1906, and he and his father moved to London, where he was brought up by his father with the help of an aunt.

He spent his holidays in Wexford and regarded himself very much as Anglo-Irish, although when the Republic of Ireland was declared in 1948 he chose British citizenship.

He was married twice, to Mary King in 1928 and to Jill Balcon in 1951, and during the 1940s he had a long love affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann. He had four children from his two marriages, with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, documentary filmmaker and television c

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E.C. Bentley

E. C. Bentley (full name Edmund Clerihew Bentley; 10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

Bentley was born in London and educated at St Paul's School and Merton College, Oxford. His father, John Edmund Bentley, was professionally a civil servant but was also a rugby union international having played in the first ever international match for England against Scotland in 1871. Bentley worked as a journalist on several newspapers, including the Da

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Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly was an English crime writer best known for the Inspector Brett Nightingale series. Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Kelly was celebrated for the sense of refreshingly dark suspense in her mysteries. Her novel , published in 1961, won the Gold Dagger Award.

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Christianna Brand

Christianna Brand (December 17, 1907 - March 11, 1988) was a crime writer and children's author. Brand also wrote under the pseudonyms Mary Ann Ashe, Annabel Jones, Mary Roland, and China Thomson.

She was born Mary Christianna Milne in 1907 in Malaya and spent her early years in India. She had a number of different occupations, including model, dancer, shop assistant and governess.

Her first novel, Death in High Heels, was written while Brand was working as a salesgirl. In 1941, one of her best-loved characters, Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, made his debut in the book Heads You Lose. The character would go on to appear in seven of her novels. Green for Danger is Brand’s most famous novel. The whodunit, set in a World War 2 hos

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Charles Kingston

Charles Kingston, born about 1884, was the pen name of Charles Kingston O'Mahoney.

Little is known of the man but he began his writing career with 'The Viceroys of Ireland', which was published under his own name Charles O'Mahoney in 1912.

He turned to crime fiction in 1921 when he wrote 'Stolen Virtue' and thereafter he wrote 25 twenty crime novels, 17 of them in the golden age of British crime fiction between the two world wars and eight in the 1940s. His final novel was 'Fear Followed On', published posthumously in 1945. Many of his books are set in London.

He died in 1944.

Gerry Wolstenholme

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Julian Symons

Julian Gustave Symons is primarily remembered as a master of the art of crime writing. However, in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and he held a distinguished reputation in each field.

His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day. It is for this that he was awarded various prizes, and, in 1982, named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America - an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. He succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain's

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John Dickson Carr

AKA Carter Dickson, Carr Dickson and Roger Fairbairn.

John Dickson Carr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1906. It Walks by Night, his first published detective novel, featuring the Frenchman Henri Bencolin, was published in 1930. Apart from Dr Fell, whose first appearance was in Hag's Nook in 1933, Carr's other series detectives (published under the nom de plume of Carter Dickson) were the barrister Sir Henry Merrivale, who debuted in The Plague Court Murders (1934).

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Georges Simenon

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903 – 1989) was a Belgian writer. A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.
Although he never resided in Belgium after 1922, he remained a Belgian citizen throughout his life.

Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.

He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories

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Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based, and Some Must Watch (1933), on which the film The Spiral Staircase (1946) was based.

Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876, White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books.

She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s.

Her first three works, published between 1927 and 1930, w

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Christianna Brand

Christianna Brand (December 17, 1907 - March 11, 1988) was a crime writer and children's author. Brand also wrote under the pseudonyms Mary Ann Ashe, Annabel Jones, Mary Roland, and China Thomson.

She was born Mary Christianna Milne in 1907 in Malaya and spent her early years in India. She had a number of different occupations, including model, dancer, shop assistant and governess.

Her first novel, Death in High Heels, was written while Brand was working as a salesgirl. In 1941, one of her best-loved characters, Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police, made his debut in the book Heads You Lose. The character would go on to appear in seven of her novels. Green for Danger is Brand’s most famous novel. The whodunit, set in a World War 2 hos

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Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards has been described by Richard Osman as ‘a true master of British crime writing.’ He has published twenty-three novels, which include the eight Lake District Mysteries, one of which was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize for best crime novel of the year and four books featuring Rachel Savernake, including the Dagger-nominated Gallows Court and Blackstone Fell, while Gallows Court and Sepulchre Street were shortlisted for the eDunnit award for best crime novel of the year. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning histories of crime fiction, The Life of Crime and The Golden Age of Murder. He has received three Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America and has also b

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Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Scotland Yard's Inspector Alan Grant.

The first of these, The Man in the Queue (1929) was published under the pseudonym of Gordon Daviot , whose name also appears on the title page of another of her 1929 novels, Kif; An Unvarnished History. She also used the Daviot by-line for a biography of the 17th century cavalry leader John Graham, which was entitled Claverhouse (1937).

Mackintosh also wrote plays (both one act and full length), some of which were produced during her lifetime, under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot. The district of Daviot, near h

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Margaret Kennedy

Margaret Kennedy was an English novelist and playwright.
She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she began writing, and then went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1915 to read history. Her first publication was a history book, A Century of Revolution (1922). Margaret Kennedy was married to the barrister David Davies. They had a son and two daughters, one of whom was the novelist Julia Birley. The novelist Serena Mackesy is her grand-daughter.

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Celia Fremlin

Celia was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England. She was the daughter of Heaver Fremlin and Margaret Addiscott. Her older brother, John H. Fremlin, later became a nuclear physicist. Celia studied at Somerville College, Oxford University. From 1942 to 2000 she lived in Hampstead, London. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, with whom she had three children; he died in 1968. In 1985, Celia married Leslie Minchin, who died in 1999. Her many crime novels and stories helped modernize the sensation novel tradition by introducing criminal and (rarely) supernatural elements into domestic settings. Her 1958 novel The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960.

With Jeffrey Barnard, she was co-presenter of a BBC2 documentary “Night and Day” de

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Freeman Wills Crofts

Born in Dublin of English stock, Freeman Wills Crofts was educated at Methodist and Campbell Colleges in Belfast and at age 17 he became a civil engineering pupil, apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley D Wise who was the chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway (BNCR).

In 1899 he became a fully fledged railway engineer before becoming a district engineer and then chief assistant engineer for the BNCR.

He married in 1912, Mary Bellas Canning, a bank manager's daughter. His writing career began when he was recovering from a serious illness and his efforts were rewarded when his first novel 'The Cask' was accepted for publication by a London publishing house. Within two decades the book had sold 100,000 copies. Thereafter he con

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E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

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E.C. Bentley

E. C. Bentley (full name Edmund Clerihew Bentley; 10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

Bentley was born in London and educated at St Paul's School and Merton College, Oxford. His father, John Edmund Bentley, was professionally a civil servant but was also a rugby union international having played in the first ever international match for England against Scotland in 1871. Bentley worked as a journalist on several newspapers, including the Da

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Carol Carnac

Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

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John Bude

John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.

He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.

This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that

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W.F. Harvey

William Fryer Harvey was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces".

Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).

In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received

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Billie Houston

A Scottish actress and dancer; she toured music halls and revues with her sister Renée Houston as the "Houston Sisters". They became a leading variety act in the 1920s, sometimes performing as two children in over-sized furniture; Billie played the part of a boy.

Houston published one mystery novel in 1935.

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Raymond W. Postgate

Raymond William Postgate (6 November 1896 – 29 March 1971) was an English socialist, writer, journalist and editor, social historian, mystery novelist, and gourmet who founded the Good Food Guide.

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Ethel Lina White

Ethel Lina White was a British crime writer, best known for her novel The Wheel Spins (1936), on which the Alfred Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes (1938), was based, and Some Must Watch (1933), on which the film The Spiral Staircase (1946) was based.

Born in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1876, White started writing as a child, contributing essays and poems to children's papers. Later she began to write short stories, but it was some years before she wrote books.

She left employment in a government job working for the Ministry of Pensions in order to pursue writing. Her writing was to make her one of the best known crime writers in Britain and the USA during the 1930s and '40s.

Her first three works, published between 1927 and 1930, w

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Bernard J. Farmer

Bernard J. Farmer (1903-1964) was a British writer whose books included a series of police-focused crime fiction novels, and works on more diverse subjects such as The Gentle Art of Book Collecting. In Death of a Bookseller, the author combined these interests with excellent results.

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Billie Houston

A Scottish actress and dancer; she toured music halls and revues with her sister Renée Houston as the "Houston Sisters". They became a leading variety act in the 1920s, sometimes performing as two children in over-sized furniture; Billie played the part of a boy.

Houston published one mystery novel in 1935.

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Miles Burton

AKA John Rhode, Cecil Waye, Cecil J.C. Street, I.O., F.O.O..
Cecil John Charles Street, MC, OBE, (1884 - January 1965), known as CJC Street and John Street, began his military career as an artillery officer in the British army. During the course of World War I, he became a propagandist for MI7, in which role he held the rank of Major. After the armistice, he alternated between Dublin and London during the Irish War of Independence as Information Officer for Dublin Castle, working closely with Lionel Curtis. He later earned his living as a prolific writer of detective novels.

He produced two long series of novels; one under the name of John Rhode featuring the forensic scientist Dr Priestley, and another under the name of Miles Burton featurin

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Lois Austen-Leigh

Lois Emma Austen-Leigh, the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew and thus the great-great niece of Jane herself, was born and brought up in Winterbourne, Gloucester, on 10 July 1883. Her father was the Rector in the town. They later moved to Wargrave in Berkshire. While there Lois kept a diary and she had one unusual pastime in that she rode a motor-cycle wherever she went.
During the First World War, 1916-1918, she worked as a gardener for the Red Cross in Reading, while her sister, Honor, was a nurse in Malta and France. After the War, she became a companion to her widowed aunt. Then, after her aunt’s death in 1926, she had a house, Cob House built at Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast for herself and her sister. Possibly this was financed a

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E. Radford

Edwin Isaac Radford, 1891-1973, b. in Staffordshire

See also Edwin Radford

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Andrew Forrester

Pseudonym used by James Redding Ware.

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Nicholas Blake

Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet Cecil Day-Lewis C. Day Lewis, who was born in Ireland in 1904. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and his wife Kathleen (nee Squires). His mother died in 1906, and he and his father moved to London, where he was brought up by his father with the help of an aunt.

He spent his holidays in Wexford and regarded himself very much as Anglo-Irish, although when the Republic of Ireland was declared in 1948 he chose British citizenship.

He was married twice, to Mary King in 1928 and to Jill Balcon in 1951, and during the 1940s he had a long love affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann. He had four children from his two marriages, with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, documentary filmmaker and television c

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Francis Beeding

Francis Beeding is the pseudonym used by two British male writers, John Leslie Palmer (1885-1944) and Hilary St George Saunders (1898-1951). The pseudonym was a joint effort and was apparently chosen because Palmer always wanted to be called Francis and Saunders had once owned a house in the Sussex village of Beeding.

The pair met when undergraduates at Oxford and remained friends when they both worked at the League of Nations in Geneva and it was while there that they decided to collaborate on writing detective novels.

Discussing their collaboration at one time Saunders commented, 'Palmer can't be troubled with description and narrative, and I'm no good at creating characters or dialogue.' Whatever the reason it certainly worked.

Palmer was d

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Sara Woods

(Lana Hutton Bowen-Judd)
UK (1922 - 1986)
aka Anne Burton, Mary Challis, Margaret Leek

Born in England, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Filey, Yorkshire.

During the Second World War, she worked in a bank and as a solicitor's clerk in London. Here she gained much of the information later used in her novels. Lana married Anthony George Bowen-Judd on April 25, 1946. They ran a pig breeding farm between 1948 and 1954. In 1957 they moved to Nova Scotia, Canada. She worked as a registrar for St. Mary's University until 1964. In 1961 she wrote her first novel, Bloody Instructions, introducing the hero of forty-nine of her mysteries, Anthony Maitland, an English barrister.

Her last years she lived with her husband at Niagara-on-th

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Bruce Graeme

Graham Montague Jeffries aka David Graeme, Peter Bourne, Roderic Hastings, Fielding Hope, and Jeffrey Montague father of Roderic Jeffries

He is the creator of:
1. ‘Blackshirt (Richard Verrell)’, a gentleman crook.
2. ‘Auguste Jantry’, an Inspector in 19th century Paris.
3. ‘Robert Mather’, a Detective Sergeant.
4. ‘William Stevens and Pierre Allain’, a Detective Superintendent and an Inspector.
5. ‘Theodore I. Terhune’, a bookseller and amateur sleuth.
6. ‘Lord Blackshirt (Anthony Verrell)’, a gentleman crook and son of Richard Verrell.
In 1952 his son Roderic Jeffries started writing Blackshirt stories under the pseudonym ‘Roderic Graeme’.

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John Ferguson

Total similar authors (37)