"By 1936 John Hunter (1891-1961) had been a full-time writer for well over 20 years. Much admired by that literary maverick J. Maclaren Ross, Hunter was the nearest British equivalent to the high-production pulp-fictioneers who flourished in the States during the 1930s. Like them, he was not at all choosy about his markets, but wrote for just about any genre there was: historical, romance, western, fantasy, SF, thriller, detective, school-story, span, straight adventure. The only kind of writing he didn't much indulge in was non-fiction. He worked under at least a dozen pseudonyms and probably clocked up around 20 million words in a writing career that lasted for over 40 years. He was somewhat addicted to the 'If only he/she had known' plot-device, but generally his writing was punchy, pacey, dramatic, often violent and always highly readable." --- Jack Adrian - Sexton Blake Wins (1986)