Dick Donovan

Dick Donovan was the pen name of Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (1843–1934), an English journalist who had traveled in India, Australia and the Pacific before settling into fiction. From 1888 he published hundreds of detective stories narrated by a Glasgow investigator named Dick Donovan, collected in The Man-Hunter, Caught at Last! and a dozen other volumes, and for a few years in the Strand Magazine he rivaled Sherlock Holmes in popularity. He also wrote Gothic and horror fiction, including Tales of Terror in 1899, and historical novels. His autobiography, Pages from an Adventurous Life, appeared in 1907, and he complained that the pseudonym had swallowed his own name.