Frederick C. Davis

Born in 1902, Frederick C. Davis was an American writer who built an impressively busy career in popular fiction. Sources identify him as Frederick Clyde Davis, note that he studied at Dartmouth College, and say he began writing professionally while still quite young.

He became one of the great workhorses of the pulp-magazine world, producing a very large number of stories as well as dozens of novels over several decades. Alongside books published under his own name, he also used pseudonyms including Murdo Coombs, Stephen Ransome, and Curtis Steele.

Mystery readers often know him best for novels featuring Professor Cy Hatch, but his work ranged widely across crime, suspense, and adventure fiction. He died in 1977, leaving behind the kind of enormous, varied bibliography that makes pulp-era authors so much fun to rediscover.