author
Richard Howells Watkins
An adventure and detective writer with a real taste for speed, travel, and early aviation, he brought the energy of pulp-era thrills to his fiction. His stories often circle around pilots, danger, and hard-driving action.
3 Audiobooks
Nerve enough
by Richard Howells Watkins
The air splasher
by Richard Howells Watkins
His to fly
by Richard Howells Watkins
About the author
Richard Howells Watkins was an American writer in the adventure and detective field. A finding aid for his papers at UC Santa Barbara describes him as a World War I veteran, an avid traveler, and an enthusiast for auto racing, aviation, and the sea; it also notes that he was born in New York City on May 26, 1895, later lived in Riverside, Connecticut, and moved to Santa Barbara in 1956.
His surviving papers include correspondence, short stories, articles, screenplays, and aviation files with photographs of World War I aces and early aircraft. That mix fits the work he is still known for today: fast-moving pulp fiction with a strong aviation streak, including stories such as His to Fly, Nerve Enough, and The Air Splasher.
Watkins also wrote crime and mystery fiction, including the Silver Skull stories that appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly in the 1930s. While many details of his life remain hard to pin down, the record that does survive shows a writer deeply connected to the machines, risks, and restless motion that shaped his fiction.