Robert Turner

Born in 1915 and dying in 1980, he was a prolific American writer whose career stretched across detective magazines, crime paperbacks, comics, and early TV scripts. Sources available during this search consistently describe him as a pulp novelist with a wide-ranging commercial writing career, and one source credits him with creating the Quality Comics heroine Wildfire.

He is especially remembered today for Pulp Fiction, first published in 1948. That short book has been rediscovered by later readers as a practical, no-nonsense writing manual shaped by real experience in the pulp marketplace.

The details of his life are harder to pin down than the details of his work, so it is safest to focus on what is well supported: he was a working professional writer who produced a large volume of popular fiction and script material during the mid-20th century, and his reputation has endured mainly through the surviving influence of his advice on storytelling.