John Burke

John Burke (1922-2011) was an English novelist and prolific tie-in writer born in Rye, East Sussex, who worked as a publications executive for Shell and a story editor for Twentieth Century-Fox before turning to full-time writing in 1966. He is best remembered for his novelizations of Hammer horror films in the mid-1960s, later collected in Hammer Horror omnibuses, and for novelizing the science fiction television series UFO and Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Burke also created the Victorian occult detective Dr. Alex Caspian across several Gothic supernatural novels and, with his wife Jean, co-wrote suspense fiction as Harriet Esmond. Across five decades he published widely under pseudonyms including Jonathan Burke and Robert Miall, moving fluidly between original suspense and horror fiction and licensed adaptations of film and television properties.