Guy Boothby
When he died at the age of 37, the Australia author Guy Boothby had written over fifty novels, as well as a number of short stories and plays. Though largely forgotten today, Boothby had a highly successful and productive career, exploiting the Victorian and Edwardian desire for serialised adventure and mystery stories. Contemporary writers were not always complementary about his talents; one obituary, commenting on his speed of writing, noted that 'one does not look for literary merit in work of this lightning character'.[1] Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that, during his brief career, Boothby enjoyed the kind of success that would be the envy of many writers.
Born in 1867 in the city of Adelaide, in what was then the Colony of South Australia, Boothby was dispatched to England as a child, for a traditional English education. He would return to Australia at the age of 16, initially bound for services in the colonial administration; when this proved to be unsatisfactory he turned to writing, producing his first major work, the comic opera Sylvia, in 1890. He would return to England in the early 1890s, and it was here that he had his first major success, a travelogue entitled On the Wallaby, or Through the East and Across Australia.
Over the remaining ten years of his literary career, Boothby turned his hand to a number of genres, including mysteries, adventures, and romances, with his greatest successes being a series of novels focused on the occultist antihero Doctor Nikola. His productivity was prodigious; in one obituary it was recounted that:
One afternoon he received a request for a story to be published within three days. He set to work at half-past 5, and went on till late at night. After a few hours' sleep he started again at 3.30 a.m., and worked on till he had written 23,000 words. He sent his butler up to Waterloo from Sunbury, where he was living, and as each instalment arrived by train it was taken direct to the printers. The whole was in the public's hands within about 60 hours of the order being received.[2]
In 1905 Boothby contracted influenza, and died at his home in the Hampshire town of Boscombe on 26 February 1905.