J.B. Harris-Burland
The novelist John Burland Harris-Burland was born in Aldershot in 1870, the son of a decorated military veteran, Major General William Burland Harris-Burland. Growing up in a comfortable middle-class, he would likely have followed his father's footsteps into the army, was it not for a childhood bout of rheumatic fever which would lead to ongoing ill health. He was educated at Sherborne School, where he won a number of prizes for his literary efforts, and originally intended, on leaving school, to study at Durham University in preparation for entering a career in the Church of England. However, his love of literature led to a decision to study at Oxford University's Exeter College.
On leaving university, Harris-Burland had a brief career on the stage, before writing his first novel, Dacobra, in 1902. This was a commercial success and, for the remainder of his life, Harris-Burland would be a professional novelist.
As with many writers of the period, Harris-Burland worked with a number of literary genres, supplying the reading public with thrilling tales, many of which were serialised in contemporary newspapers. As well as his noted supernatural and science-fiction stories, he was responsible for a number of crime and murder mysteries. Over his lifetime he would produce over sixty novels.
After his marriage in 1906 Harris-Burland would split his time between the town of Pevensey in Sussex and Stanton in Worcestershire. Harris-Burland would die at his home in Sussex in 1926, aged 55.
View A Mayfair Mystery by J.B. Harris-Burland