Frederick Robert Buckley (1896–1976), better known as F. R. Buckley, was an English writer. He wrote more than 200 short stories for pulp magazines between 1918 and 1953. He was born on 20 December 1896 in Colton, Staffordshire, England, and died in 1976. He was the son of R. J. Buckley (1847–1938) and Mary Wakelin. His father was music critic for the Birmingham Gazette from 1886 to 1926. Frederick attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and Birmingham University, studying journalism. While at King Edward's School, at age 14, he performed in Aristophanes' Peace in the role of Theoria. Also in the cast was schoolmate J. R. R. Tolkien playing Hermes. F. R. Buckley was married in 1916 to actress Helen Curry and his brother-in-law was fellow pulp fiction author Tom Curry.
F. R. Buckley in 1945
Betty Blythe, Frederick Buckley and Guy Empey in a still from the 1919 silent film The Undercurrent
Poster of the movie The Bearcat, a Western now lost from 1922, crediting the writer F.R. Buckley
BBC Broadcasting House in London in 1949
Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.
Cover of the pulp magazine Spicy Detective Stories vol. 2, #6 (April 1935) featuring "Bullet from Nowhere" by Robert Leslie Bellem
November 1927 issue of Black Mask, featuring The Continental Op
Cover of the pulp magazine Dime Mystery Book Magazine, January 1933
Image: Detective Book Magazine 002