Francis Gerard

Full name Francis Edward Marie Gerard was born in Chiswick, Middlesex, on 4 February 1905. His surname was sometimes spelled Gérard; he dropped the Marie as an adult. He died in Johannesburg in 1966.

Most of his works are thrillers, some of them continuations of Edgar Wallace's non-fantasty Sanders of the Rivers tales; several of them feature Sir John Meredith, an eminent Occult Detective whose investigations move sometimes into Lost Race territory, examples being Golden Guilt (1938), in which a lost colony of Crusaders is found to have survived in Central Asia, and The Prisoner of the Pyramid (1948), focusing on Aztec survivals in Central America. The Black Emperor (1936) is a Near Future political thriller, in which a Black man is persuaded to attempt to become the emperor of all Africa; more complexly interesting in an science-fiction sense, Secret Sceptre (1937) focuses on a secret society of knights, a Pariah Elite sequestered in a remote part of Wales, whose goal is to preserve the Holy Grail and to defend Britain from the Anti-Christ. [Source: SF Encyclopedia]