Writing Some of Boothby's earlier works relate to stories of Australian life, but later he turned to genre fiction, including crime fiction, imperial romance, science fiction and Gothic horror. Boothby's oeuvre is pervaded by an array of intriguing and subversive villains whose larger than life characters eclipse the unremarkable English protagonists. They range from the classic supernatural fiends of fin-de-siècle gothic, to deformed freaks (a particular penchant of Boothby's), to sophisticated international master criminals that anticipate the adversaries of Ian Fleming's James Bond character. In their depiction of the international master criminal and the revenge of the undead ancient Egyptian, Boothby's novels were influential in establishing two key tropes of the cinematic age, which persist long after the novels themselves have faded into obscurity. The Dr Nikola Series Boothby was once well known for his series of novels about Doctor Nikola, an occultist anti-hero seeking immortality and world domination. The adventures of Nikola were launched with the first episode of A Bid for Fortune which was serialised in The Windsor Magazine (a rival to The Strand Magazine). Nikola is described as dressing in "faultless evening dress, slender, having dark peculiar eyes and dark hair, and white toad-coloured skin." Dr Nikola starred in a play The Adventures of Dr. Nikola by Ben Landeck and Oswald Brand, which ran briefly in London in 1902. Other novels In A Prince of Swindlers he created the character of Simon Carne, a gentleman thief in the Raffles mould, with an alter ego as the eccentric detective Klimo. Carne first appeared in Pearson's Magazine in 1897, predating Raffles by two years. Pharos the Egyptian (1899) is a thriller with romance and some supernaturalism in which a very sinister old man, Pharos, proves to be Ptahmes, a mummy who has survived through the centuries with full magical powers. The Curse of the Snake (1902) is referred to by Brian Stableford as the most interesting of Boothby's novels. However, Stableford states that Boothby "very obviously made up his novel plots as he went along and that therefore this novel "concludes with a woefully inadequate explanation of its marvelously creepy opening sequence." Ghost Stories Boothby wrote a number of ghost stories, mainly from his collections Uncle Joe's Legacy and Other Stories (1902) and The Lady on the Island (1904). Amongst the better known of these are "The Black Lady of Brin Tor", "A Strange Goldfield", "The Lady on the