Arthur J. Burks

Arthur J. Burks (September 13, 1898 – May 13, 1974) was an American pulp fiction writer and Marine colonel.
Burks was born to a farming family in Waterville, Washington. He married Blanche Fidelia Lane on March 23, 1918, in Sacramento, California, and was the father of four children: Phillip Charles, Wasle Carmen, Arline Mary, and Gladys Lura. He served in the United States Marine Corps in World War I, and began writing in 1920. After being stationed in the Dominican Republic and inspired by the native voodoo rituals he heard about from Haitian prisoners in a military jail, Burks began to write stories of the supernatural that he sold to the magazine "Weird Tales" in 1924. 
In late 1927 he resigned from the Marine Corps and began writing full-time. He became one of the "million-word-a-year" men in the pulp magazines by virtue of his tremendous output. He wrote in the neighborhood of 800 stories for the pulps. He was well known for being able to take any household object that someone would suggest to him on a dare, and instantly generate a plot based around it. His byline was commonplace on pulp covers. He wrote primarily in the genres of aviation, detective, adventure, science fiction, sports (primarily boxing), and weird menace. Two genres he was "not" to be found in were love and westerns. He wrote several series for the pulps, including the Kid Friel boxing stories in "Gangster Stories", and the Dorus Noel undercover-detective stories for "All Detective Magazine", set in Manhattan's Chinatown. 
The pressure of producing so much fiction caused him to ease off in the late-1930s. He returned to active duty as the U.S. entered World War II and eventually retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Burks moved to Paradise in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1948, where he continued to write until his death in 1974. Throughout the 1960s, he wrote many works on metaphysics and the paranormal. In his later years, he lectured on paranormal activities and gave readings.
Critical Appraisal.
E. F. Bleiler adjudges Burks' novel "The Great Mirror" (1952) as "pretty bad." He states of the collection "Look Behind You" (1954) "In terms of content and format this is one of the low points in American fan publishing." Of Burks' collection "Black Medicine" (1966) Bleiler sums it up as "a weak collection. The Caribbean stories show racial bias to the point of grotesqueness, and most of the other stories are routine pulp fiction. ["The Desert of the Road"] has points of interest, and ["Bells of Oceana"] is worth reading for a certain baroque, exuberant overkill of horror." 