Austin J. Small

In the days before radio and rapid transportation Seamark (Austin James Small, fl. 1919-29) roamed the wastelands of the world - mainly the Yukon and up to the Arctic Circle, but also around the Pacific, across the Kalahari, and through West Africa's fever-belt. He served in the British Royal Navy during the First World War and was in several actions, notably the attack on the German submarine pens at Zeebrugge.
He was a prolific short-story writer for the fiction magazines of the early 1920s, at one stage appearing in 20-Story Magazine under his own name as well as his somewhat obscure pseudonym (1. Landmark visible from the sea, navigational guide; 2. a coastline's upper tidal limit). He put a great deal of his own experience of the gruelling side of life into his stories, which are vivid and vigorously told, with just the right amount of sentiment and melodrama to appeal to his audience.
Coming under the spell of the thriller writer Edgar Wallace, in his last books he wrote of vast global conspiracies and insane criminals who used super-science to gain their ends: Master Vorst [1926]; The Man They Couldn't Arrest [1927]; The Avenging Ray [1930].
>From biographical note by Jack Adrian in Detective Stories from The Strand Magazine [1991]