Martin Sands

John Frederick Burke (8 March 1922 – 20 September 2011) was an English writer of novels and short stories.

He had written under the pen names J. F. Burke, Jonathan Burke, Jonathan George, Robert Miall, Martin Sands, Owen Burke, Sara Morris, Russ Ames, Roger Rougiere, Joanna Jones and co-written with his wife Jean Burke under the pen name Harriet Esmond.

Burke was born in Rye, Sussex, on 8 March 1922, and educated at Holt High School, Liverpool, now known as Childwall Academy. He served in the Royal Air Force, Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and the Royal Marines during the war.

After working for the publishers Museum Press and the Books for Pleasure Group, he was a Public Relations and Publications Executive for Shell (1959–63) and Story Editor for Twentieth Century-Fox (1963–65) before becoming a full-time writer in 1966.

Writing as Jonathan Burke, J. F. Burke and John Burke, he produced several suspense stories and psychological thrillers, including the Atlantic Award in Literature winning Swift Summer (1949; by J. F. Burke), These Haunted Streets (1950), Chastity House (1952), Echo of Barbara (1959; filmed in 1960) and The Twisted Tongues (1964). Some of his other novels appeared under the pseudonyms of Joanna Jones, Sara Morris, Jonathan George and Owen Burke.

He achieved equal popularity with his science fiction short stories in magazines like New Worlds and New Frontiers, and the best of these were collected in Alien Landscapes (1955). His first two SF novels, The Dark Gateway (1953) and The Echoing World (1954), both dealt with the theme of parallel universes; and Pursuit Through Time (1956) described an attempt to change the course of history while time-travelling into the past.

For more than thirty years Burke novelised a large number of stage plays, film and TV scripts, notably John Osborne's The Entertainer (1960) and Look Back in Anger (1960), The Angry Silence (1960), Flame in the Streets (1961), The Lion of Sparta (1961; the film was released as The 300 Spartans), The Boys (1962), The System (1963), A Hard Day's Night (1964), Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965), That Magnificent Air Race (1965; the film was released as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines), The Hammer Horror Omnibus (1966/7; two volumes), Till Death Us Do Part (1967), Privilege (1967), Smashing Time (1968), Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Moon Zero Two (1969), Luke's Kingdom (1976), King and Castle (1986) and a series of The Bill novels, beginning in 1985.

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