Henry St. John Cooper

This article is about the writer who died in 1926 and whose novels were published until 1936. For the writer who published some novels under this name from 1937 to 1940, see John Creasey.

Charles Henry St. John Cooper (1869 – 1926) was a prolific English novelist of school and adventure fiction. He wrote thousands of stories for several Amalgamated Press papers, sometimes under the pen name Mabel St. John.[1] He is perhaps best known for creating, in 1908, the character Pollie Green, considered the "most popular, though not the first, in a series of irrepressible schoolgirl heroines".[2] According to his son, he also wrote many "authorless" Sexton Blake stories for the Union Jack.[3] His novel Sunny Ducrow was adapted into a 1926 film, Sunny Side Up.[4]

Actress Gladys Cooper was his half-sister,[1] and musician Henry Russell was his maternal grandfather.[5]

  1. ^ a b Cadogan, Mary (1982). "Mabel St. John". In Vinson, James (ed.). Twentieth-Century Romance and Gothic Writers. Macmillan Publishers. pp. 607–612. ISBN 978-1-349-06129-7.
  2. ^ Drotner, Kirsten (1988). English Children and Their Magazines, 1751–1945. Yale University Press. p. 166. ISBN 0-300-04010-5.
  3. ^ Hodder, Mark. "Snippets: A Sexton Blake Scrapbook". Blakiana. Retrieved 31 July 2020.
  4. ^ "Sunny Side Up (1926)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 23 March 2019. Retrieved 21 July 2020.
  5. ^ Rutherford, Susan (2019). ""Singer for the Million": Henry Russell, Popular Song, and the Solo Recital". In Parker, Roger; Rutherford, Susan (eds.). London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories. The University of Chicago Press. pp. 201–220. ISBN 978-0-226-67018-8.