For over three decades, P. G. Wodehouse had stiff competition for the shillings of English readers looking for a good comic novel: Joan Butler. At the rate of roughly one a year, Stanley Paul published over thirty of Butler’s novels. Few of them were considered worthy of review by most of the major magazines and newspapers, but that didn’t stop readers from buying them in the thousands and sometimes tens of thousands. They are now — every last one of them — out of print.
Given the zeal with which the work of English women novelists from the interwar period has been rediscovered and celebrated in recent years, you might wonder how it is that the work of Joan Butler has been so utterly neglected. The answer is simple: she was a he. As the Daily Mail announced in early 1960, Joan Butler was the pseudonym of the writer Robert William Alexander, who was born near Dublin in 1905 and who died in British Columbia in 1979. Although Alexander published a handful of novels, some with science fiction themes, under his own name, he primarily worked as Joan Butler.
I’m still waiting for the cheap copy of one of Butler’s novels I bought recently to arrive, but in the meantime, I thought it worth splurging on a cavalcade of the covers from about two-thirds of Mr. Alexander’s total Butler production. So, over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach here it comes:
