Guy Newell Boothby (13 October 1867 – 26 February 1905) was a prolific Australian novelist and writer, noted for sensational fiction in variety magazines around the end of the nineteenth century. He lived mainly in England. He is best known for such works as the Dr Nikola series, about an occultist criminal mastermind who is a Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu, and Pharos, the Egyptian, a tale of Gothic Egypt, mummies' curses and supernatural revenge. Rudyard Kipling was his friend and mentor, and his books were remembered with affection by George Orwell.
Some of Boothby's earlier works relate to stories of Australian life, but later he turned to genre fiction including crime fiction, imperial romance, science fiction and Gothic horror. Boothby's oeuvre is pervaded by an array of intriguing and subversive villains whose larger than life characters eclipse the unremarkable English protagonists. They range from the classic supernatural fiends of fin-de-siècle gothic, to deformed freaks (a particular penchant of Boothby's), to sophisticated international master criminals that anticipate the adversaries of Ian Fleming's Bond character. In their depiction of the international master criminal and the revenge of the undead ancient Egyptian Boothby's novels were influential in establishing two key tropes of the cinematic age, which persist long after the novels themselves have faded into obscurity.
