Bertram Atkey was born December 25, 1879 in Downton, Wiltshire, in England. He attended the Collegiate School in Salisbury where he excelled in music and sports, especially cricket. He began writing for the magazines in the early 1900s and created a variety of fictional characters including Smiler Bunn, Hobart Honey, Nelson Chiddenham, Prosper Fair and Winnie O'Wynn. He generally wrote crime fiction but also produced science fiction and supernatural stories, and mostly with a comic edge to it, full of rascals and rogues. Atkey's Mesmer Milann stories represent the author's more serious side. He spent his final days in a nursing home in Sway, Hampshire, and died there on June 12, 1952 at age 72.