- Born
- 10 July 1869
St Marylebone, London, England - Died
- 24 June 1951
North Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Summary
Gask was born at St Marylebone, London, and trained in dentistry, a profession he continued for the next forty years. He married in 1898 and had four children, then divorced his wife and married his children's nanny in 1909. He came to Australia in 1920 with his second wife and their two sons, establishing a practice in Adelaide. The publication of his first novel, The Secret of the Sand Hills (1921), was self-funded, but when the first edition sold out within weeks a London publisher, Herbert Jenkins, republished it, and it soon became a bestseller. Gask went on to write more than thirty crime and detective novels-averaging one a year-with many of them set in and around Adelaide, including The Red Paste Murders (1923), Cloud the Smiter (1926) and The Shadow of Larose (1930).