Frank Richards, the principal pen name of Charles Hamilton, wrote school stories on a vast scale, most famously the Greyfriars stories featuring Billy Bunter. Bunter is greedy, boastful and perpetually short of money, while classmates such as Harry Wharton and Bob Cherry provide more conventional schoolboy adventure around him. The stories first appeared largely in magazines such as The Magnet and combine boarding-school routine, sport, pranks, mysteries and comic reversals. Richards's prose is brisk, repetitive by design and shaped for serial reading, with familiar characters returning to recognisable patterns rather than developing like figures in a modern novel. His work fits classic British school stories, comic children's fiction and early twentieth-century serial literature. Readers interested in the history of boys' papers and boarding-school fiction will find Greyfriars a major reference point. Read more Less
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