Horler created Brit hero Tiger Standish

It is the birthday of British thriller writer Sydney Horler (1888), whose novel Tiger Standish (1932) introduces a tall, ugly-handsome, two-fisted hero cast in the Bulldog Drummond mold. Standish was a freelance British counter-espionage agent with a penchant for rescuing damsels in distress and meting out justice to dastardly criminals. He is a pipe-smoking member of the British upper class with a manservant, and a cat named Richard the Lion, to whom he confides his inner thoughts. Standish was popular in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Horler wrote 157 novels, many of them featuring Standish. He also wrote several nonfiction books, including London’s Underworld (1934), which he spent a month researching in the city’s high crime neighborhoods.