William Murray Graydon

William Murray Graydon was an extremely prolific American writer who also wrote under the pen-names Alfred Armitage, William Murray, and Tom Olliver. He wrote adventure, historical fiction and Sexton Blake detective stories for boy's story papers.

William Murray Graydon was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Graydon, a prominent lawyer. He was the eldest of four children, and had three younger sisters Mary, Julia, and Alice. He was educated at the Harrisburg Academy and spent seven years there. He began writing while employed as a clerk at the Harrisburg National Bank. His first stories were mainly boys adventures about canoeing, fishing, camping, based on his real life experiences. His first stories were published in the Harrisburg Telegraph and in Forest and Stream though his success truly began when his stories began to be published in The Argosy in the 1890s.

In 1886, he married Pearl Ellen Balsley. His son Robert Murray Graydon was born in 1890 and his daughter Rachel Sloane Graydon the following year. In the early 1890s, William Murray Graydon began to write stories and novels of foreign and historical adventure. He began taking trips to England and selling his stories to the boy story papers there. In 1896 he moved his family to England. Details are a little vague in terms of their movements during their early stay in the UK. 1901 saw the family living in Horses Head, Upton (Norfolk). The 1911 Census reported that they had moved to the Fulton District in London.

Graydon published in a variety of boy adventure genres: travelogues in exotic lands, historical adventures and even a lost world tale set in Africa. One of his earliest popular creations was wild beast purveyor Matthew Quin, who appeared in about 30 short stories in the United States between January 1898 and November 1902. Graydon also created detectives Carfax Baines, Gordon Fox, Abel Link and Derek Clyde, but though they featured in several tales none of them ever achieved the popularity of rival story paper detectives Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee.

He retired from writing in the 1930s and lived in Paris until shortly before the start of the Second World War. Upon his return to England he lived in Cornwall where he died in April 1946.