The Frank Richards I was thinking of was the one who wrote the "Billy Bunter" stories IOTL.
The analogue to Charles Hamilton in TTL was Harold Hamilton, born on a slightly different date compared to our world. Harold Hamilton, like his counterpart from OTL, had a talent for writing.
As in our world, Hamilton began writing in the early 20th Century for Amalgamated Press, though he never wrote anything analogous to the Greyfriars stories of OTL. Hamilton’s career was interrupted by the economic recession in the United Kingdom after the end of the First Great War, which resulted in Amalgamated Press discontinuing the story papers that Hamilton had been writing for. In 1924, Hamilton emigrated to Australia, where he settled in Melbourne.
The British military loss in the Great War and the abrupt postwar cancellation of his writing projects for Amalgamated Press led to a shift in the tone and settings of Hamilton’s writing. The first of Hamilton’s Australian novels,
The Serpent, which was published in 1926 and proved to be a bestseller, was his first of horror story, as well as the first of what proved to be seven novels in his
Serpent series. Most of the other stories and novels that he wrote during the 1930s and early 1940s were mysteries, adventure stories, or horror.
The superbomb attacks against London, Brighton, and Norwich, along with the British military defeat in the Second Great War, led to another shift in Hamilton’s writing. By 2024, Hamilton is best remembered in Australia for a trio of novels with different post-apocalyptic settings. These included
Radioactive Ghost, which was published in 1947,
The Empty Square, which was published in 1950, and
The Green Coda, which was published in 1955. Each of these novels would be adapted by Australian filmmakers in the 1970s.
Harold Hamilton died in Melbourne in 1964, having never returned to the United Kingdom.
