John Lawrence (14) (1907–1970)

[from The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box website]
Among mystery writers John Lawrence is the king of the unremembered. In the Nineteen Thirties and early Forties, during the golden age of crime and detective pulps, John Lawrence appeared regularly in Black Mask, Dime Detective and all sorts of similar magazines, with his name often featured on their covers. Since then he's been almost completely forgotten, and not a word on him can be found in any of the major critical or reference books on the mystery genre, even those most partial to writers from the pulps. Search high and low and you'll find not an iota of proof that a crime author named John Lawrence ever existed. I tried for years without success to establish that he was a human being and not a house name. Then early in 1986 a friend who remembered my interest in Lawrence told me of an elderly acquaintance who had written for pulps of the Thirties and had mentioned casually that his best friend back then had been a fellow pulpster by the name of Jack Lawrence.