TOOKER, Richard (Presley)

(1902-1988)

   US writer and publisher who wrote also as Dick Presley Tooker; his first sf story, under that name, was "Planet Paradise" for Weird Tales in 1924. He is best remembered for The Day of the Brown Horde (1929), in which cavemen fight one another and the last of the plesiosaurs, and which deals, like most of the prehistoric-sf subgenre, with the onset of human consciousness (ORIGIN OF MAN). The Dawn Boy (1932), a juvenile, revisits a similar venue. Inland Deep (1936) rathermore imaginatively features man-frogs and other odd creatures in an underground LOST WORLD. It is reported that from about 1940 RT was a ghost-writer.

   JC