Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was an English journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and non-fiction, and was one of the most prolific English writers of detective fiction.Fletcher's first books published were poetry. In 1914, Fletcher wrote his first detective novel and went on to write over a hundred more, many featuring the private investigator Ronald Camberwell.Fletcher published multiple crime fiction novels during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction," namely his The Middle Temple Murder (1919) which served as the basic formulaic template for writing detective fiction novels; though, this particular novel (in addition to many of his others) did not share many general traits with those that characterize this particular literary era.