C. Ranger-Gull

Guy Thorne was the pen name of Cyril Arthur Edward Ranger Gull (1875 - 9 January 1923), a prolific English journalist and novelist best known for his novel When It Was Dark: The Story of A Great Conspiracy (1903). He also wrote under the names C. Ranger Gull and Leonard Cresswell Ingleby. Thorne was educated at Denstone College, Manchester Grammar, and Oxford University, although he left without taking a degree. He was on the literary staff of the Saturday Review 1897-98, writing also for The Bookman and The Academy. He was editor of London Life in 1899, then joined the Daily Mail and later the Daily Express. He also wrote for the gossip weekly Society. His first novel was The Hypocrite: A Novel of Oxford and London Life, published anonymously in 1898. From 1900, he was engaged in writing fiction, producing about 125 novels in the succeeding years. The most famous was When It Was Dark, which reached sales of 500,000 copies. The book describes the attempt by a Jew, the malevolent Constantine Schaube, to overthrow the whole of the Christian world by fraudulently disproving the Resurrection.