Frederick Joseph Thwaites was born in 1908, in the inner Sydney suburb of Balmain, into a working-class family. He left school at the age of 13, and initially worked in the clothing industry whilst attending technical college. Although he received little recognition within highbrow literary circles, Thwaites became one of the most popular Australian authors of his day, and with contemporaries Ion. L. Idriess, Frank Clune, E. V. Timms, and Arthur Upfield, he ranks as one of the pre-eminent Australian popular fiction writers of the mid 20th century.
Thwaites' remarkable run of success began with his first novel, The Broken Melody (1930). Initially self published, it gained little attention until 1932, when it was taken up and published by the N.S.W. Bookstall Co., after which it sold some 20,000 copies within the year. From this point on, Thwaites never looked back, and over the next two decades he churned out a string of best-sellers, most of them action packed romances, averaging a new novel every year (in 1967 he claimed to have sold 10 million hard-back copies of his novels alone). Undoubtedly, Thwaites' popularity was buoyed by film and radio. In 1938, The Broken Melody was made into a successful film by screen writer Frank Harvey and director Ken Hall, and over the years a number of his novels were read on radio and adapted as radio plays. Thwaites was also probably a beneficiary of the ban on imports of paperbacks from the United States, which was in force in Australia between 1939 and 1959, and it was perhaps no coincidence that his popularity waned in the decade after the ban was lifted. Always the entrepreneur, Thwaites founded two publishing companies, to produce cheap editions of his novels - initially the F. J. Thwaites Publishing Co. (in 1936), and later the Harcourt Press, and whilst his publishing ambitions were limited mainly to his own works, to this extent he can also be seen as one of the pioneers of popular fiction publishing in Australia.
Thwaites married J. C. Williamson actress and silent screen star Jessica Harcourt in Melbourne in 1938. He travelled overseas on a number of occasions, initially in the 1930s, to the United States and Britain, and then later in his career, he made a series of adventurous overland journeys, across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Americas, and Africa, which became the subject of his travel books. He died in a Sydney hospital in 1979, at the age of 71, survived by his wife Jessica, and their two sons.
