1. Malcolm R Afford, known as Max Afford, was an Australian playwright and novelist.
18 Facts About Max Afford
1. 2.
Max Afford left school when he was 16, and started writing novels and plays.
3.
Max Afford died of cancer on 2 November 1954 at Mosman, Sydney, and was cremated.
4.
Max Afford's stage plays showed that if he had gone on, he would have become an important playwright.
5.
Max Afford had such a vitality that it is very hard to realize the truth.
6.
Max Afford wrote three novels while in his twenties, which were later published in England and America.
7.
Max Afford worked as a reporter at the News and Mail from 1926 to 1931.
8.
Max Afford wrote eight crime novels, usually employing English settings, and more than sixty radio and stage plays, usually stories of crime involving the sifting of situations that ultimately uncover the perpetrators.
9.
Max Afford was considered somewhat of a pioneer of the "whodunit" in radio broadcasting.
10.
Max Afford was one of the first contract writers to be engaged by the ABC.
11.
In 1942, Max Afford resigned from the ABC and joined the radio station 2GB, for whom he wrote two long-running commercial serials: First Light Fraser, and Digger Hale's Daughters.
12.
In 1945, Afford created an all-time record in Australian theatrical history by having two three-act plays presented professionally by the J C Williamson theatre company at the Theatre Royal, Sydney.
13.
Max Afford wrote Mischief in the Air and co-wrote with Ken G Hall the story for the Columbia Film Corporation's film, Smithy, based on the aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith.
14.
Max Afford was president of the Sydney PEN Club in 1950.
15.
Max Afford's radio plays and serials have been re-broadcast in Canada, England, South Africa, New Zealand, Poland, and Egypt.
16.
Max Afford's radio plays have been produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as by BBC London, by Lux Radio Theatre in South Africa, by the National Broadcasting Service in New Zealand, and in Cairo.
17.
Max Afford championed the cause of hundreds of authors and numerous literary journals, and acted as an advocate for left-wing writers in the 1950s.
18.
Thelma then gave a book of Max Afford's radio plays to Sam Ure Smith, an Australian arts publisher and promoter, just in case Freddie was disinclined to publish the stage plays.