Richard Howells Watkins (b. 26 May 1895, New York City) was an American author of adventure and detective fiction, active chiefly in the pulp magazine era of the early-to-mid twentieth century. He was a veteran of the First World War and, by avocation, an inveterate traveller with strong interests in auto racing, aviation, and maritime subjects — interests that surface repeatedly in his fiction and journalism. He lived for a time in Riverside, Connecticut, before relocating to Santa Barbara, California, in 1956, where his papers were eventually deposited; the Richard Howells Watkins Collection at UC Santa Barbara Special Collections contains his correspondence, short stories, articles, and screenplays, along with an aviation file of photographs of First World War flying aces and early aircraft. His fiction appeared in the popular pulp magazines of the period, including Argosy, and several of his adventure novels and novellas are now in the public domain, among them Nerve Enough, The Air Splasher, His to Fly, and The Master of Revels (Doubleday, 1928). Biographical detail beyond this — his education, his death date, and a full bibliography — is not well documented, and the fullest surviving record is the finding aid for his personal papers.
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