In 1915, Buckley emigrated to the United States on the SS St. Louis and worked as a film critic for the Motion Picture Mail, a Saturday magazine supplement of The New York Evening Mail. Starting in 1917, he worked in silent film in Brooklyn for the Vitagraph Studios where he was primarily a screenwriter and occasionally an actor. Between 1917 ands 1918 he wrote, co-wrote or adapted the scenarios for The Cambric Mask, By the World Forgot, A Gentleman's Agreement, The Purple Dress, Lost on Dress Parade, :it:The Song of the Soul |The Song of the Soul, The Other Man, The Hiding of Black Bill, A Night in New Arabia, The Last of the Troubadours and The Lovers' Knot. He appeared in principal roles in The Undercurrent and The Unknown Quantity.
Writer
Buckley left Vitagraph after selling Getting It, his first short story to The Black Cat, an American magazine specializing in original short stories of an unusual nature for $20.00. In 1922 he won the O' Henry Prize for his short story Gold-Mounted Guns published in Red Book Magazine, March 1922. His fiction also appeared in Collier's, Liberty, McClure's, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post. Buckley was also extensively published in many pulp magazines including Adventure, Hutchinson's Adventure-story Magazine, Argosy, The Blue Book Magazine, Short Stories, The Story-Teller and Western Story Magazine. For Adventure, Buckley wrote a series of stories set in the Italian Renaissance, revolving around the swashbuckling exploits of condottieri Captain Luigi Caradosso. The Luigi Caradosso stories were enormously popular with Adventure's readers. When Adventure published a new Caradosso story in the May 1940 issue, the editor Howard Bloomfield noted that many readers had written in to request that the magazine "Bring back Captain Caradosso." Buckley also wrote a novel, The Way of Sinners, set in sixteenth century Italy, in which Caradosso is mentioned. Buckley also published Western, mystery and sea stories as well as historical fiction. Later some of his short stories would be adapted for film or radio by others. The Bearcat, a 1922 Universal Film Manufacturing Company picture, Peg Leg and the Kidnapper, originally published in Western Story Magazine was used for the 1926 Fox Film Corporation film The Gentle Cyclone and RKO Radio PicturesStung 1931. His story Habit, honorably mentioned in the O'Henry Memorial Volume for 1923. and published in the April 30, 1923 issue of Adventure was adapted for the July 18, 1948 episode of the CBS radio program Escape. In the 1930s he returned to England writing film criticism again, now for the Birmingham Evening Despatch.
Broadcaster
He was a writer and on air radio presenter on the BBC from 1934–1970. Some time between 1947 and 1951 Buckley is credited with bringing actor and comedian Stanley Unwin to the attention of BBC producers Peter Cairns and David Martin who premiered Unwins first broadcast on the radio program Pat Dixon's Mirror of the Month In the mid-1950s, Buckley worked as a portrait painter in Paris. From 1959 to 1962 Buckley was heard as a regular panelist on the weekly BBC radio program The Guilty Party where a crime play was dramatized, then the panelists would cross-examine the characters in an effort to figure out who was guilty of the crime.
Later Life
From the 1960s to the time of his death in 1976, Buckley lived in a reportedly haunted historical house in King's Lynn, Norfolk, which is known as The Exorcist's house.
Books by F. R. Buckley
1923 – Canyon of Green Death
1925 – Joan Of The Ranch
1925 – The Sage Hen
1926 – Billy Van
1926 – The Blithe Sheriff
1927 – The Way of Sinners – In this gory tale of Renaissance Italy, Francesco Vitali, Captain of a formidable band of mercenaries, tells his life story.
