Pierre Coalfleet was the pen name of Frank Cyril Shaw Davison, a Canadian-born novelist and translator who was active during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893, Davison established his literary reputation in the 1920s, publishing four novels under his pseudonym between 1921 and 1927. Beyond his work as a novelist, he was also active in the theater world, where he adapted and translated various European plays. Many of these dramatic translations were completed in collaboration with Rita Matthias, the pen name of Marguerite Julie Strauss.\n\nDavison's personal and artistic network extended into the expatriate modernist circles of Europe. In the early 1920s, while living in Berlin, he met the prominent American artist Marsden Hartley. The two formed a deep and lasting friendship that persisted until Hartley's death in 1943, an association that remains highly documented and studied within the context of Hartley's biography and artistic career.\n\nIn a notable historical footnote, Davison was targeted by the Nazi regime during World War II. His pseudonym, though misspelled, was included on the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. (commonly known as "The Black Book"), a secret Gestapo arrest list of prominent residents in Great Britain to be detained immediately upon a successful German occupation. This discovery only came to light in recent years due to the initial spelling error. Davison survived the war era and passed away in 1960.
