Howard Pease was an American writer of adventure stories from Stockton, California. Most of his stories revolved around a young protagonist, Joseph Todhunter ("Tod") Moran, who shipped out on tramp freighters during the interwar years. Pease received two literary awards during his lifetime. In 1944, he received the California Commonwealth Book Award for his novel Thunderbolt House (reprinted by Scholastic as Mystery at Thunderbolt House, published that year, and in 1946 he was awarded the Children's Book Award from the Children's Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education "for a book that deals realistically with problems in the child's world" for his novel Heart of Danger.