Martin Jones is an enormously well-known and popular character in both literature and film; over fifty short stories about him were written between 1958 and 1983 by English author William Hamilton, who also wrote twenty-three books in that span. Peter O'Neal wrote six Jones books in the late 1980's and early 1990's, but the series had evolved into a film franchise by that point. The Jones character is an archetype and the movies have made Crown Pictures a mainstay US film studio after it nearly went bankrupt in the late 1960's.