Barry Perowne is a pseudonym of Philip Atkey who was born in the New Forest area of Wiltshire.

He left school at the age of 14 to work for a carnival equipment manufacturer; he used his experiences in this line of work in his later works on carnival showmen who, with their families and caravans, took up winter quarters in the factory yards. He later became secretary to his uncle Bertram Atkey before editing two magazines that published humorous and romantic fiction. In addition he wrote short stories for several other magazines as well as a couple of novels about Dick Turpin, the highwayman, and Red Jim, the first air detective.

By agreement with the E W Hornung estate he continued the Raffles series created by that author. His first stories of the amateur cracksman appeared in the British magazine 'The Thriller' with the sophisticated cracksman's adventures put into contemporary settings.
In 1933 he married Bertram Atkey's daughter; their marriage was to produce one daughter and ended in divorce in 1948.
He joined the Army in 1940 and served three years in the infantry and three years in the intelligence corps.

He continued to write his Raffles stories and many of them appeared in 'Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine'. Fourteen of the best of those stories appeared in 'Raffles Revisited' in 1974, a book which came some 40 years after his first published books about Raffles. His Raffles stories were considered by many critics to be far superior to those of Raffles' creator E W Hornung.
He also wrote under his own name, Philip Atkey, and 'Blue Water Murder' (1935), 'Heirs of Merlin' (1945) and 'Juniper Rock' (1952) were the results.
He also used the pseudonym Pat Merriman, 'Night Call' (1937) and in addition wrote under his own name, 'Arrest These Men!' (1932) being the first of such productions ... to be followed by many more, ending with 'A Singular Conspiracy', which is a crime fantasy based on an apocryphal meeting between Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.

He died on 24 December 1985.