James Corbett (22 April 1887 - September 1958) was born in Belfast and served as a lieutenant during the First World War. From 1929 until 1951 he wrote thrillers, crime novels, horror fiction and science fiction for the popular lending-library market.

His sf tales, beginning with The White Angel (1931), are as sensational as his thrillers, drawing on Martians, vampires, hypnosis, telepathy, resurrection, death rays, mad inventors, supernatural doubles and apocalyptic threats. The Man Who Saw the Devil reworks the Jekyll-and-Hyde pattern, with neither personality aware of the other, and Devil-Man from Mars is an interplanetary adventure featuring a Martian equipped with hypnotic powers and death rays.

Corbett had a small reputation among his readers as a spectacularly clumsy stylist, but he remains a useful example of Irish participation in interwar popular science fiction, horror and thriller publishing.