Short answers, pulled from the story.
Murray Fletcher Pratt stood before a grand jury after police arrested him for stealing less than twenty-five dollars from newspaper cash drawers. The Associated Press reported the incident with his middle initial as an S, creating a mistaken identity that followed him through every newspaper covering the story.
Fletcher Pratt died in June 1956 at age fifty-nine. He wrote over thirty books on naval history before his death and remained influential among wargaming enthusiasts for generations.
Pratt established the Trap Door Spiders literary dining club in 1944 at The Ipsy-Wipsy Institute, a rambling thirty-one-room Victorian mansion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. Writers including William Lindsay Gresham, John Ciardi, and L. Sprague de Camp spent entire summers there during marathon weekend house parties.
The Harold Shea series eventually published as The Complete Compleat Enchanter became their most famous fantasy collaboration with L. Sprague de Camp. They wrote novels like Land of Unreason in 1941 and The Carnelian Cube in 1948 together over many years.
After Pratt died in June 1956, the Civil War Round Table established the Fletcher Pratt Award presented every May to honor non-fiction books about the war. Pratt served as president of that organization from 1953 to 1954 after becoming a charter member in 1951.