“But in 1943 my idea was fresh, and after stealing the usual penny a word for it, I received a thirty-day sentence on various newsstands. As usual, aside from a few comments in the letter column of Weird Tales, the story went unnoticed.”
In fact, the story was first dramatized in January 1944 on CBS Radio’s The Kate Smith Hour starring screen Ripper Laird Cregar, before being adapted again for The Molle Mystery Theatre, Murder by Experts and Bloch’s own Stay Tuned for Terror. Barre Lyndon (no stranger to Ripper movies himself) scripted a version for the 1961 TV show Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff.
Bloch returned to the Ripper theme in his 1967 Star Trek episode “Wolf in the Fold” and the 1984 novel The Night of the Ripper.
“Over the years I’ve been asked my opinion of the Ripper’s true identity,” revealed the author. “After much study and consideration, I now firmly believe that Jack the Ripper was actually Queen Victoria.”
~ * ~
LAWRENCE BLOCK has been writing crime fiction for over half a century. Best known for his long-running series about PI “Matthew Scudder” and gentleman burglar “Bernie Rhodenbarr “, his awards include the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers’ Association of the UK, numerous Anthony, Edgar and Shamus Awards, and in 1994 he was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America. As if all that is not enough, he has also been presented with the key to the city of Muncie, Indiana.
His most recent novel is Hit Me, the fifth book about a wistful hit man named Keller.
Of “Hot Eyes, Cold Eyes”, Block says: “I wrote this story twice. The first version, dashed off in the late-1950s, was sold to a bottom-of-the-barrel pulp magazine, and I lost all track of it. Twenty years later I remembered it - but all I remembered was the last line.
“So I wrote it again. Actually I wrote a whole new story, leading up to the last line, which was all I remembered. (Who could forget it?) And I sent it to an editor who liked my work, and he wanted to buy it, but felt the ending was too vivid for his readers. So he’d take it, but he’d have to drop the last line.
“Drop the last line? Without the last line there was no story. So I displayed an uncharacteristic artistic integrity and took the story back, and in due course a Playboy imitator called Gallery printed it, last line and all.”
~ * ~
RAMSEY CAMPBELL is described in the Oxford Companion to English Literature as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild.
Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know and The Kind Folk. Forthcoming are The Last Revelation of Gla’aki (a novella) and Bad Thoughts.
His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably.
The author’s novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain, his regular columns appear in Prism, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog, and he is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.
‘“See How They Run’ was written for an anthology about psychopaths edited by my old, and now lamented, friend Robert Bloch,” explains Campbell. “Bob was happy with the tale but not the title, which he’d used for a story of his own, and so I re-titled mine ‘For You to Judge’. I still preferred my original title, however, and after Bob’s death I used it for a reprinting by another much-missed friend, Karl Edward Wagner.
“Not many days before Bob died I was able to speak to him on the phone for half-an-hour and tell him he was loved. He told me that he was able to see a pattern in his life. I hope I shall in mine.”
~ * ~
MIKE CAREY was born in Liverpool, but moved to London in the 1980s after completing an English degree at Oxford. He taught English and Media for several years before resigning to become a freelance writer in 2000.
Initially he worked mainly within the medium of comic books, coming to prominence with the Lucifer ongoing series at DC Vertigo. Since then, he has written Hellblazer for DC, X-Men and Fantastic Four for Marvel, Vampirella for Harris and Red Sonja for Dynamite Entertainment. He also scripted the Marvel Comics adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow, and has launched a creator-owned book at Vertigo, The Unwritten, which (in collected format) has made the New York Times graphic novel best-seller list several times.
More recently, Carey has moved into prose fiction with the “Felix Castor” novels, a series of supernatural crime thrillers recounting the exploits of a freelance exorcist, and (under the pseudonym “Adam Blake”) with mainstream thrillers such as The Dead Sea Deception. Along with his wife Linda and their daughter Louise, he has co-written the fantasy novel The Steel Seraglio, published in the UK by Gollancz as City of Silk and Steel. His movie screenplay, Dominion, is in development with US producer Intrepid Pictures and UK’s Slingshot Studios.
“This story grew sideways out of another story,” explains the author. “The earlier tale was about Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty as collaborators in a big creative enterprise - an enterprise that involved the endless, repetitive building up and breaking down of mysteries. Almost like they were two different versions of the same compulsive personality. Then someone showed me an essay by David McKie that said exactly the same thing in about one-tenth of the word count. So I threw that story away and came up with this one.
“I’d like to issue a small disclaimer, though. This incarnation of the story might give the impression that I have a poor opinion of reviewers, which isn’t true at all. Some of my best friends are reviewers. And I’ve never killed any of them ... even once.”
~ * ~
R. CHETWYND-HAYES (1919-2001) was born in Isleworth, West London. Known as “Britain’s Prince of Chill”, in 1989 he was presented with Life Achievement Awards by both the Horror Writers Association and the British Fantasy Society.
The author’s first book was The Man from the Bomb, a science-fiction novel published in 1959 by Badger Books. His subsequent novels include The Dark Man (aka And Love Survived), The Brats, The Partaker: A Novel of Fantasy, The King’s Ghost, The Curse of the Snake God, Kepple, The Psychic Detective and World of the Impossible, while his short fiction was collected in The Unbidden, Cold Terror, The Elemental, Terror by Night, The Night Ghouls, The Monster Club, A Quiver of Ghosts, Tales from the Dark Lands, The House of Dracula, Dracula’s Children, Shudders and Shivers, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes (aka looking for Something to Suck), Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies, amongst other titles. A “best of” collection/bibliography is forthcoming from PS Publishing.
In 1976, Chetwynd-Hayes ghost-edited and wrote almost all the one-shot magazine Ghoul. He also edited the anthologies Cornish Tales of Terror, Scottish Tales of Terror (as “Angus Campbell”), Welsh Tales of Terror, Tales of Terror from Outer Space, Gaslight Tales of Terror, Doomed to the Night, and the posthumous Great Ghost Stories and Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories (both with Stephen Jones), along with twelve volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, and six volumes of The Armada Monster Book series for children.
The author of two movie novelizations, Dominique and The Awakening (the latter based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars), his own stories have been adapted for radio, TV and the movies, including The Monster Club (in which the author was portrayed by veteran horror actor John Carradine).
“The Gatecrasher” was adapted in the 1974 anthology film Beyond the Grave, for an episode starring David Warner. “When I was informed that Milton Subotsky was considering ma
king a film based on four of my tales, I went over the moon!” recalled the author. “I thought, ‘Gosh, a film! My fortune is made!’ Alas, it wasn’t, but I did have fun visiting the set and realizing that all of the dialogue that these famous people were speaking was mine.
‘“The Gatecrasher’ was supposed to be based on Jack the Ripper, though that point was completely overlooked by the scriptwriters.”
~ * ~
BASIL COPPER (1924-2013) was born in London, and for thirty years he worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970.
His first story in the horror field, “The Spider”, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night, Cold Hand on My Shoulder and Knife in the Back.
One of the author’s most reprinted stories, “Camera Obscura”, was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.
Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in several volumes, including the novel Solar Pons versus The Devil’s Claw.
More recently, PS Publishing has produced the non-fiction study Basil Copper: A Life in Books, a massive two-volume set of Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper and a restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers, while the Valancourt Books imprint is issuing new editions of the author’s novels The Great White Space and Necropolis.
In 1991, “The Recompensing of Albano Pizar” was dramatized for BBC Radio 4’s Fear on Four series as “Invitation to the Vaults”, introduced by Edward de Souza’s The Man in Black.
~ * ~
PETER CROWTHER is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing, his editing and, as publisher, for the hugely successful PS Publishing (now including the Stanza Press poetry subsidiary and PS Artbooks, a specialist imprint dedicated to the comics field).
As well as being widely translated, his stories have been adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in The Longest Single Note, Lonesome Roads, Songs of Leaving, Cold Comforts, The Spaces Between the Lines, The Land at the End of the Working Day and the upcoming Jewels in the Dust. He is the co-author (with James Lovegrove) of Escardy Gap and The Hand That Feeds, and author of the Forever Twilight SF/horror cycle and By Wizard Oak.
Crowther lives and works (and still reads a lot of comic books and buys far too many CDs!) with his wife and PS business partner, Nicky, on the Yorkshire coast of England. He is currently writing a sequence of novelettes set against a background of alien invasion and the implosion of the multiverse.
“It’s all John W. Campbell’s fault,” he complains. “I just loved his (or rather Don A. Stuart’s) ‘Who Goes There?’, first reading it in a collection of that name, and again in its original appearance (Astounding horn the late-1930s - always try to read your favourite stories where they first appeared), and then as a movie (first Howard Hawks’s 1951 production - superb, but not a good rendition of Campbell’s story; and then John Carpenter’s 1982 riff, closer to the original material and great fun but, for me, a weaker movie).
“Anyway, not surprisingly, I wanted to write my own yarn about a shape-shifting monster.
“The germ of an idea had sat in the back of my head for some considerable time, waiting for that all-important USP that would make it special. All was quiet brain-wise until I was asked to write a story for Robert Bloch’s Psychos anthology (this was in the early 1990s). That was when the idea for ‘Eater’ presented itself - first off, the shape-shifting became a take on the old American Indian myth of eating your enemy’s heart to gain his strength; and secondly, the milieu in which the story takes place moved from the cold isolation of the Arctic to a busy police station in suburban USA. I was all set.
“But I was immersed in two other deadlines and so, by the time I started writing, the anthology had closed. Undaunted (and with nothing else time-sensitive), I carried on ... and created Mister Mellor. When the tale was finished, I sent it in to Rich Chizmar at Cemetery Dance Magazine. He bought it - very enthusiastically, I might add - and the story generated a lot of kind words (always embarrassing, but also always heartily well received) ... resulting in an appearance in CD’s The Best of Cemetery Dance (along with another Crowther yarn, ‘Rustle’). It was also adapted for TV on both sides of the Atlantic, first as an episode of Urban Gothic in the UK and, in the US, as part of Fear Itself featuring Elisabeth Moss (‘Peggy Olson’ from Mad Men).
‘“Mister Mellor Comes to Wayside’ is a previously unpublished vignette originally written for my first collection, The Longest Single Note. I must confess that I rather like the character. I hope you do, too.”
~ * ~
SCOTT EDELMAN has published more than eighty short stories in magazines such as The Twilight Zone, Absolute Magnitude, Science Fiction Review and Fantasy Book, and in anthologies such as The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Crossroads, MetaHorror, Once Upon a Galaxy, Moon Shots, Mars Probes and Forbidden Planets. His many zombie stories have been collected in What Will Come After, while his science fiction can be found in What We Still Talk About.
He has been a Bram Stoker Award finalist five times, in the categories of both Short Story and Long Fiction. Additionally, Edelman currently works for the Syfy Channel as the editor of Blastr. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run, and has been a four-times Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.
‘“The Trembling Living Wire’ was inspired by one of my favourite Edgar Allan Poe poems,” acknowledges Edelman, “knowledge of which is not at all necessary to appreciate the story. (Though those who already know of the one ‘who despisest an unimpassioned song’ may pick up on certain background elements earlier than those who’ve never read the poem.) Poe’s ‘Israfel’ got me to thinking of the places we go in the service of our arts. Some of those places are darker than others, yielding darker results. I hope never to go as far as in the story.”
~ * ~
HARLAN ELLISON® has been awarded the Hugo Award eight-and-a-half times, the Nebula Award four times, the Bram Stoker Award five times (including Lifetime Achievement in 1996) and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award twice.
He is also the recipient of the Silver Pen for Journalism by International P.E.N., the World Fantasy Award, the Georges Mêlées fantasy film award, an unprecedented four Writers Guild of America awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. In 2006, he was made a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Ellison moved to New York in his early-twenties to pursue a writing career. Over the next two years he published more than 100 stories and articles. Moving to California in 1962, he began selling to Hollywood, co-scripting the 1966 movie The Oscar and contributing two dozen scripts to such shows as Star Trek, The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Cimarron Strip, Route 66, Burke’s Law and The Flying Nun. His story “A Boy and His Dog” was filmed in 1975, starring Don Johnson, and he was a creative consultant on the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone TV series.
His more than seventy-five books include Rumble (aka Web of the City), Rockabilly (aka Spider Kiss), All the Lies That Are My Life and Mefisto in Onyx, while some of his almost 2,000 short stories have been collected in The Juvies (aka Children of the Street), Ellison Wonderland, Paingod and Other De
lusions, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled, The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Deathbird Stories, StrangeWine, Shatterday, Stalking the Nightmare, Angry Candy, Slippage and The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective edited by Terry Dowling.
Ellison also edited the influential science fiction anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, and followed it with a sequel, Again Dangerous Visions, in 1972.
More recently, he was the subject of Erik Nelson’s revelatory feature-length documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth (2008), chronicling the author’s life and work, which was made over a period of twenty-seven years.
He lives with his wife, Susan, inside The Lost Aztec Temple of Mars, in Los Angeles.
‘“All the Birds Come Home to Roost’ took many years to write,” recalls Ellison. “I had the idea back in the early-1970s. It came to me because a number of women with whom I’d had relationships, which relationships had broken up and the women vanished from my world, suddenly began reappearing.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 61