‘Maybe,’ Giordano agreed. ‘But they called this chap “occhio azzurro”.’ He shrugged, and picked up his own coffee. ‘Perhaps it’s a coincidence.’
‘But you think there’s a connection. Why? Why would Arturo Della Quercia want that—’ she lowered her voice ‘—demon to do me harm, if I’m a descendant of someone he employed?’
Putting his cup down, Giordano eyed her levelly. ‘ “Harm” is rather too mild a term, you know. When you think that “possession” is another word for “owning”. Owning you, in life and death, body and soul. For ever. Whatever he had against the Da Silva family, you were lucky to get out.’
‘Well,’ said Jo, looking out of the window at a white cat that had wandered into view, ‘you could say I had help.’
STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN
Necrology: 2001
ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S ICONIC DATE saw the passing of many writers, artists, performers and technicians who, during their lifetimes, made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres (or left their mark on popular culture in other, often fascinating, ways) . . .
AUTHORS/ARTISTS
Children’s author Catherine Storr, whose classic 1958 novel Marianne Dreams was filmed in 1988 as Paperhouse, died on January 6th, aged 87. A former editor at Penguin Books, eleven of her supernatural stories were collected in Cold Marble and Other Ghost Stories, while her collection of stories for young children, Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, was published in 1955 and remains on the curriculum of many British primary schools.
Wartime cryptographer and screenwriter Leo Marks died on January 15th, aged 80. He scripted Michael Powell’s cult classic Peeping Tom and Twisted Nerve.
Gordon B. Love, who produced the fanzine Rocket’s Blast/Comicollector in the 1960s, died on January 17th following an automobile accident. He was 62.
Comics artist Frederic E. Ray, Jr., who illustrated Superman and Tomahawk for DC Comics during the 1940s and 1950s, died on January 23rd.
Fantasy and military SF writer Rick Shelley died of complications from a massive heart attack on January 27th, aged 54. His books include the ‘Varayan Memoir’ trilogy, the ‘Lucky 13th’ series, plus The Wizard at Meq and The Wizard at Home.
Canadian-born fantasy and SF writer Gordon R. (Rupert) Dickson died of complications from asthma on January 31st, aged 77. Best known for the ‘Childe Cycle’, ‘Dorsai’ sequence and ‘Hoka’ stories (written with Poul Anderson), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author published his first story in 1951 and wrote more than eighty books and around 200 short stories. His 1976 novel The Dragon and the George won the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth Award.
British horror author Gerald Suster died of an apparent heart attack on February 4th, aged 49. A former teacher before becoming a full-time writer in the late 1970s, his many occult thrillers include such titles as The Devil’s Maze, The God Game and The Labyrinth of Satan, which formed a loosely linked trilogy. His other novels include The Elect, The Scar, The Offering, The Block, The Force and The Handyman. A devotee of Arthur Machen, whose writing was a major influence on his own work, Suster also wrote a number of non-fiction volumes based on his personal interest in the occult, including Hitler and the Age of Horus, The Truth About the Tarot, The Hellfire Friars and a biography of Aleister Crowley. He also contributed a regular column to the esoteric magazine The Talking Stick.
Slovakian-born John L. Nanovic, who worked as an editor under the name ‘Henry Lysing’ for Street & Smith on such pulp magazines as Doc Savage and The Shadow, died on February 9th, aged 94.
Peggy (Margaret) Cave, the wife of pulp author Hugh B. Cave, died of cancer complications on February 12th after two weeks in hospital. She was 86.
Popular horror author Richard [Carl] Laymon died of a massive heart attack on February 14th, aged 54. The current President of the Horror Writers Association, his many novels include the ‘Beast House’ series (The Cellar, The Beast House and The Midnight Tour), along with The Woods Are Dark, Out Are the Lights, Beware!, All-Hallows Eve, Resurrection Dreams, The Stake, Quake, Bite, Cuts, Once Upon a Halloween, The Travelling Vampire Show and Night in the Lonesome October. As well as writing two novels under the pseudonyms ‘Carl Laymon’ and ‘Richard Kelly’, his short fiction was collected in A Good Secret Place and Dreadful Tales, while the autobiographical study A Writer’s Life appeared from Deadline Press. He was set to be guest of honour at the 2001 World Horror Convention in May.
Italian composer Pierro Umiliani died the same day, aged 75. He composed the scores for more than 100 films, including The Amazing Doctor G., Five Dolls for an August Moon, Witchcraft ’70, Night of the Devils and Baba Yaga.
Eccentric Irish Ufologist and author Desmond [Arthur Peter] Leslie died in France on February 22nd, aged 79. He collaborated with George Adamski on the controversial 1953 bestseller Flying Saucers Have Landed.
Film and TV composer Richard Stone died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer on March 9th, aged 47. Besides writing the music for such movies as Sundown The Vampire in Retreat and Pumpkinhead, he also won seven Emmys for his work on Animaniacs and such other cartoon TV series as Freakazoid, Histeria!, Pinky and the Brain and Tazmania.
25-year-old Jenna A. (Anne) Felice, an editor at Tor Books, died on March 10th of complications from a severe allergic reaction and asthmatic attack after spending nearly a week in a coma. She also worked with her life partner Rob Killheffer on the small-press magazine Century.
73-year-old bestselling thriller writer Robert Ludlum died of a massive heart attack at his Florida home on March 12th, after recently undergoing heart surgery. A former television and stage actor and theatre director, his first book The Scarlatti Inheritance was written in 1971 ‘as a lark’, since when he sold more than 220 million copies in forty countries. His many titles include The Holcroft Covenant (made into a film starring Michael Caine), The Bourne Identity (made into a TV mini-series with Richard Chamberlain and a theatrical film with Matt Damon), The Matarese Circle, The Scorpio Illusion, The Apocalypse Watch and The Prometheus Deception, which appeared on the bestseller lists of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Publishers Weekly.
Veteran pulp author J. (John) Harvey Haggard died on March 15th, aged 87. A distant relative of H. Rider Haggard, from 1930 until 1960 his stories appeared in such titles as Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Future Fiction, Fantastic Universe and Ray Bradbury’s 1939 fanzine Futuria Fantasia. He had two stories reprinted in the 1997 volume Ackermanthology.
Dr Donald A. (Anthony) Reed, founder and president of The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, died of heart failure and complications from diabetes on March 18th in Los Angeles, aged 65. Reed, who founded the Academy in 1972, was instrumental in the promotion of the Saturn Awards and also founded and served as president of the Count Dracula Society since 1962.
‘Papa’ John [Edmund] Phillips, who founded the 1960s California pop group the Mammas and the Papas, died of heart failure the same day, aged 65. After years of drug and alcohol abuse, he had had a liver transplant several years earlier. Phillips wrote such classic ‘flower power’ songs as “Monday Monday”, ‘California Dreamin’, ‘Creeque Alley’ and ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)’. He also scored the movies Brewster McCloud, Myra Breckinridge and The Man Who Fell to Earth.
British supernatural fiction writer R. (Ronald) [Henry Glynn] Chetwynd-Hayes, described by one of his publishers as ‘Britain’s Prince of Chill’, died of bronchial pneumonia in a London nursing home on March 20th, aged 81. His first book was The Man from the Bomb, a science fiction novel published in 1959 by Badger Books, since when he published a further twelve novels, twenty-three collections, and edited such anthologies as 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, twelve volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories and six volumes of Th
e Armada Monster Book for children. In 1976 he ghost-edited and wrote almost all of the one-shot magazine Ghoul, and his own short stories were adapted for the screen in the anthology movies From Beyond the Grave and The Monster Club (the author was portrayed in the latter by John Carradine). In 1989 R. Chetwynd-Hayes was presented with Life Achievement Awards by both The Horror Writers of America and The British Fantasy Society for his services to the genre.
Daniel Counihan, British journalist, radio reporter and author of the children’s fantasy Unicorn Magic (1953), died on March 25th, aged 83.
82-year-old Italian comic-strip artist Luciana Giussani died in Milan after a long illness on March 31st. With her sister Angela (who died in 1987) she created the popular crime comic Diabolik in 1962 (filmed by Mario Bava in 1967 as Danger: Diabolik) and together they founded the Astorina publishing house.
Novelist and TV scriptwriter Gene Thompson, a teenage protégé of Groucho Marx, died of cancer on April 14th, aged 76. He wrote the occult novel Lupe and scripts for such shows as Gilligan’s Island, My Favorite Martian, Love American Style and Columbo.
Judy (Judith) Watson, the 61-year-old wife of science fiction/fantasy writer Ian Watson, died on April 14th of heart failure brought on by emphysema, from which she suffered progressively for the past few years. Her artwork appeared in New Worlds and Oz, and she bequeathed her body to the Department of Human Anatomy of the University of Oxford.
New York singer/songwriter and drummer Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) died after a long battle with lymphatic cancer on April 15th, aged 49. He formed his punk band The Ramones in March 1974. Following a fist fight in 1983, Ramone underwent emergency brain surgery. The band released twenty-one albums until they disbanded in 1996 and they appeared in the cult 1979 movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School and recorded the theme for Pet Sematary.
Film and TV scriptwriter George F. Slavin, whose credits include Mystery Submarine, The Rocket Man and the Star Trek episode ‘The Mark of Gideon’, died on April 19th, aged 85.
Noted anthropologist and former SF writer Dr Morton Klass died on April 28th of a heart attack, aged 73. The brother of Philip Klass (aka author William Tenn), his short fiction appeared in the 1950s and 1960s in Astounding, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Worlds of If.
39-year-old Chicago model, singer, artist and writer Lynne Gauger (Lynne Sinciaire), best known as a companion to late horror authors Karl Edward Wagner and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, died on May 2nd after a long illness. She had been taking a variety of painkillers and other medication ever since being injured in a car crash several years earlier, and had apparently lost the will to live. Her collaborative story with Rex Miller, ‘Vampires of London’, appeared in the anthology The Hot Blood Series: Kiss and Kill.
British songwriter Michael Hazlewood, whose best-known hits were probably ‘(All I Need is) The Air That I Breathe’ and ‘It Never Rains in Southern California’, died of a heart attack on May 6th while on vacation in Florence, Italy. He was 59, and his other hits included the Pipkins’ irritating ‘Gimme Dat Ding’ and the equally awful ‘Little Arrows’ by Leapy Lee.
American songwriter James E. Myers died on May 9th from leukaemia, age 81. With more than 300 songs to his credit, Myers co-wrote ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in 1953 (as ‘Jimmy De-Knight’) and changed the world. The two-minute, eight-second song was recorded by Bill Haley & His Comets the following year and quickly went to No.1 in the charts. It has since been recorded by more than 500 other artists, and used in more than forty movies, earning Myers a reported $10 million in royalties.
49-year-old British author Douglas [Noël] Adams died of a massive heart attack on May 11th while exercising in Santa Barbara, California. His writing career began with the BBC, working as a script editor and writer for Doctor Who from 1978 to 1980. At the same time, he wrote a humorous SF radio series entitled The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The original six episodes were so popular that they led to a novelization that would eventually sell more than fourteen million copies worldwide, a television series and a stage show. Various sequels followed, including The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life the Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and Mostly Harmless, along with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul; the comedy dictionary The Meaning of Liff (with John Lloyd); a non-fiction book on conservation, Last Chance to See; and the computer game Starship Titanic. Eleven chapters from his unfinished 1996 novel, The Salmon of Doubt, were included in a collection of the same title published exactly a year after the author’s death.
Controversial and hedonistic author and television scriptwriter Simon [Arthur Noël] Raven died of a stroke on May 12th, aged 73. His 1961 vampire novel Doctors Wear Scarlet was filmed as Incense for the Damned (aka Bloodsuckers), while his other books with genre elements include The Sabre Squadron, The Roses of Picardie and its sequel September Castle, The Islands of Sorrow and the collection Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories. He edited the 1960 collection The Best of Gerald Kersh, and his script work includes such projects as the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Unman Wittering and Zigo and TV’s Sexton Blake and The Demon God. Suffering with Krohn’s disease since the early 1990s, he had lived as a pensioner in Sutton’s Hospital, Charterhouse, an alms house for impoverished gentlemen in London.
Hank (Henry King) Ketcham, who created the comic strip character Dennis the Menace in 1951, died of heart disease and cancer on June 1st, aged 81. Although the strip appears in 1,000 newspapers around the world, he stopped drawing the character himself in 1994. Ketcham got his first job as an animator for Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz, and he went on to work on such Disney classics as Pinocchio, Bambi and Fantasia. The artist suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after active service in the armed forces and was estranged from his son, Dennis.
British fan writer and publisher Alan Dodd died on June 5th. During the 1950s and 1960s he contributed to a number of fanzines and produced his own title, Camber.
Legendary blues guitarist and singer John Lee Hooker died in San Francisco on June 21st, aged 83.
81-year-old E.C. comics artist George Evans died on June 22nd of terminal leukaemia following a heart attack. He began his career working for the aviation pulps, such as Dare-Devil Aces, before moving into comics after World War II. Starting out as a staff artist with Fiction House, he also worked at Fawcett (where he illustrated adaptations of When Worlds Collide and Captain Video), E.C., Classics Illustrated, Dell, Gold Key (The Twilight Zone), DC Comics and Marvel. Evans also produced the daily newspaper strips Terry and the Pirates and Secret Agent Corrigan. For Karl Edward Wagner’s Carcosa imprint he illustrated Far Lands Other Days by E. Hoffman Price (1975) and Lonely Vigils by Manly Wade Wellman (1981).
Finnish author and illustrator Tove [Marika] Jansson, best known for her Moomin children’s fantasies, died on June 27th, aged 86.
Emmy Award-winning scriptwriter Harold ‘Hal’ Goldman died of lung cancer in Los Angeles on the same day, aged 81. A member of Jack Benny’s writing staff for more than two decades, he collaborated with George Burns from 1978 until the comedian’s death in 1996. During that time he co-scripted the movie Oh, God! Book II starring Burns.
Guitarist and record producer Chet (Chester) [Burton] Atkins died of cancer on June 30th, aged 77. From the mid-1950s until the 1990s he released more than 100 albums and won fourteen Grammy Awards. As a session guitarist he played on Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, Hank Williams’s ‘Jambalaya’ and the Everly Brothers’ ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ and ‘Bye Bye Love’.
Film and TV scriptwriter Arnold Peyser died of cancer on July 1st, aged 80. His credits include Elvis’s The Trouble With Girls and such series as Mission: Impossible, My Favorite Martian and Gilligan’s Island.
Canadian novelist and screenwriter Mordecai Richler, whose books include the children’s fantasies Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang and Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur, died
of cancer on July 3rd, aged 70. He is best known for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (filmed in 1974).
British composer/arranger Delia Derbyshire, best remembered for arranging composer Ron Grainer’s electronic theme for Doctor Who, died of kidney failure the same day, aged 64. She also worked on The Legend of Hell House.
Indian-born British composer James Bernard died in London on July 12th, aged 75. Educated at Wellington College, where his fellow pupils included Christopher Lee, Bernard was encouraged by the great British composer Benjamin Britten, whom he first met when he was seventeen. After serving in the RAF for three years, and a short stint with BBC Radio, he wrote his first score for Hammer Films, The Quatermass Experiment, in 1955 for £100. His subsequent output of scores for the studio comprised Quatermass 2, The Curse of Frankenstein, X The Unknown, Dracula (one of the greatest and most influential horror film scores ever recorded), The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Stranglers of Bombay, The Terror of the Tongs, The Kiss of the Vampire, The Gorgon, Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Plague of the Zombies, She, Frankenstein Created Woman, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, The Devil Rides Out, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Taste the Blood of Dracula, Scars of Dracula, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. He also composed the score for Torture Garden, an anthology film from Hammer’s rival Amicus, and in 1997 he wrote the score for Channel 4/Photoplay Production’s restoration of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu. His final work appeared the following year in Kevin Brownlow’s documentary Universal Horror for Turner Classic Movies. As co-writer of the original story for the 1950 atomic thriller Seven Days to Noon, he was one of the few composers to win an Academy Award for something other than music.
American book-cover illustrator Fred Marcellino died of colon cancer the same day, aged 61. For over a decade he produced more than forty covers a year, including Charles L. Grant’s The Ravens of the Moon, Clive Barker’s The Inhuman Condition and In the Flesh, Ray Bradbury’s Death is a Lonely Business and Peter Ackroyd’s First Light. He later illustrated classic children’s books.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13 Page 64