British scriptwriter and playright Alan [Frederick] Plater CBE died of cancer the same day, aged 75. His credits include Shades of Darkness (“Feet Foremost”, based on the story by L.P. Hartley), Bewitched (based on the story by Edith Wharton), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (“The Solitary Cyclist”), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (“The Man With the Twisted Lip”) and the near-future mini-series A Very British Coup.
British “hard” science fiction writer James P. (Patrick) Hogan died in Ireland on July 12, aged 69. A prolific novelist, he began his career in 1977 with Inherit the Stars, the first in his “Giants” series, and his many other books include The Genesis Machine, The Two Faces of Tomorrow, Thrice Upon Time, Voyage from Yesteryear, The Proteus Operation, Endgame Enigma, The Mirror Maze, The Infinity Gambit, The Multiplex Man, Realtime Interrupt, Paths to Otherwhere, Bug Park, Star Child, Outward Bound, The Legend That Was Earth, Martian Knightlife, The Anguished Dawn, Echoes of an Alien Sky, Moonflower and Migration, along with the “Code of the Lifemaker” duology and the “Cradle of Saturn” series. Hogan’s short fiction is collected in Minds Machines & Evolution, Rockets Redheads and Revolution and Catastrophes Chaos and Convolutions. He was also the author of the non-fiction collections Mind Matters and Kicking the Sacred Cow.
70-year-old American underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar was found dead from an an accidental overdose of antidepressant drugs in his Ohio home on the same day. He had been suffering from prostate cancer, asthma, high blood pressure and depression. Pekar began publishing his autobiographical comics series American Splendor in 1976, and he was portrayed by Paul Giamatti in the 2003 Oscar-nominated film of the same name. In 1988 he annoyed talk-show host David Letterman so much that he was banned from the NBC-TV show. Pekar was buried in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, next to “The Untouchables” crime-buster Elliot Ness.
Canadian Richard Langlois (aka “Lee Richard”/“Richard Lee”), a pioneering historian and scholar of French-language comics, died of cancer in Quebec on July 19, aged 68.
American screenwriter Tom (Thomas) [Frank] Mankiewicz, the son of famed Hollywood writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, died of cancer on July 31, aged 68. Best known for his scripts for the James Bond films Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, his other screenwriting credits include Ladyhawke and Dragnet (1987). Mankiewicz also worked as a “creative consultant” on the scripts for Superman (1978) and its sequel, Superman II, and he directed Dragnet, Delirious and an episode of TV’s Tales from the Crypt.
Prolific Italian screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico (Giovanna Cecchi), best known for her work with Luchino Visconti, died the same day, aged 96. In 1972 she co-scripted the TV mini-series The Adventures of Pinocchio featuring comedy team Franco and Ciccio.
Spanish comic book artist and portrait painter Fernando Fernández [Sanchez] died on August 9, aged 70. During the 1950s and ’60s he worked (uncredited) on many war and romance titles from British imprint Fleetway Publications. Fernández also contributed eleven strips to James Warren’s horror title Vampirella in the early 1970s (including the acclaimed “Rendezvous”), and in 1982 his adaptation of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in oil paints was serialised in the Spanish edition of Creepy magazine. He also adapted a number of stories by Isaac Asimov to comics.
Elain Koster (Elain Landis) who, as publisher at New American Library in the 1970s, paid $400,000 for the paperback rights to Stephen King’s Carrie after the book had sold disappointingly in hardcover, died on August 10, aged 69. She also oversaw the SF list at NAL, and was president and publisher at Dutton before starting her own literary agency in 1998.
Scriptwriter Raphael Hayes, who wrote the 1959 Three Stooges movie Have Rocket, Will Travel, died on August 14, aged 95. His other writing credits include episodes of TV’s Lights Out, Suspense, Steve Canyon and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Susan M. Garret, who began publishing fan fiction in her Doctor Who fanzine Time Winds in 1983, died of cancer the same day, aged 49. Her Forever Knight TV novelisation Intimations of Mortality was published by Berkeley in 1997.
American scriptwriter Jackson [Clark] Gillis died on August 19, two days before his 94th birthday. He wrote episodes of Adventures of Superman, Disney’s The Hardy Boys serials, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Tarzan, Lost in Space, The Wild Wild West, Land of the Giants, The Snoop Sisters (“A Black Day for Bluebeard” featuring Vincent Price), The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, Jason of Star Command, Knight Rider, and the 1976 Rod Serling TV movie Time Travelers. In 1957 Gillis scripted a feature version of the 1950s Superman show, Superman and the Secret Planet, which was never produced, and he also co-wrote a pilot script for Irwin Allen’s proposed 1967 TV series Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was also never made. One of Gillis’ original Superman scripts was later rewritten as a 1994 episode of The New Adventures of Superman.
American songwriter George David Weiss died on August 23, aged 89. His credits include such standards as “What a Wonderful World”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and “Stay with Me Baby”.
American author Rebecca V. Neason died after a long illness on August 31, aged 55. She had suffered from fibromyalgia for many years. Neason made her publishing debut in 1993 with the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Guises of the Mind, and her other books include the fantasy novels The Oak and the Cross, The Thirteenth Scroll and The Truest Power, along with two Highlander TV tie-ins: The Path and Shadow of Obsession.
Larry Ashmead, who was an editor at such American publishing houses as Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and Lippincott for almost fifty years, died of pneumonia on September 3, aged 78. He was Isaac Asimov’s editor at Doubleday, where he also looked after J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick, amongst other authors.
Bibliographical researcher, critic and editor [Richard] Neil Barron died on September 5, aged 76. He edited the seminal 1976 critical reference work Anatomy of Wonder and then expanded it over four further editions. His other books include Fantasy Literature: A Reader’s Guide, Horror Literature: A Reader’s Guide, What Do I Read Next? and Fantasy and Horror: A Critical and Historical Guide to Literature and Illustration, Film, TV, Radio, and the Internet. Barron also founded Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review and edited the magazine from 1979 to 1980 and from 1982 to 1983. He received a Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association in 1982 for his contributions to SF criticism.
Veteran British SF and fantasy author E. (Edwin) C. (Charles) Tubb (aka “Charles Grey”, “King Lang”, “Gill Hunt”, “Brian Shaw” etc.) died in his sleep on on September 10, aged 90. From 1951 onwards, he published more than 130 novels and over 230 stories (often pseudonymously) in such magazines as Astounding/Analog, Authentic Science Fiction (which he edited from 1956 to 1957), Galaxy, Nebula, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Vision of Tomorrow and others. His many books include Saturn Patrol, Alien Dust, The Space-Born, The Possessed, Death God’s Doom, The Sleeping City, the Space: 1999 tie-in Earthbound, the “Cap Kennedy” series (1973–83) and the “Dumarest of Terra” series that began in 1967 with The Winds of Gath and ran for thirty-three volumes (with the final book appearing in 2009). Mirror of the Night was a collection of the author’s horror fiction, published by Sarob Press in 2003. He also wrote Westerns and a trilogy based on Roman history, and his 1955 story “Little Girl Lost” was adapted as an episode of Rod Serling’s TV series Night Gallery. Tubb was Guest of Honour at the 1970 World SF Convention in Germany, and he left behind a number of unpublished manuscripts.
British TV scriptwriter and producer Louis [Frank] Marks died on September 17, aged 81. An expert on the Italian Renaissance, Marks scripted several episodes of Doctor Who (including “Day of the Daleks” and “The Masque of Mandragora”) and Doomwatch, he was script editor on the Dead of Night episode “The Exorcism” and Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, and he produced such series as Centre Play (which included two Edgar Allan Poe adaptations) and
a 1993 version of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, scripted by Harold Pinter.
45-year-old American urban fantasy author Jennifer Rardin (Jennifer Pringle), who wrote the “Jaz Parks” CIA assassin/ vampire hunter series, apparently committed suicide on September 20. The first novel in the sequence, Once Bitten, Twice Shy, was published in October 2007. It was followed by Another One Bites the Dust, Biting the Bullet, Bitten to Death, One More Bite, Bite Marks, Bitten in Two and the posthumously published The Deadliest Bite. She also wrote a YA novel, Shadowstruck.
Award-winning British music composer Geoffrey Burgon died after a short illness on September 21, aged 69. He composed music for the 1970s Doctor Who serials “Terror of the Zygons” and “The Seeds of Doom”, and his other credits include Treasure of Abbott Thomas (based on the story by M.R. James), Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Bewitched (based on the story by Edith Wharton), Play for Today: “Z for Zachariah”, the BBC adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion the Witch & the Wardrobe (1988), Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, plus Ghost Stories for Christmas, in which Christopher Lee portrayed M.R. James.
British Sherlock Holmes scholar and actor Bernard [Hurst] Davies died the same day, aged 86. He joined the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1958 and subsequently published a number of articles that redefined Holmesian research (these were collected in 2008 in the two-volume Holmes and Watson Country: Travels in Search of a Solution). He served as chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London from 1983 to 1986 and in 1973 co-founded the Dracula Society with fellow actor Bruce Wightman. As an actor, Davies appeared in a 1969 episode of Doctor Who (“The War Games”) playing a German soldier.
One of the most powerful agents in the genre, Ralph M. (Mario) Vicinanza, died of a cerebral aneurysm in his sleep on September 25. He was 60. Vicinanza had worked in publishing for forty years, and his client list included such authors as Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Frank Herbert, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Marshall Smith, the Dalai Lama and many others. He began his career as a foreign rights agent at the Scott Meredith Agency, a role he continued for agents such as Kirby McCauley, Lurton Blassingame and Eleanor Wood. In 1978 he founded his own agency, Ralph M. Vicinanza Ltd, and he formed the media production and management company Created By in 1998. In recent years, Vincinanza was credited as an executive producer on a number of film and TV projects based on his clients’ work, including Snow Wonder (Connie Willis), Jumper (Steven Gould), The Wee Free Men (Terry Pratchett), FlashForward (Robert J. Sawyer) and Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin). At the time of his death, a film version of The Forever War (Joe Haldeman) was in development.
Legendary American TV writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell, creator of The Rockford Files and numerous other hit shows, died of complications from melanoma on September 30, aged 69. Despite suffering from dyslexia, his more than 300 television scripts include episodes of The Greatest American Hero, Stingray and Silk Stalkings, along with the TV movies Dr Scorpion, The Night Rider, the Disney pilot The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage, and the direct-to-video movies Dead Above Ground, It Waits and The Tooth Fairy. As a producer, Cannell’s credits include Midnight Offerings, Them, Demon Hunter and The Garden, and he was also the author of sixteen novels.
British SF author Lan Wright (Lionel Perry Wright) died on October 1, aged 87. His first story was published in New Worlds in 1952, and his short fiction continued to appear in that magazine, along with such titles as Nebula Science Fiction and Science Fiction Adventures, for the next decade. Wright’s books include Who Speaks of Conquest?, A Man Called Destiny, Assignment Luther, Space Born (aka Exile from Xanadu), The Creeping Shroud (aka The Last Hope of Earth) and A Planet Called Pavanne (aka The Pictures of Pavanne).
American screenwriter and political activist Willam W. (Wallace) Norton [Jr] died of a heart aneurysm the same day, aged 85. His credits include the psycho thriller Poor Albert and Little Annie, Big Bad Mama, Day of the Animals and the original story for Body Count. He also produced the 1964 nudie How to Succeed with Girls, written by his son, Bill L. Norton. In 1958, William Norton was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for being a member of the Communist Party. He moved to Ireland in 1985 where, along with his second wife Eleanor, he was convicted of trying to smuggle guns to the IRA in Northern Ireland and served nearly two years in a French prison. Upon his release, the couple moved to Nicaragua, where he shot and killed a robber who broke into their home.
Betty Bond (Betty Gough Fulsom), the widow of pulp author Nelson S. Bond (who died in 2006), died of a heart attack on October 2, aged 94. The couple were married for seventy-two years, and she was closely involved in her husband’s writing career – typing his manuscripts and handling finances. She also had her own career in radio and TV broadcasting, including hosting her own shows in the 1950s.
British illustrator Brian Williams died on October 4, aged 54. After contributing work to the gaming magazine White Dwarf, he worked on the interactive Lone Wolf series of books by Joe Dever and the spin-off novels by John Grant.
Pioneering Australian bibliographer Donald H. (Henry) Tuck died on October 11, aged 87. He published A Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1954; revised and expanded 1959) and the three-volume The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Through 1968: A Bibliographic Survey of the Fields of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Through 1968 (1974, 1978 and 1983), winning a World Fantasy Special Award – Non-Professional and a Hugo Award for the third volume. He was a Guest of Honour at the first Australian World SF Convention in 1975, but was unable to attend.
Prolific Belgium SF writer Alain le Bussy died of complications following a throat operation on October 14, aged around 63. A regular Eurocon attendee, he wrote more than thirty novels and was editor of the fanzine Xuensè.
Penthouse publisher and film producer Bob Guccione (Robert Charles Joseph Edward Sabatini Guccione) died after a long battle with lung cancer on October 20, aged 79. Guccione also published the glossy science fiction magazine Omni, which ran as a print title from 1978 to 1995, and then in an electronic version for another three years. At one time one of the richest men in America, a series of poor investments eventually resulted in him losing most of his $4 billion fortune.
American TV writer Coleman Jacoby (Coleman Jacobs), who scripted the 1958 “Bilko’s Vampire” episode of The Phil Silver’s Show, died of pancreatic cancer the same day, aged 95. His other credits include the 1979 special The Halloween That Almost Wasn’t, featuring Judd Hirsch as “Count Dracula”.
Award-winning British children’s author Eva Ibbotson also died on October 20, aged 85. Ibbotson was born in Vienna, Austria, and her books for youngsters include The Great Ghost Rescue, The Secret of Platform 13, The Star of Kazan, Journey to the River Sea, The Dragonfly Pool and The Ogre of Oglefort. She won the Romantic Novelists’ Association award for her 1982 adult novel Magic Flutes.
90-year-old American cartoonist Alex Anderson Jr, who co-created the TV characters Rocky and Bullwinkle with Jay Ward and Bill Scott, died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease on October 22. He was the first artist to draw the adventures of the flying squirrel and his moose friend, but had no involvement in the subsequent TV series. Anderson also worked on “Mighty Mouse” for his uncle Paul Terry’s Terrytoons cartoons and, with college friend Ward, he also co-created such characters as “Crusader Rabbit” and “Dudley Do-Right”. However, two years after Ward’s death, Anderson had to sue Jay Ward Productions to gain official acknowledgement as a co-creator of Rocky, Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right.
Swiss-born Swedish artist Hans Arnold died on October 25, aged 85. Probably best known for his cover illustration for the ABBA Greatest Hits album, Arnold was Sweden’s premier horror artist, illustrating numerous stories in the weekly magazines from the 1950s to the 1970s, some of which were later collected in a book on the subject. He also created a popular TV cartoon show, Matulda och Megasen, and founded a fan club, the Swedish Horr
or Academy.
British scriptwriter Mervyn [Oliver] Haisman who, with writing partner Henry Lincoln, was a credited writer on the 1968 Boris Karloff/Christopher Lee/Barbara Steele film Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), loosely based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, died of heart failure in Spain on October 29, aged 82. Haisman and Lincoln also scripted “The Abominable Snowman”, “The Web of Fear” and “The Dominators” stories for the BBC’s Doctor Who in the 1960s, creating the “Yeti” monsters and the character of “Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart” portrayed by Nicholas Courtney. Haisman’s other credits include the episodic BBC series Jane, based on the popular World War II newspaper strip, and the subsequent movie Jane and the Lost City, along with the New Zealand TV series Twist in the Tale hosted by William Shatner.
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