English-born animator and director Norm McCabe died the same day, aged 94. He began working at Warner Bros, in the mid-1930s, where his credits include a number of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck cartoons. He later contributed to such TV series and specials as The Superman/Aquaman Hour, The Batman/Superman Hour, The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show, The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat, Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island, The Duxorcist, The Night of the Living Duck and Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters. McCa-be’s other credits include Fritz the Cat and Transformers: The Movie.
33-year-old American comic book artist Seth Fisher died on January 30th after falling seven stories from a roof in his adopted homeland of Japan. His credits include DC Comics’ Green Lantern: Willworld, the Eisner Award-nominated Flash: Time Flies, Batman: Snow, and Marvel’s Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big in Japan.
British crime writer, actor and broadcaster Ernest Dudley (Vivian Ernest Coltman Allen), who created sinister BBC Radio detective “Dr. Morelle” in 1942, died on February 1st, aged 97. The character, inspired by Erich von Stroheim, who Dudley had met in Paris in the 1930s, was originally played by Cecil Parker. The 1949 Hammer film The Case of the Missing Heiress featured Valentine Dyall as Morelle, and Dudley himself portrayed the role in a 1951 film adaptation.
Veteran animator and illustrator Myron Waldman died of congestive heart failure on February 4th, aged 97. He was the last surviving animator from the Max Fleischer Studios, which he joined in 1930. There he helped develop such characters as Betty Boop (who started out as a dog), Popeye, Superman, Raggedy Ann, Baby Huey, Herman, Little Lulu and Casper the Friendly Ghost. In 1934 he began producing a number of “Color Classics” cartoons in response to Disney’s series of “Silly Symphonies”. He left the company in 1957 and moved to television (Milton the Monster and Batfink), before later touring on the lecture circuit.
The body of 76-year-old American TV writer and director Alan Shalleck, who collaborated with co-creator Margaret Rey to bring the Curious George series to the Disney Channel as more than 100 five-minute shorts, was found in Florida on February 7th. Two men were charged with his murder. Shalleck and Rey (who died in 1996) also collaborated on more that two dozen further books about the mischievous monkey after the death of artist H. A. Rey in 1977.
91-year-old Japanese composer Akira Ifukube, best known for his iconic Godzilla theme, died of multiple organ failure in Tokyo on February 8th. He later scored many other films in Toho’s “Godzilla” series, along with such titles as Rodan!, The Mysterians, Battle in Outer Space, Atragon, Dagora the Space Monster, Frankenstein Conquers the World, War of the Gargantuas, Majin (and its sequels), King Kong Escapes and Latitude Zero. He came out of retirement in 1995 to score Godzilla vs. Destroyer, and his theme continued to be heard on the last series entry, Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). Ifukube also came up with Godzilla’s trademark roar by running a resin-coated glove over the strings of a double bass.
British crime writer Michael Gilbert died the same day, aged 93. Named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1998, his ghost stories appeared in Argosy and The After Midnight Ghost Book.
Peter [Bradford] Benchley, the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and best-selling author of Jaws, died of complications from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis at his New Jersey home on February 11th, aged 65. Jaws, which has sold more than twenty million copies world-wide since its first publication in 1974, was successfully filmed by Steven Spielberg the following year from a script co-written by Benchley (who also had a cameo). It became the first film to gross more than $100 million and spawned a series of sequels and imitators. Benchley’s other novels, The Deep, The Island and Beast were also filmed, but with less success, while his 1994 novel White Shark, about a Nazi-engineered man/shark hybrid, was made into the 1998 TV movie Creature. Although Benchley’s Jaws did much to demonise sharks, the writer became a passionate conservationist and advocate for the species.
British-born film and television executive and author James Hardiman died in San Francisco on February 19th, aged 86. He moved to Hollywood in 1956, where he worked for Walt Disney Productions, CBS-TV, Screen Gems and Columbia Pictures Television. He spent a number of years in Tokyo as a correspondent for Daily Variety, and his supernatural novel The House Where Evil Dwells was filmed in Japan in 1982 starring Edward Albert, Susan George and Doug McClure.
58-year-old African-American SF author Octavia E. (Estelle) Butler died of a stroke on February 24th after striking her head during a fall on the sidewalk outside her Seattle home. She was reportedly on high blood pressure medication at the time. Inspired by the movie Devil Girl from Mars, she began writing at age twelve and her first story, “Crossover”, appeared in the 1971 anthology of the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. She went on to publish nearly twenty books, including Patternmaster, Kindred, Wild Seed, Parable of the Talents and the 2005 vampire novel Fledgling. Butler received the Nebula Award, two Hugo Awards and the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1995 she was the first SF writer granted a “genius” award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, receiving $295,000 over five years.
American artist Ronald Clyne died of a heart attack on February 26th, aged 80. He sold his first illustration to Fantastic Stories at the age of fifteen, and in 1945 he was commissioned to illustrate the dust-jacket for August Derleth’s collection Something Near. This began a long association with Derleth’s Arkham House imprint, and during the 1940s he produced numerous covers for the small press, including The Opener of the Way by Robert Bloch, Night’s Black Agents by Fritz Leiber, Jr, The Clock Strikes Twelve by H. Russell Wakefield (his personal favourite) and The Lurker at the Threshold by H. P. Lovecraft and Derleth. He also contributed illustrations to the pulp magazines, including Weird Tales. Clyne occasionally returned to work for Arkham in the 1950s and ’60s, but was by then a prolific and successful artist employed by all the major New York publishing houses. Between 1951 and 1981 he also created more than 500 distinctive album covers for Folkways Records, which he considered his best work.
American fantasy author Ronald Anthony Cross died from a stroke on March 1st, aged 68. His first story appeared in New Worlds 6 in 1973, and since 1994 he published four volumes in the “Eternal Guardians” series.
Richard [Patrick] Terra, who published non-fiction in Analog, The New York Review of Science Fiction and other publications, died of a pulmonary embolism on March 4th, aged 46.
Dutch-born SF writer Nancy Ann Dibble (Ansen Dibell) died on March 7th, aged 63. Her “King of Katmorie” series ran over five books (1978–85), and as “Nan Dibble” she wrote Beyond Words, Beyond Silence, a 1992 tie-in to the Beauty and the Beast TV series.
Former attorney, antiques dealer and science fiction author David Feintuch [Mason] died of a heart attack on March 16th, aged 61. He had a long history of cardiac troubles and suffered from Type II Diabetes. Mason won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1996 for his military SF novel Midshipman’s Hope, and continued the Hornblower-like “Seafort Saga” over a further eight books. He also wrote the fantasy novels The Still and The King.
US academic and humorous fantasy author John Morressy died of a massive heart attack on March 20th, aged 75. He made his debut in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with “Accuracy” in 1971, and his novels include Starbrat, Frostworld and Dream fire, The Juggler, Ironbrand, Graymantle and Kingsbane. In 1986 he created the humorous “Kedrigern” series, which includes A Voice for Princess, The Questing of Kedrigern and Kedrigern and the Dragon Comme II Faut.
SF author Kurt von Trojan died of bone and kidney cancer in Australia on March 22nd, aged 69. Born in Vienna, his books include the novels The Transing Syndrome and The Atrocity Shop and the collection When I Close My Eyes.
Jane Yolen’s husband of more than forty years, poet David W. (William) Stemple, died in his sleep after a long battle with cancer the same day, aged 68.
Polish SF author and critic Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on Marc
h 27th, aged 84. The author of Solaris (filmed twice), his more than seventy books sold over twenty-seven million copies worldwide and were translated into more than forty languages. Lem’s other books include Man from Mars, The Astronauts, Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Star Diaries, The Chain of Chance, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, The Invincible, The Cyberiad, Scene of the Crime and One Human Minute. He was made an honorary member of the SFWA in 1973, but that status was revoked when Lem published a controversial essay decrying the poor state of science fiction writing. He stopped writing fiction in 1989.
Typographical designer Ruari McLean died the same day, aged 88. During the 1950s and ’60s he supervised the design of such iconic British children’s comics as Eagle, Girl, Swift and Robin.
American author and screenwriter Henry Farrell (Charles Henry Myers), whose fiction was filmed as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, How Awful About Allan and What’s the Matter With Helen?, died on March 29th, aged 85.
Australian fan Diane Marchant died of pancreatic cancer on April 5th. In 1972 she created the Aussie Star Trek Welcommitte with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, and is credited with publishing the first sexually explicit “slash” fan fiction two years later.
TV writer and producer Burt Pearl died of lymphoma on April 6th, aged 49. He scripted episodes of The Highwayman, Something is Out There and Touched by an Angel, also executive producing the latter series until 2003.
63-year-old British SF and fantasy author and editor Angus Wells died in an accidental fire at his home on April 11th. While working at Sphere Books in the 1970s he edited a number of “Best of” collections based around individual authors. His own books include the TV tie-in Star Maidens (as by “Ian Evans”) and Swordsmistress of Chaos and A Time of Ghosts both with Robert Holdstock (as “Richard Kirk”), the first two volumes in the “Raven” series to which he contributed a further three solo novels. Wells’ other fantasy novels, published under his own name, include the “Book of the Kingdoms”, “Godwars” and “Exiles” series. He was also a prolific author of Westerns and adventure novels under a variety of house names.
88-year-old Scottish novelist Dame Muriel Spark (Muriel Sarah Camberg), whose novels The Comforters, Memento Mori, The Ballad of Beckham Rye and The Hothouse by the East River all contain elements of the supernatural, died in Florence, Italy, on April 13th. Best known for her 1961 book The Brime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark was published in 2003. Her revisionist 1951 biography, Child of Light, won a HWA Bram Stoker Award when expanded in 1987 as Mary Shelley: A Biography.
Scriptwriter, producer and director David Peckinpah, the nephew of film director Sam Peckinpah, died of a heart attack on April 23rd, aged 54. He scripted episodes of Beauty and the Beast and Farscape, produced Silk Stalkings, and produced and directed episodes of Sliders.
Screenwriter, dramatist and novelist Jay Presson Allen (Jacqueline Presson) died of a stroke on May 1st, aged 84. She adapted Mamie for Alfred Hitchcock, scripted the 1973 TV film The Borrowers and also wrote the screenplay for Ira Levin’s Deathtrap.
47-year-old American fantasy author Lisa A. (Anne) Barnett died in her sleep of a brain tumor caused by metastatic breast cancer on May 2nd. She collaborated with her partner, Melissa Scott, on the novels Point of Hopes, Point of Dreams and The Armor of Light, while their novella “The Carmen Miranda Gambit” appeared in Carmen Miranda’s Ghost is Haunting Space Station Three.
Music composer and conductor Andre Brummer died of pneumonia on May 6th, aged 89. His many credits include Roger Corman’s Monster from the Ocean Floor, Love Slaves of the Amazon, Eegah!, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, Rat Pfink and Boo Boo, Sinthia the Devil’s Doll and The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher.
British editor and ghost story author Elizabeth M. (Margaret) Walter died on May 8th. Although she refused to divulge her age, she was believed to be around 78 or 79. Her stories are collected in Snowfall and Other Chilling Events, The Sin-Eater and Other Scientific Impossibilities, Davy Jones’s Tale and Other Supernatural Stories, Come and Get Me and Other Uncanny Invitations and The Dead Woman and Other Haunting Experiences. James Turner compiled some of her best tales for the 1979 Arkham House collection In the Mist and Other Uncanny Encounters. Her story “The Spider” was filmed as “A Fear of Spiders” for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, and she also contributed to the 1972–73 TV series Ghost Story. Between 1961–93 Walter was chief editor of the Collins Crime Club at publisher William Collins.
George Lutz, whose claims in 1975 that his Long Island home was possessed by evil spirits became the basis of The Amityville Horror, died of heart disease the same day, aged 59. When the family moved out of their house after twenty-eight days following numerous bizarre occurrences, Lutz and his then wife Kathy (who died in 2004) collaborated with author Jay Anson on the 1977 best-seller. The story was filmed in 1977 and 2005, and inspired various sequels and spin-offs.
Russian philosopher and author Alexander Zinoviev died of cancer on May 10th, aged 83. His 1976 novel The Yawning Heights is a dystopian satire on the USSR.
American mathematics teacher and author Arthur Porges died after a long illness on May 12th, a couple of months short of his 91st birthday. He began his fiction career in the early 1950s, selling consistently to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and within a few years he had branched out with sales to Galaxy, Amazing Stories, Startling Stories, Fantastic Universe and other SF digests. By the late 1960s Porges had moved into the mystery genre, with many memorable tales appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s, Ellery Queen’s and Mike Shayne’s magazines. A collection of horror stories, The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections, was edited by Mike Ashley and published by Ash-Tree Press in 2002.
44-year-old Bay Area fan, folk singer and author Leigh Ann Hussey was killed in a motorcycle accident on May 16th. She had stories in the anthologies Werewolves and Vampires, both edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg, and was a regular contributor to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine.
Tony Award-winning Broadway producer, director and composer Cy Feuer died on May 17th, aged 95. During the late 1930s he began working at Republic Pictures as a composer and head of the studio’s music department. Over the next two decades he worked on Fighting Devil Dogs, Hawk of the Wilderness, S.O.S. Tidal Wave, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Zorro’s Fighting Legion, Drums of Fu Manchu, Mysterious Doctor Satan, Adventures of Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy vs. Crime Inc., Spy Smasher and The Crimson Ghost. He later produced such hit stage musicals as The Boy Friend, Can-Can and Silk Stockings.
British folk-singer Gytha North died of cancer on May 24th, aged 55. Terry Pratchett borrowed her name for his character Gytha (Nanny) Ogg, the witch in the popular “Discworld” novels.
American comics artist Alex (Alexander) Toth died at his drawing board on May 27th, aged 77. He joined DC Comics in 1947, where he illustrated such characters as Dr Mid-Nite, the Atom and Green Lantern for $30 per page. He went on to work on a number of Dell comics based on popular TV shows (Zorro, Twilight Zone etc.), as well as titles for Archie, Charlton, Marvel and Warren’s horror and war magazines. A year after art directing the animated TV series Space Angels in 1964, Toth joined Hanna-Barbera Studios, where he designed many cartoon series, including Jonny Quest, Battle of the Planets, Challenge of the Superfriends, The Herculoids, Shazzam, Birdman and the Galaxy Trio, The Fantastic Four, Scooby-Doo and Space Ghost. He was also a storyboard artist on the SF film Angry Red Planet and worked as a sequence production designer on Project X.
Television writer Robert Bielak, who was supervising producer for Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, died on May 30th, aged 85. He also scripted episodes of MacGyver and Rung Fu: The Legend Continues.
“Seamus Cullen”, the pseudonymous American-born author of the erotic 1976 novel Astra and Flondrix and other fantasies, including A Noose of Light and Sultan’s Turret, was reported to have died of cancer when mail to his address
in Ireland was returned in May marked “Deceased”.
British playwright, novelist and prolific TV scriptwriter Allan Prior died on June 1st, aged 84. In the 1970s he scripted five episodes of BBC-TV’s makes 7.
George Kashdan, who worked as an editor and writer at DC Comics from 1946 until 1968, died of complications from a stroke on June 3rd, aged 78. Among the characters he worked on were Green Arrow, Congo Bill and Johnny Quick. He wrote and often edited such titles as House of Mystery, House of Secrets, Secrets of Haunted House, Tales of the Unexpected, Rip Hunter Time Master, Aquaman, Teen Titans, Metamorpho, Ghosts, Bomba the Jungle Boy, Hawkman, Weird War Tales and Blackhawk (where he turned the World War II heroes into superheroes in the mid-1960s). After leaving DC, Kashdan moved to Dell/Gold Key, where he contributed to Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, Grimm’s Ghost Stories, Flash Gordon, Star Trek and Twilight Zone.
Former CIA intelligence agent and author Karl T. Pflock, whose 2001 book Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe debunked the UFO conspiracy theory, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) on June 5th, aged 63.
67-year-old American fantasy artist Tim Hildebrandt (Timothy Allen Mark Hildebrant), one-half of the successful Brothers Hildebrandt team, died of complications from diabetes on June 11th. With his identical twin brother Greg he created the original Star Wars poster, a series of J. R. R. Tolkien calendars and numerous book covers, posters and collectibles. Since 1981 the two brothers had worked separately until they were reconciled in the early 1990s. Tim Hildebrandt executive produced and appeared in the 1983 film Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn, which starred his son, Charles George Hildebrandt. With his wife Rita, he wrote the 1983 novel Merlin and the Dragons of Atlantis and the non-fiction Fantasy Cookbook. In 1992 he won a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist.
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