American writer Hortense Calisher died on January 13, aged ninety-seven. She began her career writing for The New Yorker, and her works include the alternate history novel Journey from Ellipsia and the 1951 horror story “Heartburn”.
British-born Emmy Award-winning composer Angela Morely, who before a sex change operation in 1972 was credited as Wally Stott, died of complications from a fall and subsequent heart attack in Arizona on January 14. She was eighty-four. A former conductor of the BBC Radio Orchestra, her credits include Captain Nemo and the Underwater City (as “Stott”), The Slipper and the Rose, Watership Down and episodes of TV’s Wonder Woman. She also worked as an uncredited musical arranger on Peeping Tom, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The Little Prince, Star Wars, Superman (1978), The Empire Strikes Back, Deathtrap (1982), E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Fire and Ice, The Day After and Hook.
British novelist, playwright and barrister Sir John [Clifford] Mortimer died following a long illness on January 16, aged eighty-five. Best known for creating Rumpole of the Bailey, he also worked on the scripts for The Innocents (based on Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”), Bunny Lake is Missing, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes (uncredited). In 1971 he successfully defended Oz magazine against charges of obscenity.
American TV writer and jazz musician Gordon “Whitey” Mitchell died of cancer on January 16, aged seventy-six. He was a story editor and staff writer on CBS-TV’s Get Smart (1969–70) and his other credits include episodes of My Mother the Car, Mork and Mindy and a 1986 Twilight Zone.
Screenwriter, celebrity journalist and a publicist for Warner Bros., Mickell Novack died of heart failure on January 22, aged ninety-one. The wife of film producer Walter Seltzer, she co-scripted One Million B.C. starring Lon Chaney, Jr (remade by Hammer as One Million Years B.C.) and the film version of Thorne Smith’s body-swap novel Turnabout.
Seventy-six-year-old John [Hoyer] Updike, widely recognized as one of the “greatest generation” of American authors, died of lung cancer on January 27. Best known for his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick and its belated sequel, The Widows of Eastwick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, critic and poet’s 1997 novel, Toward the End of Time, was science fiction.
Influential Italian SF writer Lino Aldani died of lung disease on January 31, aged eighty-two. He began publishing SF stories in 1960, and his novels include Quando le radici, Eclissi 2000 and Nel segno della luna bianca. In 1963 he founded his own short-lived SF magazine, Futuro, which was revived many years later as Futuro Europa.
Scottish-born author and English teacher Stuart Gordon (Richard Alexander Steuart Gordon, aka Richard A. Gordon and Alex R. Stuart) died of a heart attack in Shanghai, China, on February 7, aged sixty-one. He began his career contributing to New Worlds in the mid-1960s, and he also sold stories to Philip Harbottle’s Vision of Tomorrow magazine. His SF novels include Time Story, Slaine and the Crow God, Smile on the Void, Fire in the Abyss, and the “Eye” and “Watchers” trilogies. Gordon also wrote a number of non-fiction works, including The Paranormal: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia of Myths and Legends and The Book or Curses.
Edward (Falaise) Upward, considered to be the oldest living author in the UK, died on February 13 at the age of 105. While at Cambridge in the 1920s, he created the surreal “Mortmere” series of stories with Christopher Isherwood.
American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Jr died of complications following a fall on February 14. He was ninety. After working at the eponymous publishing company his father founded, he left in 1959 to co-found independent imprint Atheneum. Following a series of takeovers, Knopf eventually became senior vice-president at Macmillan until his retirement in 1988.
American fan and convention runner Chuck (Charles Albert) Crayne died of cardiac problems on February 16, his seventy-first birthday. He had been disgnosed with spinal cancer a few days earlier. During the 1960s he edited the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society newszine De Profundis and co-chaired the 1972 Worldcon – the largest SF convention held at that time. Crayne also helped found the mystery convention Bouchercon in 1970, and in 1976 he was involved in creating the first NASFiC.
Legendary SF and fantasy author Philip José Farmer died in his sleep on February 25, aged ninety-one. His transgressive alien sex story “The Lovers” was rejected by twenty-six publishers before it appeared in Startling Stories in 1952. The author’s more than seventy-five books include the “Riverworld”, “The World of Tiers”, “Herald Childe”, “Dayworld” and the pulp-influenced “Doc Caliban and Lord Grandrith” series. He also published fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage, plus such literary pastiches as The Wind Whales of Ishmael, The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, The Adventure of the Peerless Peer by John H. Watson M.D., Hadon of Ancient Opar and Flight to Opar, A Barnstormer in Oz, Escape from Loki: Doc Savage’s First Adventure and the Tarzan novel The Dark Heart of Time. Venus on the Half-Shell was published under the byline of Kurt Vonnegut’s hack SF writer “Kilgore Trout” (reputedly partly inspired by Farmer), his numerous short stories were collected in The Book of Philip José Farmer, Riders of the Purple Wage and The Best of Philip José Farmer, amongst many other titles, and he edited the anthology Mother Was a Lovely Beast. He was a winner of the Hugo Award, a SFWA Grand Master Award and a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.
Oscar-nominated Italian screenwriter, Tullio Pinelli, died in Rome on March 7, aged 100. Best known for his collaborations with Federico Fellini, Pinelli’s credits include the director’s 8V2 and Juliet of the Spirits.
Prolific French horror and SF author André Caroff (André Carpouzis), who produced the eighteen-volume “Madame Atomos” horror series, died on March 13, aged eighty-four.
Spanish comic-strip artist, “Pepe” Gonzalez (José González Navarro), best known for drawing Vampirella for Warren Publishing throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, died on March 13, aged sixty-nine. He had fallen into a coma following a long illness. While still a teenager in the late 1950s, Gonzalez began working for such British publications as TV Heroes and Young Marvelman Annual. As well as contributing to various UK romance titles, in the mid-1960s he also illustrated a syndicated strip based on TV’s The Avengers.
Another Spanish comics artist, José (María) Casanovas, Sr, died on March 14, aged seventy-four. He began drawing from Spanish comics in 1957, and later worked extensively outside his native country, with strips appearing in Germany, Italy, Holland, Finland and America. During the 1970s and 1980s he contributed to such UK titles as 2000AD, Starlord, Starblazer, Scream!!, Eagle and Judge Dredd Annual.
Oscar-nominated American screenwriter Millard Kaufman died from complications from open-heart surgery the same day, aged ninety-two. Best known for co-creating the near-sighted cartoon character Mr Magoo in 1949 with animator John Hubley, Kaufman also wrote Unknown World, Aladdin and His Lamp, Bad Day at Black Rock and The War Lord before becoming MGM’s leading script doctor, working on countless films uncredited. He also “fronted” the script of Joseph H. Lewis’ cult classic Gun Crazy (aka Deadly is the Female, 1950) for blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Kaufman’s first novel was published in 2007 when he was eighty-six.
American songwriter Jack Lawrence [Schwartz] died of complications from a fall on March 15, aged ninety-six. Best known for the songs “Beyond the Sea” and “Tenderly”, he also wrote the songs for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959).
Hollywood comedy scriptwriter and TV director Mort (Morton) Lachman, who was the head writer for Bob Hope’s “joke factory” for twenty-seven years, died of a heart attack on March 17, aged eighty-nine. He had been suffering from diabetes.
American writer John Kennedy, who had some SF stories published in Galaxy and elsewhere, died on March 18, aged sixty-three. His short fiction was collected in the chapbook Nova in a Bottle (2003).
Canadian writer and collector Chester D. Cuthbert, a member of First Fandom, died on March 20, aged ninety-six. He had two stories published in Hugo Gernsback’s pulp magazine Wonde
r Stories in 1934, and in 2007 he donated 60,000 SF books and magazines to the University of Alberta.
Triple Oscar-winning film composer and conductor Maurice(Alexis) Jarre died of cancer in Malibu, California, on March 29, aged eighty-four. The French-born Jarre composed the music for more than 150 movies, including Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (aka Eyes Without a Face/The Horror Chamber of Dr Faustus), Judex, The Collector, The Night of the Generals, Disney’s The Island at the Top of the World, Mr Sycamore, The Man Who Would Be King, Ressurection, Firefox, Dreamscape, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, The Bride, Enemy Mine, Solarbabies, Fatal Attraction, Julia and Julia, Ghost, Solar Crisis and Jacob’s Ladder.
British author, anthologist and biographer Michael (Andrew) Cox died on March 31, aged sixty. He had been suffering for some years from a rare and aggressive form of cancer that gradually causes blindness. A former singer-songwriter (he recorded two albums under the name “Matthew Ellis” and another as “Obie Clayton”), in 1977 he joined Thorsons Publishing Group, and in 1989 he became a senior commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, where he edited The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (both with R.A. Gilbert), The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, Twelve Tales of the Supernatural and Twelve Victorian Ghost Stories, as well as several other anthologies. Cox also wrote the acclaimed biography M.R. James: An Informal Portrait (1983), and he received a record-breaking advance of £430,000 for his debut novel, the Victorian mystery The Meaning of Night (2005). It was followed three years later by a sequel, The Glass of Time, and he was working on a third novel at the time of his death.
British writer, playwright and poet John (Alfred) Atkins died on March 31, aged ninety-two. When he was called up for war service in 1943 (often going AWOL), his job as Literary Editor at the left-wing newspaper Tribune was taken by George Orwell. He published literary biographies of Walter de la Mare, J.B. Priestley and Orwell, amongst others, and his 1955 study, Tomorrow Revealed, drew on prophetic and utopian writings.
Comics artist Frank Springer died of prostate cancer on April 2, aged seventy-nine. He began his career in the early 1950s, working on newspaper strips such as Terry and the Pirates, Rex Morgan M.D. and, later, The Incredible Hulk. During the 1960s and 1970s he worked for Dell Comics, DC Comics and Marvel Comics, most notably on Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Conan the Barbarian. Springer also contributed to National Lampoon and worked on the animated TV show Space Ghost. He retired from comics in 1992 and took up oil painting.
The sixty-one-year-old Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Dave (Lance) Arneson died of cancer on April 7, just over a year after the death of the game’s other creator, Gary Gygax.
American author Jack Owen Jardine, who wrote SF and fantasy under a number of pseudonyms, died on April 14 after a long illness. He was seventy-seven and had suffered a stroke in 2005, from which he never fully recovered. As “Larry Maddock” he wrote four Agent of T.E.R.R.A. time-travel novels: The Flying Saucer Gambit, The Golden Goddess Gambit, The Emerald Elephant Gambit and The Time Trap Gambit; as “Howard L. Cory” he collaborated with his wife at the time, Julie Ann Jardine, on The Mind Monsters and The Sword of Lankor, and as “Arthur Farmer” he produced several erotic novels, including The Nymph and the Satyr. During the 1960s Jardine published a number of stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Unaccustomed As I Am to Public Dying was a collection of his mystery stories published in 2005.
German-born broadcaster, writer, celebrity chef and former British politician Sir Clement Freud (Clemens Raphael Freud) died in London on April 15, aged eighty-four. The grandson of Sigmund Freud and brother of artist Lucian Freud, his 1968 best-selling children’s book, Grimble, has 150,000 members in its fan club and is a favourite of J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman. For almost sixty years, Freud was married to June Flewett, who was the inspiration for the character of “Lucy Pevensie” in C.S. Lewis’ “Chronicles of Narnia” books.
Acclaimed and often controversial British “New Wave” SF author J. (James) G. (Graham) Ballard died of complications from prostate cancer on April 19, aged seventy-eight. Born in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China, his family was imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II, and Ballard moved to the UK in 1946. His first short stories appeared in New Worlds and Science Fantasy in December 1956, and he went on to write a number of dystopian or fantastic novels, including The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, The Crystal World, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), Concrete Island, High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company and Hello America. His short fiction is collected in Billenium, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, Passport to Eternity, The Terminal Beach, The Impossible Man, The Day of Forever, The Disaster Area, The Overloaded Man, The Atrocity Exhibition, Vermillion Sands, Chronopolis, The Venus Hunters and The Voices of Time, amongst other titles. Steven Spielberg filmed his semi-autobiographical childhood memoir Empire of the Sun in 1987. Ballard’s archive of papers and manuscripts was subsequently donated by his family to the British Library.
American author and journalist Ken Rand died of complications from a rare abdominal cancer on April 21. He was sixty-two. Rand’s work was published widely in the small presses, and his novels include Phoenix, The Golems of Laramie County, Fairy BrewHaHa at the Lucky Nickel Saloon and A Cold Day in Hell. His prolific short fiction is collected in Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon, Bad News from Orbit, Soul Taster, Through Wyoming Eyes, Where Angels Fear: The Collected Short Fiction Volume One and The Gods Perspire: The Collected Short Fiction Volume Two. Rand also published a number of non-fiction titles, including The Human Visions: The Talebones Interviews.
New Zealand-born British TV writer and Western and thriller novelist John Gillies (aka Jacques Gillies, John Gill and Jake Gillies) died in April. He wrote the original TV play that Hammer’s Cash on Demand (starring Peter Cushing) was based on, along with episodes of Danger Man, Armchair Thriller, Menace and Shadows of Fear.
Austrian-born parapsychologist and novelist Hans Holzer died in Manhattan after a long illness on April 26, aged eighty-nine. He travelled the world investigating reportedly haunted houses and wrote more than 140 books, starting with Ghost Hunter in 1963 and including Where the Ghosts Are, Haunted House Album and Hans Holzer’s The Supernatural. With medium Ethel Johnson-Meyers he visited the house in Long Island in which Ronald DeFeo, Jr killed six family members in 1974. As a result, Holzer’s 1979 non-fiction book Murder in Amityville became the basis of the 1982 movie Amityville II: The Possession. He also published two related novels, The Amityville Curse (filmed in 1990) and The Secret of Amityville. In 1971 Holzer was a technical advisor on the movie Night of Dark Shadows, and he also wrote the “Randy Knowles: Psychic Detective” trilogy in the 1970s. His other novels include The Psychic World of Bishop Pike, The Clairvoyant, Star of Destiny and The Entry.
Fifty-seven-year-old American fantasy author Tom (Thomas Franklin) Deitz died on April 27 of complications following a serious heart attack in January. His fifteen novels include Windmaster’s Bane (1986) and nine further volumes in the “David Sullivan” series, the “Soulsmith” series, the “Thunderbird O’Conner” duology and the “Tale of Eron” quartet.
Sometimes controversial writer and movie collector Richard “Bojack” Bojarski died in April while visiting a friend in New York. Known for his “Hugo Headstone” comics in Castle of Frankenstein magazine and The Monster Times, he also wrote the early reference books The Films of Boris Karloff and The Films of Bela Lugosi.
British fanzine and feminist writer Abigail Frost was found dead in her London apartment on May 1, aged fifty-seven. She had been battling cancer and apparently died the day before from an undiagnosed heart problem. Frost contributed articles and convention reports (sometimes in collaboration with Roz Kaveney) to a number of fan publications and, for a couple of years in the early 1980s, she was the designer for Interzone. Frost won the 1993 Trans Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF) to a
ttend the World SF Convention in San Francisco, but created controversy three years later when, as European administrator, she used the funds to pay her own debts.
Cuban-born American comics artist and animator Ric Estrada died of prostate cancer on May 1, aged eighty-one. He moved to New York in the late 1940s to study art and began working on EC’s Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat in the early 1950s. Although the penciller also worked for Dell Comics and Warren Publishing’s Eerie, he is best remembered for his work with DC Comics, which included Wonder Woman, Legion of Super-Heroes, and many war titles. Estrada also occasionally contributed to the syndicated Flash Gordon newspaper strip and, during the 1980s, he worked on such cartoon TV series as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Jonny Quest and Bionic Six.
Court clerk and political journalist Herbert A. Goldstone, whose much-anthologized story “Virtuoso” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1953, died on May 6, aged eighty-eight.
American fanzine editor and SF bibliographer A. (Arthur) Langley Searles died of prostate cancer on May 7, also aged eighty-eight. From 1943 to 1953 he published Fantasy Commentator, and revived the title in the late 1970s, first as an annual and later semi-annual until 2004. Searles received a First Fandom Hall of Fame Award in 1999.
Hollywood scriptwriter and producer John Furia, Jr, whose credits include episodes of TV’s The Twilight Zone and Kung Fu, died the same day, aged seventy-nine. He was a former president of the Writers Guild of America, West.
French book editor and translator Robert Louitt, who translated J.G. Ballard’s Crash, died of cancer on May 13, aged sixty-four. From 1973 to 1984 he edited the Dimensions SF imprint, then founded the Double Star line for Denoël, which combined two novels in each volume.
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