Controversial and hedonistic author and television scriptwriter Simon [Arthur Noel] 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 ofWhen 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’sThe 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 forThe 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.
British film poster illustrator Tom (Thomas) ‘Chan’ [William] Chantrell died on July 15th, aged 84. From The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse in 1938 to Star Wars in the late 1970s, he produced around 7,000 poster designs, averaging three posters a week. Hammer Films’ James Carreras would often commission his posters before the films were made, and Chantrell painted himself as the Count on Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, while his second wife Shirley appears as a radio operator onThe Bermuda Triangle and as a cannibal victim on Eaten Alive!
43-year-old author James H. Hatfield, whose book Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President was recalled and pulped by St. Martin’s Press in 1999 after it was discovered that he had lied about his credentials, was found dead of a drug overdose on July 18th. His earlier books include a number of unauthorized trivia challenges, biographies and encyclopedias (many co-written with George Burt) based around such movies and TV shows as Star Wars, Deep Space Nine, Lost in Space, The X Files and Star Trek The Next Generation. Hatfield had been found guilty in 1988 of plotting to kill his bosses at a Dallas real-estate firm in a failed car bombing and in 1992 of forging a signature to cash $22,000 in Federal cheques.
Norman Hall Wright, the last surviving writer of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (‘The Nutcracker Suite’ sequence), died on July 21st, aged 91. He also worked on various cartoon shorts and was a -sequence director on Bambi.
Lynrd Sknyrd bassist Leon Wilkeson died on July 27th, aged 49. The cause of death was under investigation.
Children’s author Elizabeth Yates died on July 29th, aged 95. In 1949 she ghost-edited the anthologySpooks and Spirits and Shadowy Shapes and included one of her own stories.
Science fiction and fantasy author Poul [William] Anderson died of prostate cancer around midnight on July 31st, aged 74. He had returned home that day after a month in hospital to await the end with his close family. After making his debut in Astounding in 1947, he wrote more than 100 books, including Vault of the Ages (1952), Three Hearts and Three Lions, The High Crusade, A Midsummer Tempest, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, Tau Zero and two collaborations with Gordon R. Dickson (who died in January), Star Prince Charlie and Hokas Hokas Hokas. A winner of three Nebula and seven Hugo awards, his penultimate novel, Genesis, won the 2000 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
Robert H. (Henry) Rimmer, author of the 1966 free-love novel The Harrad Experiment (filmed in 1973) and several volumes of The X-Rated Videotape Guide, died on August 1st, aged 84. His other books include The Zolo
tov Affair, Love Me Tomorrow and The Resurrection of Ann Hutchinson.
68-year-old Ron Townsend, co-founder and one of the lead singers of 1960s group 5th Dimension, died of renal failure on August 2nd after a four-year battle with kidney disease. The Grammy-winning group’s greatest hits include ‘Up Up and Away’ and ‘Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In’.
Author Frederick A. Raborg, Jr., who was a regular contributor to Marvin Kaye’s anthologies under the pseudonym ‘Dick Baldwin’, died on August 13th, aged 67. His stories appeared in Brother Theodore’s Chamber of Horrors, Ghosts, Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural and Devils & Demons, amongst other titles.
HarperCollins editor Robert S. Jones, whose authors included Clive Barker, died of cancer in New York on the same day, aged 47.
American composer Jack Elliott, who wrote the music for Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat and other 1970s TV shows, died of a brain tumour on August 18th, aged 74. His film credits include Oh, God!, and the series The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was loosely based on Elliott’s family.
Controversial British astrophysicist and SF author Sir Fred Hoyle, who coined the term ‘Big Bang’ to describe the creation of the Universe (a theory he always personally disputed), died on August 20th after suffering a severe stroke in July. He was 86. Founder of the Institute for Astronomy at Cambridge University and fellow of the Royal Society, Hoyle’s novels include The Black Cloud and Ossian’s Ride, and he co-wrote the BBC TV series A for Andromeda and its sequel,Andromeda Breakthrough, with John Elliott.
Comics artist Chuck Cuidera, who created Blackhawk at Quality Comics in 1941, died on August 25th, aged 86. He also created Blue Beetle and continued to ink Blackhawk after the title was sold to DC Comics until 1967. He worked on several other DC titles before leaving the field in 1970.
Philanthropist and publisher Paul Hamlyn (Paul Bertrand Hamburger), who became a multi-millionaire with his eponymous mass-market imprint, died on August 31st, aged 75. Among the books he published are Supernatural Stories for Boys, The Best Ghost Stories, The Best Horror Stories and Spinechilling Tales for the Dead of Night. He reissued Algernon Blackwood’s Tales of the Uncanny and the Supernatural and Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre under his Spring Books imprint, and was also chairman of the Octopus Publishing Group from 1971-97.
Pauline Kael, the influential film critic of the New Yorker magazine, died of Parkinson’s disease on September 2nd, aged 82. Her collected essays were published as I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper Into Movies (winner of the National Book Award), Reeling and For Keeps.
54-year-old Douglas J. Stone, vice-president of Odyssey Press, which prints and mails The New York Review of Science Fiction, was aboard the doomed American Airlines Flight 11, which was crashed by terrorists into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th.
Long-time fan and former president and co-founder of the Southern Fandom Confederation, Meade Frierson, III died of cancer on September 24th, aged 61. With his wife Penny he edited the influential H.P. Lovecraft fanzine HPL in the early 1970s.
George Gately [Gallagher], creator of the Heathcliff newspaper comic strip, died of a heart attack on September 30th, aged 72. From 1973 until he retired in the late 1990s, he drew the eponymous cartoon cat, before which he created the Hapless Harry strip.
E.C. comics artist Johnny Craig also died in September, aged 75. After entering the industry in the late 1930s, he joined E.C. in 1950 where he contributed to Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror, Haunt of Pear, Two-Fisted Tales and other titles. His other credits include Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie and various titles for Marvel and DC.
69-year-old Gregory [Hancock] Hemingway, the youngest son of Ernest, died of hypertension and cardiovascular disease on October 1st while being held at a women’s detention centre in Florida (he had apparently had a sex-change operation late in life and called himself ‘Gloria’). Hemingway had been arrested five days earlier for being naked in public and was charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest. His book about his father, Papa: A Personal Memoir, was published in 1976.
Scottish illustrator Charles William Stewart died on October 3rd, aged 85. As well as producing artwork for Beckford’s Vathek and Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, he also editedGhost Stories and Other Horrid Tales for the Folio Society, to which he contributed twenty watercolour plates.
Nuclear physicist, author and SF fan Milton A. Rothman died of heart failure on October 6th, aged 81. One of the hosts for the first SF convention in America, he chaired three Worldcons (including the one in 1953 that introduced the Hugo Award) and published fiction in Astounding under the pseudonym ‘Lee Gregor’.
British-born composer and songwriter Joel Lubin, best known for such songs as ‘Move Over, Darling’ and ‘Glass Bottom Boat’ for Doris Day, died of heart failure on October 9th, aged 84. During the 1960s he developed a number of music artists, including Jan and Dean, and he co-wrote ‘Tutti Frutti’ with Little Richard.
Poet, editor and literary critic Anne Ridler O.B.E. (Anne Barbara Bradby), who edited Best Ghost Stories for Faber & Faber in 1945, died in Oxford on October 15th, aged 89.
Oscar-winning American songwriter Jay Livingston, who with Ray Evans wrote such classics as ‘Buttons and Bows’, ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘Que Sera Sera’, died of pneumonia on October 17th, aged 86. The duo’s first big hit was ‘G’bye Now’ from Olsen and Johnson’s 1941 revueHellzapoppin’, which led to a ten-year contract with Paramount. Their TV themes include Bonanza and Mister Ed (which featured Livingston’s voice). Livingston also worked on the scores for When Worlds Collide andThe Mole People.
90-year-old TV writer Norman Lessing, whose credits include episodes of Shirley Temple Storybook (which he associate produced) and Lost in Space, died on October 22nd of congestive heart failure and complications from Parkinson’s disease.
Best known for his depictions of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Discworld’ on book covers, calendars and other media since 1984, British artist Josh (Ronald William) Kirby died unexpectedly in his sleep on October 23rd, aged 72. In a career that spanned fifty years, he produced more than 400 paintings, some of the best of which are collected inThe Josh Kirby Poster Book, In the Garden of Unearthly Delights, The Josh Kirby Discworld Portfolio and A Cosmic Cornucopia. Beginning in 1956 with a paperback cover for Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, he illustrated such authors as Ray Bradbury, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alfred Hitchcock. Kirby won the British Fantasy Award for Best Artist in 1996, and amongst his other work he also produced film posters for Star-flight One, The Beastmaster, Krull, Morons from Outer Space, Return of the Jedi and an unused design forMonty Python’s Life of Brian.
Irish storyteller and stage actor Eamon Kelly died on October 24th, aged 87. His stories were collected by the Mercier Press.
American author Richard Martin Stern, whose novel The Tower helped inspire the 1974 movie The Towering Inferno, died on Halloween, aged 86.
British screenwriter and playwright Anthony Shaffer died of a heart attack in London on November 6th, aged 75. The twin brother of playwright Peter Shaffer, he is best known for his stage success Sleuth (filmed in 1971). His other screenplays include Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Absolution, a trio of Agatha Christie adaptations (Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun and Appointment with Death) and the cult classic The Wicker Man (which he novelized in 1979).
Comics artist Gray (Dwight Graydon) Morrow died the same day, aged 67. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years and according to some reports took his own life. While illustrating various SF digest magazines and paperback book covers in the 1960s (including more than 100 covers for the Perry Rhodan series), he began contributing comic strips to Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie. In 1978 he adapted several stories for The Illustrated Roger Zelazny, and a retrospective volume entitled Gray Morrow: Visionary appeared in 2001. He also worked on a number of newspaper strips, including Secret Agent X-9, Rip Kirby, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and was th
e longest-running artist on Tarzan, which he illustrated for eighteen years. He was reportedly despondent over his recent replacement on the strip by a new artist.
Ken (Kenneth) [Elton] Kesey, best known as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (filmed in 1975) and the man who coined the term ‘acid’, died of complications from surgery for liver cancer on November 10th, aged 66. In 1966 Kesey fled to Mexico to avoid going to trial for marijuana possession and was eventually sentenced to six months in jail. He and his fellow ‘Merry Pranksters’ were the heroes of Tom Wolfe’s influential 1968 book about psychedelia, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
60-year-old horror author and film-maker Michael O’Rourke died unexpectedly on November 14th, possibly as a result of toxic mould poisoning. Two years earlier O’Rourke and his wife were evacuated from their home and a lawsuit is ongoing. His books includeDarkling, The Bad Thing, The Undine and The Poison Tree (under the byline ‘F.M. O’Rourke’), and he scripted the films Deadly Love (which he also directed), Hellgate and MoonStalker.
TV writer Peggy Chantler Dick, whose credits include Bewitched, died of heart failure on November 20th, aged 78.
Author and illustrator Seymour [Victory] Reit, who created Casper the Friendly Ghost with animator Joe Oriolo, died on November 21st, aged 83. Reit and Oriolo sold all rights to the cartoon character to Famous Studios for just $200 in the mid-19405, since when the franchise has generated millions through film shorts, TV series, movies and Harvey’s on-going comic book series. Reit also worked on such cartoons as Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and the Popeye and Betty Boop series, and he created the early 1940s comic strip characters Auro, Cosmo Corrigan and Super American, as well as drawing for Archie, Little Lulu and Mad Magazine.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 68
