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 ofThe Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories and six volumes of The 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 V 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 Sinclaire), 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 8t 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 [Noel] 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.