FREDERICK H. CHRISTIAN, the pen name of noted British author Frederick Nolan, was born in Liverpool in 1931. His first book was The Life and Death of John Henry Tunstall (1965), which was well received. He later founded the English Western Society, which brought him to the attention of Corgi Books (Bantam Books UK), for whom he became editor of their westerns line. He started writing westerns of his own under the pen name of Frederick H. Christian. Nolan created his own western hero “Angel” for another UK publisher, with great success, the novels soon being reprinted in America.
But Nolan had even greater writing ambitions, and quit his highly paid job to become a full-time writer. He became an internationally bestselling novelist, and his book The Oshawa Project was filmed by MGM as Brass Target, starring Sophia Loren. Since then Nolan has written many successful thrillers, historical novels, biographies, and radio and TV scripts.
ANDREW DARLINGTON, born and still living in Yorkshire, is a writer, critic and journalist, who is an expert in the fields of both popular music and science fiction. His book reviews and biographical studies of writers and musicians and vocalists have appeared widely in magazines and on-line, and his own short stories are distinguished by an intense frisson of both traditional and new-wave storytelling. He has contributed several powerful stories to both Fantasy Annual and Fantasy Adventures.
JOHN RUSSELL FEARN (1908–1960) was one of the first British writers to break into the American pulp science fiction magazine market of the 1930s and ’40s, but he also wrote 180 novels and hundreds of short stories of fantasy, horror, westerns, romance, crime fiction, and suspense, under numerous pseudonyms. His most popular series features the Golden Amazon, who was operated upon by a scientist when a child; this gave her superhuman physical powers and intelligence. Borgo Press has published over sixty of his novels and collections to date, including the twenty-one-volume Golden Amazon Saga, the five-volume Black Maria classic crime novel series, and many other mysteries, science fiction, horror, and romance novels.
JOHN GLASBY (1928–2011), a British writer, was an extraordinarily prolific writer of science fiction novels and short stories, his first books appearing in the summer of 1952 from Curtis Warren Ltd. under various house pseudonyms such as ‘Rand Le Page’ and ‘Berl Cameron’, as was the fashion of the day. Late in 1952, he began an astonishing association with the London publisher, John Spencer Ltd., which was to last more than twenty years. Glasby quickly became Spencer’s main author, writing hundreds of stories and novels on commissions in several genres. The best known of his plethora of pseudonyms was ‘A. J. Merak’, under which a number of his science fiction novels were reprinted in the 1960s in the United States.
When his association with John Spencer ended, he sold a science fiction novel under his own name to an American publisher (Project Jove, 1971). Always a great fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, he then began writing Cthulhu Mythos stories, including Dark Armageddon, a trilogy of novels that unifies Lovecraft’s conception of the Elder Gods and Old Ones. During the early 1960s, he also wrote dozens of paperback westerns, all of which were reprinted in hardcover. In recent years new supernatural stories have appeared in magazines and original collections edited by leading horror anthologist Stephen Jones, and in Philip Harbottle’s Fantasy Adventures anthologies (published by Wildside Press).
Also revived were his 1960s ‘Johnny Merak’ private-eye novels, which are being reprinted by Borgo Press. An all-new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of a Shade, was published in the UK in 2003, followed by The Dark Destroyer, a new supernatural novel, in 2005. In 2007 was authorized to continue John Russell Fearn’s famous ‘Golden Amazon’ series, and three novels, Seetee Sun, The Sun Movers, and The Crimson Peril, have appeared to date; a fourth novel, Primordial World, has yet to be published.
Many of the best of Glasby’s SF, supernatural, and detective titles are now being published by the Borgo Press, including new collections of short stories, among them The Dark Boatman, The Lonely Shadows, The Mystery of the Crater, Rackets Incorporated, Savage City, and A Time To Kill.
English writer PHILIP E. HIGH (1914–2006) was born in Norfolk. High’s writing ambitions did not surface until after the war. He published his first SF story, “The Statics,” in Authentic Science Fiction in 1956, and saw more than forty stories appear during the next decade, all of his writing being done in his spare time whilst working full-time as a bus driver. American readers were introduced to his work in 1964 when Ace Books began to issue High’s colorful sf adventure novels, including The Prodigal Sun (1964), No Truce with Terra (1964), The Mad Metropolis (1966), These Savage Futurians (1967), and Reality Forbidden (1968). Other novels followed over the next ten years.
Following the death of his literary agent and friend John Carnell in 1972, High retired from writing. In 1997 he was invited to contribute stories to Philip Harbottle’s new magazine Fantasy Annual. High enthusiastically responded, and his steady flow of top quality mss. was in no small way responsible for Fantasy Annual extending to five issues, before metamorphosing into Fantasy Adventures. High continued contributing to the magazine right up to the time of his untimely death, which — as noted in the editor’s introduction — was a major factor in its discontinuation. “The Wishing Stone” was his very last story, published posthumously.
Another Yorkshire-born British writer, GORDON LANDSBOROUGH (1913–1983) began his career as a chemist, before switching to journalism. After active service in North Africa during the War, Landsborough returned to London. In 1949 he was appointed editor of Hamilton Co. Stafford Ltd., an undistinguished paperback publisher of pulp fiction. Landsborough made vast improvements in their list and rebranded them in 1951 as ‘Panther Books’, publishing a regular series of genre novels, most notably science fiction. He also launched the famous British SF magazine, Authentic Science Fiction. As part of his editorial duties, Landsborough wrote westerns, crime, and foreign legion thrillers, mostly under his personal pseudonym of Mike M’Cracken. His personal memoir of this period of his career can be found in the book Vultures of the Void: The Legacy by Philip Harbottle.