Felix Holt

Felix Holt (b. Murray, Calloway County, Kentucky, 20 December 1897; d. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 3 June 1956*) 

Felix Cacilock Holt was the sixth child of Crawford Duncan ("C.D.") Holt (1858-1950) and Sally Bridewell Allen (1861-1947), who were married on 3 July 1878.  He had two older sisters, plus three siblings who had died young.  

His education ended with the eighth grade. During World War I he worked as a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, published in Paris. Later he worked in Chicago and Detroit, first as a cartoonist and then as a reporter. In 1931 he moved to a radio station (WJBK) in Detroit, where he was a news editor. In the mid-1930s he moved to another Detroit radio station (WXYZ), where he contributed stories to the station's three biggest programs, Challenge of the Yukon, The Green Hornet, and The Lone Ranger (some of the episodes of the later television series were based on Holt's radio scripts). In 1945 he headed to New York to write for CBS the script of  a juvenile Western serial Cimarron Tavern (1945-1946). Another Holt wrote was Doctor Standish, Medical Examiner (1948). 

Holt's first novel, The Gabriel Horn (New York: Dutton, [September] 1951), was initially rejected by thirteen publishers. The novel is told by ten year-old Little Eli of his father Big Eli, and their experiences on the Kentucky frontier in the early nineteenth century. It was very successful, with a book club edition, and a mass market paperback, as well as an abridged version appearing in a collection of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. It was also made into a film in 1955, starring Burt Lancaster, retitled The Kentuckian. Holt published a few related short stories or extracts from his novel in Argosy in late 1951. 

Holt's second novel was Daniel Boone Kissed Me (New York: Dutton, [May] 1954). Like The Gabriel Horn it was based on his knowledge of the history and legends of Calloway County, Kentucky, where he was born and raised.  

Less than one month after the publication of Daniel Boone Kissed Me, Holt died at his Pennsylvania home, following a long illness (cancer of the stomach).  He was 56. He left a widow, the former Margie J. Sies (1899-1959), who he had married in St. Louis on 1 December 1919, and one daughter. Daniel Boone Kissed Me was retitled Mountain Boy (1957) when it came out in paperback.  

*Genealogical records show that Holt died on 3 June 1956, not 2 June as is given in some references. 

Mrs. Wright Biddulph

Mrs. Wright Biddulph (b. Washington, West Sussex, 8 February 1848; d. Pimlico, London, 16 February 1931) 

Diana Goring was the daughter of Sir Henry Dent Goring (1801-1859), with his second wife Lady Mary Elizabeth Lewis Goring (1805-1871), who were married in Hove, Sussex, on 17 May 1842. Diana had at least two sisters, and some step-siblings from her father's earlier marriage 

Diana married Captain William Digby Lloyd (1845-1883) in Weybridge, Surrey, on 18 August 1870; they had two children, one son and one daughter.  Her first novel was published anonymously, A Fatal Sacrifice (London: Tinsley Brothers, [June] 1872). I have found nothing about the content of this book. As Mrs. Digby Lloyd she published her second novel, Arnold Leigh  (London: Tinsley Brothers, [September] 1880), a tale of Ireland (both of Diana's children were born in Offaly, Ireland), in which the curate Arnold Leigh, who is engaged to his cousin, jilts her for a showy girl. Reviews were not good. The St. James Gazette wrote: "it would be very difficult to make a more offensive little book than this out of equally simple materials" (28 September 1880). The Graphic was devastating: "if there were any sign of promise in Mrs. Lloyd's story, we would remind her that some slight knowledge of English grammar and spelling is even still considered more than merely advisable . . . the same indulgence can hardly be extended to a plot and to a set of so-called characters which are even below the average of such things, and are almost grotesquely feeble" (9 October 1880). Advertisements for Arnold Leigh divulged her authorship of A Fatal Sacrifice.  In Tinsley's Magazine for December 1880 she also published a short story "Ned Evans" 

After her first husband's death, she  married Anthony John Wright-Biddulph (1830-1895) in Portsea, Hampshire, on 22 November 1887; they had no children. Wright-Biddulph's first wife had died in 1886. He was the heir of Burton Park (owned by the Goring family in the sixteenth century), a famous recusancy near Duncton in West Sussex, where Catholics were allowed to resist the edict that all people must attend Church of England services.

As Mrs. Wright Biddulph (unhyphenated), Diana published two novels. The first, Cressida (London: Greening & Company, [May] 1906), has elements of fantasy, but it is basically a melodrama where a youth, Sir Derek Derenberg, helps a young girl who then conceives a life-long mission to save his soul. This amounts to a prolonged conflict with Cressida, who is devoted to Satanism and who can change shape into a large snake. The fantasy is a minor element, and most of the story is related to romance and social issues. The Bookseller summed up: "the whole tale is too bizarre and too unreal to deserve permanent success" (6 September 1906).

Her final book, again as Mrs. Wright Biddulph, was The Pirates of Society (London: Heath Cranton, [April] 1919). It concerns a young South American heiress who is brought up in a French convent, and launched into London society by the corrupt Lady Alberta. The Irish Independent noted that "interest in the narrative is intently sustained" (28 April 1919).

 Mrs. Wright-Biddulph is perhaps best remembered as a longtime friend of Hilaire Belloc, who wrote most of his book The Four Men: A Farrago (1912) under her roof at Burton, and who dedicated the book to her.  

Maggy Gould

Maggy Gould (b. Natchez, Mississippi, 31 October 1915; d. Manhattan, New York, 10 November 1980)

Marguerite Goodman was the first child of Howard Wells Goodman (1887-1960) and Dorcas Walters (1893-1931), who were married in Jefferson, Tennessee, on 27 September 1913. She had a brother who died in infancy, and a younger sister, Louise, who became a fashion model n New York. 

Little is known of her early life, beyond that she resided for a time with her aunt and uncle in Mount Ulla (near Salisbury), North Carolina. Her family moved to Macon, Georgia, when Maggy was in elementary school. She later attended Miller High School before going to the Fassifern School (for girls) in Hendersonville, North Carolina.  She met the man who would become her husband, Willis Elden Gould Jr. (1918-1991), when they were both drama students at the University of North Carolina. He became an actor, a theatrical director and stage manager, for some seasons with the Barter Theatre, a travelling repertory which included his wife as one of the actors. Maggy Gould also appeared with other repertory groups.  They were married in 1943, and their daughter Ann was born in 1948. As "Maggy" or "Maggie" Gould, she acted in at least three Broadway plays, Men to the Sea (1944), Season in the Sun (1950) and Faithfully Yours (1951). Gould called playwriting her first love. In April 1944, she and a collaborator Howard Richardson submitted to the Copyright Office a dramatic production South to the Morning, as by "Rome Dixon." It was based on the novel Un Vie (1883) by Guy de Maupassant.

As Maggy Gould she published her sole novel, The Dowry (New York: William Morrow) in August 1949. The blurb on the rear flap notes that she was living with her husband and daughter in Greenwich Village; that she had acted in the South, in California, and in Boston; and that she had written a number of plays, some optioned for Broadway, but apparently none were ever performed. 

The Dowry is the story of Robbie Gilmore,a youngish woman married to the middle-aged art critic Laurentz Gilmore. When Robbie meets the talented young painter Jonathan Reizel, a love affair begins, and Robbie leaves her husband, who puts a curse upon Jonathan. The book was reviewed mostly positively.  The Library Journal called it a "morbidly fascinating book" (July 1949), while Kirkus Reviews noted "some shocking stuff here which you may find absorbing, if you indulge in the genre" (15 July 1949). August Derleth reviewed it in The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) as a "better-than-average study in suspense with supernatural overtones in a first novel which shows much promise and some achievement. That Miss Gould should be successful with a Gothic theme in a setting so modern and sophisticated is a tribute to her skill, for she is successful with it, and she compels belief within her own set boundaries" (1 October 1949). (Derleth expanded on this review in The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949.)

A UK edition was published by Allan Wingate in September 1950. When the novel was reprinted by Pyramid Books in 1975, the author's first name was spelt "Maggie."  Interestingly, "The Dowry" is also a short story by Maupassant telling of marital betrayal. 

Gould planned a second novel, about which she said "in the next book I will do what every southerner must--lay the scene of it in the South" (The Charlotte Observer, 18 September 1949), but she seems never to have gotten round to writing it. 

By 1951 Gould had written six plays. In September 1957, Gould registered with the Copyright Office Sweeney's Island: A Play in Two Acts.  It was never printed and may have been unproduced. 

Gould and her husband were divorced, and both remarried in 1961. Maggy's second husband was Eugene Feraldis (1900-1983), a former admiral in the Greek navy who had immigrated to New York at the end of W.W. II.  In January 1962, she registered with the Copyright Office Bamboula: A Musical Romance, by Gould, Walter Bishop and Fred Norman, with the note that it was "a complete rewrite of the script with new lyrics added." She had shopped Bamboula around after first finishing it in 1951, but producers feared it would cost too much to produce, with a huge cast and fabulous settings. It told the story of the birth of the blues in the swamps of cotton country. The rewrite also does not appear to have been produced. 

In 1980, Maggy Gould Feraldis died of  cancer at the Lennox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, aged 65.   

Hal Garrott

Hal Garrott (b. Chicago, Illinois, 21 June 1877; d. Los Altos, California, 21 October 1968)

Hal Garrott was the working name of Henry Claggert Garrott, the son of Erasmus R. Garrott (1836-1897), a physician who became the chief medical officer of the Chicago Health Department, and his wife Florence Lee (1844-1930), who were married in Chicago on 20 December 1867. Hal was the second of four children, with older and younger sisters, and a younger brother.

His life is not very well documented, but he claimed to be educated at the Lewis Institute of Chicago (a technical high school founded in 1896), the University of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, and in Berlin. 

He married Jane Frances Noble (1873-1945) in St. Louis, Missouri, on 25 November 1901. They settled in Minneapolis, where Garrott managed a confectionery. They had three children, Florence Garrott (1905-1914), Hal Noble Garrott (1906-1932), and Jean Garrott (1907-1997). The marriage broke up after 1920, and on 1 December 1923, in Minneapolis, Garrott married Marian Caplin (1879-1952). 

Garrott and his second wife moved to California around 1926, settling the the Carmel area, where Garrott was the Drama and Music Editor on the Monterey Peninsular Herald. After Marian's death, Garrott married a third time, on 3 January 1956 in Santa Clara, California, to Ruby J. Norton (1877-1974). Garrott died at the age of 91. 

Garrott published three books, all for children, the first two illustrated by Dugald Stewart Walker (1883-1937), a very talented artist and book illustrator, much of whose work was poorly reproduced in books published by second tier publishers. In Garrott's books his characteristic artwork is signed only "Dugald Walker." (John Coulthart has done several blog posts on Walker, including two which focus on his black-and-white work, here and here. The second link includes a couple of illustrations from Garrott's first book.)

All three of Garrott's books were published by Robert M. McBride of New York.  The first, Snythergen, appeared on 24 November 1923, dedicated to Garrott's two surviving children. It tells of a giant boy, who was first fed on round foods that made him stout, and then his alarmed parents fed him only slender items which made him tall and thin. Snythergen runs away from home, and has many adventures, making new friends like Squeaky the pig and Sancho Wing, the goldfinch. The advice of Santa Claus on feeding turns Snythergen into a regular-sized boy. 

 

The book was well-reviewed, and  it has four color plates and many black-and-white illustrations. Garrott's second book, Squiffer, appeared on 1 November 1924. This time the story centers on a Squiffer, a squirrel who wants to be a boy. He, too, has many adventures, with a Bear and some odd characters like the funny man called Red Fairy Hot, "a bad fairy who changes people into animals and then into Bats by sprinkling them with Pink Powder" (p. 63). Some of the story is set in a Candy Palace. With this volume, Walker has only one color illustration (the frontispiece), but many black-and-white ones. Squiffer sold less well than Snythergen, and can be found in cheaper remainder bindings. 

Garrott's third and final book was First-Aide to Santa Claus, published in August 1929, which brings back the boy Snythergen, Squeaky the Pig, Sancho the Goldfinch, the Bear, and Santa Claus. It is dedicated to Garrott's younger sister's two children. A new illustrator, Mary-Ponton Gardner (1883-1957), predominantly a magazine illustrator, provides twenty illustrations, all in black-and-white. Through all three Garrott books there is a diminishment of the amount of art, and sales correspondingly suffered. First-Aide to Santa Clause is Garrott's rarest book. 

 

M.A. Neff

M.A. Neff (b. Rome, Ohio, March 1858*;  d. New York, New York, 6 October 1915) 

M.A. Neff, known familiarly as "Mell," was born Melvin Augustus Neff, the youngest of ten children of  Abraham Neff (1806-1890) and his wife Tabitha Hall (1816-1876), who were married in 1831.

Neff was married twice, the first was in 1883, but it did not last more than a few years. Around 1891 he married Mary A. Haefner (1875-1955). They had two children, James Blaine Neff (1895-1983), and another that died in infancy. Neff and his wife were based in St. Louis in the mid-1890s when their son was born.

In the 1901 U.S. Census, Neff is listed in Cincinnati as a commercial salesman. But he soon gravitated to the growing motion picture industry. Around 1910 he founded the Motion Picture Exhibitors League of America, with annual conventions beginning in 1911. Neff was its President for the last four years of his life. He wrote and produced one full length silent film, The Battle of Ballots, which debuted in August 1915. It is catalogued at the American Film Institute as five-six reels, which translated to 75 to 90 minutes. It is a melodrama that centers around prohibition. Neff appeared as himself in a short documentary newsreel (Gaumont Weekly no. 72), released on 23 July 1913, when he was elected President of the Motion Picture Exhibitors League for the third time.  

Neff's one book was the self-published 118-page paperback Paradise Found, which came out in January 1914. According to Lyman Tower Sargent, in his online version of his classic Utopian Literature in English: An Annotated Bibliography from 1516 to the Present (2016), it describes "a series of worlds, including two eutopias," the first of which is called Paradise. There people live long lives and fly about individually, living in trees. The second eutopia is Square Land, where everyone gets a 'square deal" including a lot on which to build a small house, and a three day work week of six hours each day. The book is very rare. 

Neff died in New York City on 6 October 1915, after a brief illness (kidney trouble), and an unsuccessful operation. 

 *Neff gave his birth details as March 1859 in the 1900 U.S. Census, but other sources suggest the year was 1858. 

Sue Mallinson

Sue Mallinson (b. Derby, Derbyshire, 16 February 1943)

Sue Mallinson is the working name of Susan Elizabeth Mallinson, the second child of Richard Vincent Mallinson (1911-2005) and his wife Mary Ruth ("Molly") Hembry (1914-2006), who were married in Romford, Essex, in late 1935. Sue had an older sister, and two younger brothers, one of whom died in infancy. 

Sue Mallinson worked for BBC television from 1965 to 1988. She was trained as a film director, and worked as Series Producer for a number of programmes, notably on The Book Programme (1977-1979). After she left the BBC she formed her own production company, whose most notable productions include Opera Imaginaire (1993), a fifty-odd minute assembly of animated shorts of famous arias (viewable on youtube here). Mallinson also directed a nearly one-hour documentary for the ITV "Network First" series, titled Entertaining Angels Unawares (broadcast 19 December 1995), covering the history of angels from the point of view of clergymen, scientists, and of people who claim to have encountered angels. Entertaining Angels Unawares is also viewable on youtube, at Mallinson's daughter's channel here. 

She published one novel, The Serpent and the Burrerfly (London: Robert Hale, 1980). She wrote it over seven years during her annual leave at a cottage in Dorset. The dust-wrapper blurb reads:

Lisa Covington is tired of living in London and the superficiality of her work as a journalist. Restless, she takes a six months' sabbatical and moves to the West Country. On her first evening, she and her gypsy dog Imp go for a walk on the moors and are drawn towards a giant Menhir, upon whose face is the ancient carving of a Serpent. The great stone gives Lisa an uneasy feeling and inexplicably she shudders. Just then a butterfly lands upon a small pebble at her feet which takes on a strange purplish glow. Thus the Ancient Forces of good and evil are unleashed and Lisa is propelled into a strange world of magic and mystery where she finds love, danger and a new way of life. Ghosts, psychic forces and witchcraft  abound in this romantic story, blending together to form an unusual and fascinating look into the occult.

The book is very rare today, and Mallinson wrote a sequel, Atlantis Reborn, which has never been published. Mallinson married David Roach, and they had one daughter born around 1983.  Mallinson's production company was dissolved in 2015, when she was living in Ipswich, Suffolk. 

 

(L to R) Sue Mallinson, her grandchild, and her daughter, Amity Roach, c. 2020

 

Bernard C. Blake

Bernard C. Blake (b. reg. Gosport, Hampshire, July-September 1882; d. 9 April 1918, Cocques, France) 

Bernard Cecil Blake was the third son (of three children) of John William Blake (1846-1920), who owned a yacht-fitting shop in Gosport,  and his wife Emma Julia Collins (1846-1934), who were married in 1867. His older brothers were Stanley James Blake (1870-1941), who worked alongside his father, and Victor John Blake (1873-1925), who became a medical doctor. 

Little is known of Blake's youth and education. In early 1892, he sent contributions (evidently letters or puzzles, which appear uncredited) to "The Children's Page" of  The Lady's Pictorial, and a photo of the boy at age nine, with his dog, appeared in the issue for 14 May 1892. He wrote letters to The Boy's Own Paper about five years later.  His first fiction was published in the local Hampshire newspaper (to which his father was a frequent contributor) in 1899. 

His first of three books was At the Change of the Moon (London: Greening & Co, [June] 1902). It contains nine stories, most of which are fairly short, and most of which concern madness or lunacy of some kind. There is a frame story of a competition witnessed at an inn by the narrator over a ten day storm in the 1870s,  whereby two men, Dr. Hermes, a retired brain specialist, and a small shriveled bald-headed man, nicknamed "Pharaoh" by the narrator, try to one-up each other with successive tales. None are atmospheric and rarely hint of the supernatural. Some of the contemporary reviews overpraise the work (e.g., "Mr. Blake has the touch of a fine artist, and knows the value of a suggested horror as against a plainly elaborated one. All who like weird literature and are fond of thrill should read this book" Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 29 June 1902). 

Blake published five stories, two poems, and a piece of nonfiction in a short-lived small magazine Vectis in early 1903, but his next major work was a epistolary novel, The Peculiar History of Mary Ann Susan: Told by Herself (T. Fisher Unwin, [October] 1903). It is made up of letters from a young lady to her aunt, an amusing and humorous contrast to what Blake notes in a brief preface as novels written "with a purpose." 

In his entry in The Literary Year-Book for 1906 Blake listed himself as a contributor to Punch and to M.A.P. [Mainly about People, edited by T.P. O'Connor].  

Blake's final book was Cain's Wife (Walter Scott Publishing, [16 May] 1906). On publication it was attacked for daring to take on its Biblical subject matter. The Saturday Review called it "a vulgar melodrama" (19 January 1907). Another fairly negative review in the East Anglian Daily Times is worth quoting at length for it gives details about the novel and makes it sound highly interesting:

Mr. Blake does not follow the lines of the Biblical story. He adopts the theory that co-existing with Adam, the Creator put upon the earth another race of women and men, and that amongst the latter were some who possessed attractions for the "sons of God," as Adam and his sons were called to distinguish them from the less favoured "sons of the earth." Cain and Abel play prominent parts in the story: the elder is described as a giant of vast strength but of hideous features, whereas his brother is a magnificently handsome being. Amongst the daughters of the earth are sister patricians named Silave and Naamah, dark and light respectively physically and by nature. The love tangle which sets the four at cross purposes is made responsible for the commission of that crime of fratricide which caused a curse to descend upon Cain. The erring brother, though fierce and elemental, is averse to taking Abel's life until his temptation by the sensuous and revengeful Silave becomes irresistible. The description of that terrible period, and of the dire consequences of the sin of Cain is excellently done; indeed, the power of these portions must atone for the disappointment caused by other chapters. . . . Mr. Blake's greatest fault is his modernising of the actions and language of the actions in the great drama. (16 July 1906) 

After Cain's Wife, Blake apparently ceased publishing, and went to work at his father's shop, until it was sold in 1911. After the War broke out in 1914, he joined the Army and served in North India for two and a half years. Back in England in 1917, he asked that he serve in France in place of a married officer whose wife and family were in India. Incidentally, Blake's last known short story (mentioned in a 1914 newspaper article) appeared in The Regiment--it concerns the misery of a soldier and a woman who rush to marry. Blake himself never married. On April 9th 1918 he was shot in the chest at the Front, and died during subsequent medical treatment. 

Johnny Mains has championed At the Change of the Moon, publishing in 2025 with Mislaid Books an expanded edition (including all the items from Vectis), including a well-illustrated biographical account of what is known of Blake's life.