Darrel Crombie (b. New Glasgow,
Nova Scotia, 1915; d. New Glasgow, Nova Scotia,
2001)
“Darrel Crombie” was the pseudonym of Joseph Fraser Darby,
the son of Joseph Edwin Darby (1882-1965), a British-born Canadian accountant,
and his wife, a school-teacher, Marion Louise Fraser (1883-1965), who were
married in New Glasgow on 4 September 1914.
Darby, as “Darrel Crombie,” published very little, but
small-press publisher Donald M. Grant thought very highly of him. Grant published his only-known short story, “Wings
of Y’vren” in the anonymously-edited paperback anthology, Swordsmen and Supermen (1972).
A short essay titled “Ghosts Walk . . .” is a memoir of Darby reading
Talbot Mundy as a youth. It appeared in
Grant’s Talbot Mundy: Messenger of
Destiny (1983).
According to Grant, Darby studied writing for more than two
years in the mid to late 1930s via a correspondence course with Arthur
Sullivant Hoffmann (1876-1966), who had been the editor of Adventure during its glory years 1912-1927. Grant also notes that Darby “began to crack
the British market with poetry and fiction. But World War II rolled around, and
a hopeful start was erased in a day.” Darby gave up writing creatively for more
than twenty-five years (though he worked for years as a journalist). Through the late 1960s and early 1970s he
worked on a trilogy to be titled The
Priestess of the Silver Star, but he never finished it. In the mid-1970s, after Grant was shown an
unpublished El Borak story by Robert E. Howard titled “Three-Bladed Doom,” he
passed it on to Crombie for re-writing.
Crombie reworked this into a 102 page typescript under the title of
“Lair of the Hidden Ones,” but again he never finished it.
Darby’s pen-name took the “Dar” from his last name,
expanding it to Darrel, and Crombie came from his summer home in Abercrombie,
just outside of New Glasgow in Nova
Scotia.
*I’m grateful to Nagzie Harb of Nova Scotia for supplying some information
on Darby.
