L.A. Lewis

L. A. Lewis (b. Sheffield, England, 6 February 1899; d. Southall, England, 28 October 1961)

Leslie Allin Lewis was the only child of Arthur Henry Lewis (b. 1872), a brewery expert according to the 1911 UK Census, and Catharine (sometimes Catherine) Mary Ann Allin (1870-1962), who were married at Wantage, Berkshire, in the spring of 1896. 

Leslie grew up at the Allin family estate at East Hendred in Berkshire, and was educated at Roysse’s School in Abingdon (now named Abingdon School).  As a boy he wrote and illustrated a series of stories about a panther named Blackie. During World War I he joined the Artist’s Rifles, and trained as a pilot, taking his certificate on the Maurice Farman Biplane at the Military School in Ruislip, on 29 May 1917. According to Richard Dalby, he served in France for a year, and after the war he took a course in Aero Engineering, and later earned an Instructor’s license. 

His father apparently died before 1925, and after 1926 Leslie lived with his mother and some members of her family in the Finchley area of London, through around 1951, save for a time of service in the R.A.F. during the World War II.  In July 1929, he published a story “The Chords of Chaos” in The Theosophist, edited by Annie Besant. His one collection of ten stories, Tales of the Grotesque (London: Philip Allan), came out as part of the “Creeps” series in October 1934. It is one of the best of the volumes of the “Creeps” series, with original tales like “The Tower of Moab” in which a man’s madness is exemplified by his vision of a Babel-like tower. One later tale, “The Author’s Tale,” came out in Terror by Night (1935), edited by Christine Campbell Thomson as part of the “Not at Night” series.

Elizabeth Yeardye Rickell (1897-1988), who had served in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Crops during World War I, was Leslie’s longtime friend, and she apparently became his common law wife in the early 1950s (there is no official record of their marriage).  She told Richard Dalby that her husband destroyed his surviving writings in a fit of depression, and that he long suffered from hallucinations, and from deteriorating physical and mental health during his final years. He died of a heart attack while in hospital in 1961.  Tales of the Grotesque has been reprinted three times, expanded by the one uncollected tale, in hardcover by Ghost Story Press in 1994 and 2003, and in trade paperback by Shadow Publishing in 2014, each reprint having an introduction by Richard Dalby.  

J. Max McMurray

J. Max McMurray (b. Roanoke, Alabama, 28 September 1908; d. Roanoke, Alabama, 3 January 1966)

James Max McMurray was the youngest of five children of William Harmon McMurray (1868-1954) and his wife Correna Eldorado Reaves (1868-1937)  He had three older sisters and one older brother.

McMurray attended Auburn University and the University of Virginia, before finishing up at Delta State College, in Cleveland, Mississippi, in 1932. His first novel, and only published book, The Far Bayou, was published by Rinehart and Company in September 1951. Around the time of publication, McMurray wrote:  “Cleveland is in what a certain writer referred to as ‘the adorable Delta’, a country unto itself, and one that has attracted many races and creeds. It is in the Delta that I have spent most of my adult life, with vacations on the Mississippi and Alabama coasts. The Far Bayou was begun in Cleveland and finished in Attalla and Roanoke. I have published no other fiction.  I am now living in Roanoke and working on another novel.”  McMurray published nothing else, and died unmarried. Oddly, The Far Bayou is today collected primarily because its the dust-wrapper was designed by Philip Grushkin (1921-1998), one of the major New York book designers from the 1940s through the 1980s.

David T. Lindsay

David T. Lindsay (b. St. Monans, Scotland, 5 March 1897; d. Edinburgh, Scotland, 3 March 1953)

David Tod Lindsay was the ninth of ten children of Thomas Lindsay (1856-1936) and his wife, Beatrice Craig Phillips (1858-1939). He had six older brothers, two older sisters, and one younger brother.

Little is known of his life and education. He served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (Princess Louise's) line infantry regiment during World War I. He married Lizzie Reid Scott (1901-1988) in St. Monans in 1935, and they had one daughter. 

Between March 1936 and January 1940 he published eighteen novels, all with the firm John Hamilton of London.  Most were mysteries, with at least two recurring characters. The Honourable Richard ("Dick") Monroe of the Secret Service appears in two novels, while Chief Inspector John Jay ("Jailbird") Jackson of Scotland Yard is featured in five. A few of Lindsay's books are more unusual, like the western, Vengeance Rides North (1939). Some of his mysteries have slight fantastic elements, like the rationalized "ghosts" in Inspector Jackson Investigates (1936). Three of his novels are science fictional, the two most interesting being his first book, The Ninth Plague (1936), in which a maniac seeks to exterminate the human race and bring about a great darkness by neutralizing the chemical rays of the sun; and The Green Ray (1937), in which a green ray is used to cause the engines of airplanes to stall while in flight.  The third title reputed to have science fiction elements is Air Bandits (1937).

His first few books appeared as by "David Lindsay", but his middle initial was soon added, probably to distinguish his work from that of the fantasist, David Lindsay (1876-1945), whose novels had sold very poorly.  David T. Lindsay gave up writing after paper rationing started during World War II, and worked in the Rosyth Dockyard.


*I am grateful to an anonymous person who sent me details that allowed me to learn more about this author.  My original blog posting on David T. Lindsay, with much information on his books, remains available here.  

H.B. Gregory

H.B. Gregory (b. Derby, Derbyshire, 5 December 1912; d. Lichfield, Staffordshire, 6 August 2007)

Harry Beare Gregory was the only child of Harry Welbourne Gregory (1879-1960), the manager of a wall paper manufacturer, and his wife, Constance Ellen Beare (1883-1971), who were married on 19 December 1908 in Littleover, Derbyshire. 

Little is known of his early life or education, but by the late 1930s Gregory was working in a bank, and he had begun writing plays for his church theatre. He was a devout Anglo-Catholic. He married Ivy Joan Mee (1917-1999) in Derby, Derbyshire, in the spring of 1939. They had two daughters. Gregory served for nearly six years in the army during World War II, mostly in India, before returning to his bank job in 1946. He was based variously in Leicestershire and Birmingham before becoming manager of the Solihull branch of the Westminster Bank in 1961 Gregory retired in 1972.

The 1940 dust-wrapper

Gregory’s only book, the novel Dark Sanctuary (London: Rider, [February] 1940), is the tale of a family curse on the Lovells, who have an ancestral home on Kestral, an imaginary island off the coast of Cornwall. It shows the decided influence of Dennis Wheatley and Charles Williams, with a dash of H.P. Lovecraft.  It was publish in a small edition, and received almost no notice until 1983 when Karl Edward Wagner listed it as one of the “13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels” in a series of lists in the May-June 1983 issue of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine. Wagner’s contributions therein were based more on scarcity than on literary quality, and have elevated the desire for the specifically-mentioned titles well beyond their literary value.  In the last few decades, many of these impossibly rare titles have been reprinted, and thus can at last be assessed on their merits—or lack thereof. Dark Sanctuary was reprinted in a limited edition hardcover in 2001 by Midnight House, with a speculative introduction by D.H. Olson. Noted genre authority E.F. Bleiler called Dark Sanctuary “really third rate,” but that dismissal is a bit harsh. More realistically, Dark Sanctuary is no lost classic, but it is an interesting period piece, and it is fairly typical of many library thrillers of its time.

In the summer of 2004, the author, presumed long-dead, turned up alive and well at age 91, and in the autumn he was interviewed by John Pelan of Midnight House, though the interview was not published for nearly five years, appearing in the Summer 2009 issue of Allen K’s Inhuman Magazine. Gregory noted that he wrote Dark Sanctuary after spending his honeymoon near the island of St. Michael’s Mount, off the Cornish coast near Penzance.  This locale inspired the island of Kestral. Dark Sanctuary was again reprinted in 2012 by John Pelan’s Dancing Tuatara imprint with Ramble House Publishers. It reprints Olson’s introduction, and adds a fannish puff-piece by Pelan and his 2004 interview with Gregory. 

Gregory gave up after the lack of success of his novel. In the late 1950s he returned to writing and penned a small number of short stories for The Boy’s Own Paper.  The first was probably “Runaway Rocket” in the September 1959 issue; it, together with two others, "Boy on the Moon" (1960) and "Lord of Luna" (January 1961), are the basis for an eight part film serial, made for showing to children in cinemas on Saturdays, produced by the Children’s Film Foundation, under the direction of Frank Wells, son of H.G. Wells.  Masters of Venus went into production in 1960 and took two years to make. It tells of the adventures of teenagers Pat Ballantyne and her brother Jim who end up on their father’s rocket to Venus, where they discover a race of six-fingered humans descended from Atlantis. It was released in September 1962, a well-done example of its kind.   

 

 

One further known story from The Boy's Own Paper is “Landfall on Venus” (August 1963).

 

*entry revised 29 January 2022; revised again 8 December 2023 (thanks to Steve Holland).

Gertrude Dunn

Gertrude Dunn (b. reg. Croydon, Surrey, Oct-Dec 1884; d. 12 January 1949 in Tooting Bec, London)

Gertrude Willoughby Cecilia Meade was the third of four children of Joseph Willoughby Meade (1847-1933), the manager of a sugar refinery, and his second wife, Marion Gertrude Cohen (1855-1932), who were married at St. Dominic's Priory in St. Pancras, Middlesex, on 31 October 1874. (Some of the family seem at some point to have dropped the final e in their surname, as official records appear under both "Meade" and "Mead".)  Gertrude had two older brothers and one younger sister. Her oldest brother Gerald Dominic Willoughby Meade (1875-1958), published some booklets and a substantial book Chinese Ghouls and Goblins (1928) as by "G. Willoughby-Meade".

Gertrude married a banker's clerk, Edward William Gillow Dunn (1871-1951) in the spring of 1907.  They had two children, a daughter born in 1910 and a son born in 1912.

As Gertrude Dunn she published three fantasy novels (her only books) in a short span of three years, all with the same publisher, Thornton Butterworth. The first, Unholy Depths (published in October 1926), is a ghost story with spiritualistic overtones concerning a house built over the former camping ground of gyspies, whose queen practiced some kind of voodoo. The second, and probably the scarcest of the three, is The Mark of the Bat: A Tale of Vampires, Living and Dead (published in March 1928). It interestingly has a hereditary yet living vampire who find a rival in his victim, who has become a traditional vampire. And the third is And So Forever (published in October 1929), telling the story of a beautiful woman whose extraordinarily long life is apparently owed to witchcraft and to a mysterious elixir. All three Gertrude Dunn novels are uncommon.


This author is not to be confused with Gertrude Ballie-Weaver (1855-1926), who was born Gertrude Renton, and who was married to Henry Arthur Colmore Dunn for several years before his death in 1896. During these years she was known as Gertrude Colmore Dunn, and used "G. Colmore" or "Gertrude Colmore" as her pen-name. After she was married a second time to Harold Baillie-Weaver in 1901, she continued to use the same pen-name. . 

Sabine Büssing

Sabine Büssing (b. Dortmund, Germany 1960)

Sabine Büssing majored in Russian and English language and literature, taking her teacher’s degree in 1982.  She worked as a lecturer and researcher at Ruhr University, Bochum, from 1982 though 1987, receiving her M.A. in 1983 and Ph.D. in 1987.  Her doctoral thesis was published in English as Aliens in the Home: The Child in Horror Fiction (1987).  Other books have appeared in English and in German. These include, in English:  Of Captive Queen as and Holy Panthers: Prison Fiction and Male Homoerotic Experience (1990), A Darker Shade of Bale (1994), and The Ultimate Guide to Negative Thinking (1997).  And in German: Balladenzauber: Schulklassiker unverschämt originell interpretiert für Deutschlehrer und ihre Opfer (1995)  [Ballad-Magic: School Classics Outrageously Interpreted for German Teacher sand Their Victims];   Das Deutsche Reiseschauderbuch Satiren (1999) [The German Travel-Shudders Book of Satires]; Leuchtturm im Dschungel: Roman über das Leben des Schriftstellers Robert Louis Stevenson (1999) [Lighthouse in the Jungle: A Novel about the Life of Writer Robert Louis Stevenson]; Kinderreime rund ums Jahr: zum Vorlesen und Vortragen (1999) [Nursery Rhymes throughout the Year: For Reading and Writing]; and Die nackte Wahrheit hinterm Notenschlüsselloch: was Sie niemals über unsere grossen deutschen Komponisten erfahren wollten (2000) [The Naked Truth behind the Clef Hole: What You Never Wanted to Know about Our Great German Composers].

A Darker Shade of Bale, published by the The Book Guild of Sussex, is a collection of ten macabre stories. Some are historical, some modern. Some have plot twists that are not entirely successful.  Ramsey Campbell blurbed the volume accurately: “a feast of the grotesque, the psychological and the marvellous in the best European tradition.” 

Kenneth Gunnell

Kenneth Gunnell (b. Hove, Sussex, 17 February 1918; d. reg. Truro, Cornwall, May 2001)

Kenneth George P. Gunnell was the son and only child of George Thomas Gunnell (1887-1968).  In the literary world he is primarily remembered as the translator of Bernard Sellin's The Life and Works of David Lindsay (Cambridge University Press, 1981).  Gunnell had in fact known Lindsay in Hove during the last seven years of Lindsay's life, beginning in the summer of 1938, and his brief translator's preface adds some nice details of  Lindsay's final years.

Gunnell's only other known publications are of a very different sort: two novels that were both published by Luxor Press of London, though the first book had a successful American edition under the Phoenix Library imprint of Grove Press. The Graduate Mistress (1971) is a sexy tale of a schoolmistress dominating one of her young male students.  In the second, The School for Sin (1973), a young man relates his sexual adventures as a teacher at a boarding school for girls. These books are in style about as far away from David Lindsay as you can get.