Category Archives: birthday

Remembering Bill

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We lost Bill Crider to cancer in February of last year.  February 12, 2018, to be exact.  Today (July 28) would have been his 78th birthday.

I took the picture on the left at the 2017 World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio. That’s Joe Lansdale on the left.  It was my last time to see Bill.  We didn’t get to visit much; his stamina was low.  I understood and was thankful for the time I did get to chat with him.

Bill Crider is best remembered as a mystery writer, and that’s as it should be.  He was good, very good at that genre.  Along with some westerns, he also wrote bit of fantasy and science fiction.  It would be great if someone could collect those stories.

I first became aware of Bill in 1999, when he was the guest at a writing symposium held at the university I was at.  We didn’t meet then, but I started watching for his books.  Then I moved to another part of the state.  About a year or two later, ConDFW got started.  Bill was a regular attendee there, as well as Aggiecon and Armadillocon, two other conventions I was attending at the time.  Although he didn’t write much fantasy and science fiction, Bill was a fan especially of the older, pulpier stuff.  We’d both grown up reading a lot of the same authors and stories, although he had read them in their original publications while I had read reprints.

We had some mutual friends, and I got to know Bill and and to a lesser extent his wife Judy by hanging with that group.  I tended to stay at the back of the crowd and just listen.  Bill was an accomplished raconteur, and when he and Joe Lansdale got going, well, you couldn’t find better entertainment than that.

Bill was always a gentleman, courteous, kind, approachable.  He was soft spoken, and he never failed to have something interesting to say.  I didn’t know him as well as Joe or Scott Cupp or James Reasoner did.  They knew him for far longer after all.  Still, he was my friend, and I miss him.

If you’ve not read Bill Crider, give his work a try.  He never engaged in literary pyrotechnics.  He just told good stories.

John D. MacDonald Makes Children Cry

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“A Child is Crying”
Originally published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948

Even though he’s best remember as a writer of crime novels and the Travis McGee series of thrillers, John D. MacDonald was also an accomplished author of science fiction.  He only wrote three sf novels (The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything; Ballroom of the Skies; Wine of the Dreamers), but the ISFDB lists 70 short stories if I’ve counted correctly.  Not all of those are necessarily science fiction, but that’s more than enough for a retrospective collection or two.  (Stephen Haffner, are you paying attention?)  Some of his science fiction was collected in Other Times, Other Worlds.  That little paperback is long out of print, although copies can still be found.  I bought one at a secondhand bookstore in Colorado a few weeks ago.

MacDonald was born on this date, July 24, in 1916, and passed away during surgery in 1986.  In observance of his birth, I managed to read one of his tales.  “A Child is Crying” is one of his best-known sf short stories, and it’s easy to see why. Continue reading →

And Still More Birthdays

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Before I look at several folks born on this date, please indulge me by allowing me to explain one of the reasons I do these posts.

No, it’s not because I have nothing else to say.  Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while should know that usually isn’t the case.  (Well, okay, maybe a little.)

One of the main reasons I do these posts are for historical reasons.  The fields of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and weird fiction have long histories. Aside from a few well-known authors such as Lovecraft, Howard, Asimov, Clarke, and a few others, most of the writers of the past are unknown to the general reading public.

Why does this matter, you ask?  Because every few years some new writer will write a novel/short story/screenplay/ransom note/etc that young readers, critics, and other writers will hail as original and groundbreaking.  Only it won’t be.  It will have been done years or decades before by someone else.  And usually done better, although YMMV as to how much better.  The new work will be shinier, have more up to date technology, and express the correct sociopolitical opinions du jour.  But the central conceit will be anything but original.

IOW, those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.  Case in point the undead myth that women weren’t represented in the field before [insert year of speaker’s birth here].  This is one of those myths that just won’t die, in spite of some of us trying to put a stake in its heart.

There was a conversation that came across my Twitter feed yesterday (and is probably still going on for all I know; I am on Twitter sporadically these days) in which someone stated that Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein came to dominate the science fiction field in their later years while many writers contemporary to the time these three did their most well-known work and were just as admired and respected became forgotten.  And while this topic is better suited for another post, part of what I’m trying to do with these birthday posts is to prevent some of these formerly well-respected but now obscure writers from being completely forgotten.

So, with that in mind, here are today’s birthdays. Continue reading →

A Quick Look at E. Hoffmann Price

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Pulp writer E. Hoffmann Price was born on this date, July 3, in 1898.  He passed away in 1988 at the age of 89 a few weeks prior to his birthday.  Price graduated from West Point, served in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, as well as in the Philippines and Mexico.  A student of the orient, he drew on these interests for much of his fiction.

Price wrote for a variety of pulps, especially adventure, detective, and western, but he is best remembered these days for his weird fiction.  A correspondent of H. P. Lovecraft, they collaborated on “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”.  I believe he is the only pulp writer to have met Robert E. Howard in person, on two different occasions, IIRC.  He is also the only known person to have Howard, Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smith.  Price met many of the pulp writers, including Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and L. Sprague de Camp.

Price experienced a resurgence in his career in the late 70’s and early 80’s, publishing several fantasy and science fiction novels.

We just got back from vacation last night, so I’m playing catch-up today.  If I get a chance, I’ll read one of his short stories this evening.

Manly Wade Wellman’s “The Finger of Halugra”

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It’s been a while since I posted anything, and so I was going to do an update.  The I realized it was Manly Wade Wellman’s birthday (b. May 21, 1903) and instead could write about something that would be of interest to people.

“The Finger of Halugra” is vintage Wellman, but it may not be familiar to many of you.  It was originally written in the early 70s for a small press publication that folded before the story could see print.  The story languished in Wellman’s files and wasn’t rediscovered until some years after the author’s death, when Karl Edward Wagner came across it.  The story first saw print in another small press publication, Deathrealm, in the spring 1995 issue.  It was reprinted in The Best New Horror Volume 7 (AKA The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 7).  Sin’s Doorway is the only collection of Wellman’s in which “The Finger of Halugra” has appeared.  And that collection is out of print and never had an electronic edition, although copies can be had on the secondary market. Continue reading →

Jack Williamson’s Eleventy-First Birthday

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Jack Williamson

There are a number of birthdays today that I could write about, but I want to focus on three, in no other order than their importance to me.

Legendary science fiction and fantasy author Jack Williamson was born 111 years ago today.  That would be April 29, 1908.  He passed away in 2006.

Williamson got his start in the pulps in the late 1920s with his first story, “The Metal Man”, being published in Amazing Stories.  His final novel, The Stonehenge Gate, was published in 2005.

My project to read and compare the magazine and book versions of Darker Than You Think got sidetracked last year.  I’ll try to get it restarted in the summer.

I’ve written about Williamson’s impact on me several times before, so I’ll keep my comments short.  I came across a stripped copy of The Best of Jack Williamson for a quarter at the flea market in Wichita Falls, Texas, when I was in the seventh grade.  (Stripped means the cover had been stripped off and the book had been reported to the publisher as having been pulped.  It was stolen, IOW, although I didn’t know that then.)  My favorite story in the collection at the time, and still a favorite today, is “With Folded Hands”.  It’s a chilling story about robots who protect us from ourselves, whether we want them to or not.  If you haven’t read it, it’s worth tracking down a copy. Continue reading →

“Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall” by Frank Belknap Long

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Frank Belknap Long was born on this date, April 27, in 1901.  Long was friends with H. P. Lovecraft, and he’s best remembered today as a member of the Lovecraft circle.  Long contributed a number of  stories to the Mythos over the years, my personal favorite being “The Hounds of Tindalos”.

But Long wrote in multiple genres, including Gothics mostly under his wife’s name.  Today I want to look briefly at one of his science fiction stories.  “Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall” was first published in the November 1948 issue of Startling Stories.   Continue reading →