The Dark Boatman. John Glasby

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JOHN GLASBY

      The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos

      The Lonely Shadows: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos

      The Mystery of the Crater: A Science Fiction Novel

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1967, 1991, 2007 by John Glasby

      Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of John Glasby

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For Morag

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      John Stephen Glasby was born in 1928, and graduated from Nottingham University with an honours degree in Chemistry. He started his career as a research chemist for I.C.I. in 1952, and worked for them until his retirement. Over the next two decades, he began a parallel career as an extraordinarily prolific writer of science fiction novels and short stories, his first novels 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. Not only was Glasby required to switch back and forth from science fiction to supernatural stories (his preferred media), but also to Foreign Legion sagas, Second World War novels, hospital romances, crime novels, and westerns. He quickly amassed a large number of personal pseudonyms, the best known being “A. J. Merak,” under which name a number of his science fiction novels were reprinted in the 1960s in the United States.

      When his association with John Spencer eventually ended, he took the opportunity to sell a science fiction novel under his own name to Don Wollheim at Ace Books (Project Jove, 1971). Always a great fan of the work of H. P. Lovecraft, he then wrote a collection of Mythos stories for August Derleth at Arkham House. Derleth suggested extensive revisions and improvements, which Glasby duly followed, but then unfortunately died before the collection could be published, and the book was returned.

      Interested in astronomy since childhood, Glasby had joined the variable star section of the British Astronomical Society in 1958, and was made Director in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1960, and he published numerous textbooks and encyclopedias on astronomy and chemistry, the first being Variable Stars in 1968.

      During the early 1960s, Glasby wrote dozens of paperback westerns, all of which were reprinted in hardcover and paperback four decades later. Their success prompted the author to write new westerns, of which almost a dozen have appeared in recent years. Also revived were his 1960s “Johnny Merak” private eye novels, and Glasby continued to write new adventures of his Chandler-like hero.

      Following his retirement from I.C.I., Glasby returned to writing more supernatural stories in the Lovecraftian vein, and a number of his stories have appeared in American small press magazines and in Mythos anthologies edited by Robert M. Price. In recent years new supernatural stories have appeared in original collections edited by leading horror anthologist Stephen Jones, and in Philip Harbottle’s Fantasy Adventures collections (published by Wildside Press).

      His novelette, “Innsmouth Bane,” was featured in the second issue of H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror. Glasby’s most ambitious Lovecraftian work was Dark Armageddon, as yet unpublished, a trilogy of novels that unifies and brings to a climatic conclusion Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos cycle.

      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 Glasby was adjudged the ideal choice to continue John Russell Fearn’s famous “Golden Amazon” series, and three authorized novels, Seetee Sun, The Sun Movers, and The Crimson Peril, have appeared to date. A fourth novel, Primordial World, is scheduled to appear in 2012.

      Several of the best of Glasby’s SF, supernatural, and detective titles are being published by the Borgo Press.

      John Glasby died on June 5, 2011, following a long and courageous battle with illness, during which time he continued to write with undimmed power.