Richard Marsh

Pen-name of Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915), British author known for gothic horror and pulp fiction. >His real name was Heldmann, and under it, in the early 1880s, he published a handful of school stories as well as a rousing, Hentyesque yarn of the sea, *The Mutiny on Board the Ship Leander* (1882). This was actually dedicated to G. A. Henty. A year later he had become joint-editor, with Henty, of *The Union Jack*, the weekly adventure-story paper for boys. His career... lasted just six months, when a curt announcement appeared in the paper's columns: 'Mr Heldmann has ceased to be connected in any way with *The Union Jack*.' >Heldmann then disappeared for nearly a decade... bobbing up again as 'Richard Marsh', the name by which he was known until the day he died (his death certificate is under Heldmann). He wrote over fifty full-length novels (most of them thrillers), and published twenty volumes of short stories, two of which featured his heroine Judith Lee. His most celebrated work, the extraordinary theriomorphic classic <a href=https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5801453W/>*The Beetle*</a> (1897) was written in a matter of weeks in its year of publication after Marsh had read the newly published <a href=https://openlibrary.org/works/OL85892W/>*Dracula*</a> and decided he could do better. >Much of his early work was grisly in the extreme, and he penned some excellent supernatural tales (one of his daughters was the mother of the modern ghost-story writer <a href=https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL949842A/>Robert Aickman</a>). For the last decade of his life, however, he seems to have eschewed horror in favour of milder genres: chronicles of suburbia and detective novels. >>[From Biographical Note by Jack Adrian, in <a href=https://openlibrary.org/books/OL685467M/Twelve_Tales_of_Murder/>*Oxford Twelve Tales of Murder*</a>]