Supernatural & occult fiction: The Beetle

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 The Beetle (1897) was written in a matter of weeks in its year of publication after Marsh had read the newly published Dracula 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 Robert Aickman). 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 Oxford Twelve Tales of Murder]