He worked as a freelance and became even more productive. "On this novel, a historical writer's fantasy," it was proclaimed in Ancient Mysteries (1975), "the Third Reich was in part built." Haining inspired reading lists, from Elinor Glyn's outer reaches to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's little-known The Coming Race (1871), which was admired by Hitler. "Guy Boothby is one of the most unjustly neglected authors of the turn of the century," wrote Haining, "and his books, including the five Dr Nikola novels, and nearly 50 other works he penned during his short life, make exciting reading today." The Art of Mystery and Detective Stories (1977) rediscovered the fin-de-siècle master criminal Dr Nikola. No hasty assemblages, these books carefully order the familiar, alongside works he delighted in disentombing, such as Ray Bradbury's early, ingenious, previously unreprinted 1942 tale of marital discord, The Candle. Numerous were Haining's crime-driven anthologies for this firm and others. In his last year at NEL in 1972 he awarded one Philip Pullman a young writer's prize for The Haunted Storm. Three decades later, Haining, remembering that wartime intelligence officer's stories of the German general, published the non-fiction The Mystery of Rommel's Gold (2004). After other papers, including National Newsagent, he became an editor at gritty publishers New English Library (1963-72), where he was soon discussing a biography of James Bond with the by then ghostlike Ian Fleming, who died in 1964. After Valentine Dyall, who, out of BBC late 1940s radio, chilled the nation as the Man in Black, there was television and "the hideous figure of Mr Hyde on an eight by 10 inch screen in a room with the curtains drawn against the evening light".Īt 17, he joined the West Essex Gazette, whose endlessly hideous chronicles stirred that fascination with mankind at its basest. Sweets and mundane comics forsaken, Weird Tales embroiled him "in worlds of fantasy and horror, and somehow I knew I would never be quite the same again". At Buckhurst Hill grammar school in Essex, extracurricular matters included Woolworth's imported pulp magazines: "the brilliant red and yellow covers, with their illustrations of violent action and beautiful girls in various stages of disarray, immediately caught my schoolboy fervent imagination". Of Scottish ancestry, with a taste for "grue" reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson, he was born in Enfield, in far north London, and his father was a manager. Ever curious, he diversified into such subjects as Channel Island holidays, man-powered flight, scarecrows and Greta Garbo, thereby acquiring a fine, book-filled country house - widely thought haunted. Deep knowledge, lightly borne, powered a pen for hire. The author and editor Peter Haining, who has died aged 67 of a heart attack, worked on scores of books across four decades, and he was rooted in, and sustained by, a childhood passion for hidden nuggets of terror, witchcraft and crime.
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