The most exciting bit of news this week is that I bought myself a new phone. It's not brand new; it's a refurbished Samsung A23 which is a huge leap from my old phone and it will hopefully make my life easier in certain ways: the video and audio is far better when I chat to my Mum; I'm still experimenting with what else it can do but the camera is about five times better than the old one, so fewer slightly blurry pictures of things in the distance. I'm also getting a tripod so I can use it for photographing book covers and the like from a stable position rather than my own shaky-cam efforts.
Everything about it is new, so I'm on a steep learning curve and it will be a while before I'm confidently making the next Comic Cuts video. Not that I have much news on that front as I'm still waiting for Rebellion to get back to me about a couple of projects I want to do for the summer.
I mentioned last week that I had been doing a little research into the authors of a series of hard-boiled crime thrillers and was checking information from some old American copyright records. Well, I'm still checking some of the info. I've gathered and found one or two discrepancies between what was published in Al Hubin's Crime Fiction: A Comprehensive Bibliography and the source material. Nothing major, but a couple of errors none-the-less.
It has also resolved a couple of my old "mysteries that have me mystified" columns from over a decade ago. Perhaps not so exciting for most people, but punch in the air time for me as both involve writers I was trying to research back in the early 1980s!
At the age of 20, I was writing a book called Vultures of the Void, based around a handful of essays that were commissioned by Phil Harbottle a decade earlier for Vision of Tomorrow. We also compiled an extensively annotated index to all the paperbacks and magazines published during the same period covered by the Vultures book. There had been some revelations, thanks to the discovery of copyright records, a few years earlier that had revealed, for instance, the title of John Brunner's first novel. (I remember buying a copy at the 1979 Brighton WorldCon (Seacon '79), but hadn't the courage to ask Brunner to sign it!
The latter author is, or was, David Arthur Griffiths, whom I wrote about way back in 2014. In it, I said: "Griffiths was slightly older than [author E.C.] Tubb, so probably born around 1918. He would have been 20 or 21 when war was declared, and probably served the full six years of the Second World War."
I based this on something Ted told me. But it turns out Griffiths was considerably younger than Ted, and still in his early twenties when he was attending the White Horse pub, where SF fans would gather every week. Once I had his correct year of birth it was clear that Griffiths had not served and his disappearance from the SF field was most likely to be National Service rather than a deliberate career change.
Sadly, we may never know why he abandoned SF. The cheap paperback market had collapsed, but Griffiths struck me as an interesting author who might potentially have gone on to have a career alongside Tubb, Ken Bulmer and even John Brunner. Perhaps he did continue writing and, like Denis Hughes, joined the DC Thomson treadmill. Who knows... well, maybe someone knows and they'll get in touch. Until then, I'm going to mark this mystery as partly solved.
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