Robert Aickman

Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in London on June 27, 1914, the son of the architect William Arthur Aickman, whom he called "the oddest man I have ever known," and of Mabel Violet Marsh, daughter of the Victorian novelist Richard Marsh, author of The Beetle. He grew up in Stanmore, was reading by the age of four, saw his mother leave the family, and attended Highgate School from 1928 to 1931. He did clerical work in his father's architectural office, joined The Ghost Club, took part in the investigation of the haunting of Borley Rectory, and in 1941 married the literary agent Ray Gregorson; they divorced in 1957. After reading L. T. C. Rolt's Narrow Boat he wrote to its author, and in 1946 the Inland Waterways Association held its first meeting with Aickman as chairman and Rolt as secretary, leading the campaign that saved much of England's derelict canal network, though their quarrel ended in Rolt's expulsion in 1951. His first stories appeared that year in We Are for the Dark, shared with Elizabeth Jane Howard, with whom he had an affair. The societies he ran, among them the London Opera Society, kept him from writing at length until 1964, when he published the novel The Late Breakfasters and the collection Dark Entries and began editing the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. He called his own work "strange stories": tales of dislocation in time and space that refuse to explain themselves, gathered in Powers of Darkness (1966), Sub Rosa (1968), Cold Hand in Mine (1975), which includes "The Hospice," Tales of Love and Death (1977) and Intrusions (1980). "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" won the World Fantasy Award in 1975. He also wrote two memoirs, The Attempted Rescue (1966) and The River Runs Uphill, published after his death. He died in London on February 26, 1981, aged sixty-six. Little read in his lifetime, he has since been widely reprinted by Faber, Tartarus Press and New York Review Books.

When Mike Ashley was compiling his Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, Aickman objected to having his date of birth printed at all. He suggested a different entry instead: 'Aickman, Robert. Man of Mystery.' That, he told Ashley, would be helpful, and he would approve of it entirely.