Nelson Bond

Master of pulp fantasy

Nelson Slade Bond, short-story writer, antiquarian bookseller and playwright: born Scranton, New Jersey 23 November 1908; married 1934 Betty Folsom (two sons); died 4 November 2006.

Throughout his long career the American short-story writer and playwright Nelson Bond found he could sell the most extravagantly eccentric and fantastic fictions to a largely mainstream readership who would normally shun fantasy as though it were the plague.

Just as the career of the rather better-known science-fiction writer Jack Finney (Bond's junior by only three years) took off when his classic tale of alien infiltration "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" (later a seminal SF/horror movie directed by Don Siegel) regaled the generally anti-SF readers of Collier's Weekly when it was serialised in 1954, so Bond's career as a fantasy writer was launched spectacularly in 1937 when he sold a bizarre fantasy tale to Scribner's, a general-interest monthly with distinct literary leanings attached to a still formidable publishing house.

The story was "Mr Mergenthwirker's Lobblies" and concerned a typically bemused Bondian hero (in this case, as in so many others, a newspaperman) who encounters a typically barmy Bondian nonentity whose invisible companions, the "Lobblies", can foresee future mayhem (traffic accidents, murders, bank robberies and the like). The story struck a chord with readers unaccustomed to such fantastic, and comic, fare, and on the strength of it Bond wrote a successful off-Broadway play (even more popular out in the boonies in summer stock) around the theme which in turn led to his being commissioned to come up with a whole series of radio dramas. He later (1941-42) continued the series in Argosy.

Encouraged by all this, Bond, with a kind of scatter-shot technique, proceeded to hit the expensive slick-paper (and high-paying) weeklies and monthlies such as Esquire ("The Man Who Walked Through Glass", November 1938, e.g.) as well as the more lowly pulps, like Popular Detective, Ten Detective Aces and the venerable Detective Fiction Weekly.

He had a knack for the twist in the tail, the more outré the better, and seemed able to insinuate his material into the oddest locations. In March 1937 Street & Smith's Top-Notch, an out-and-out man's pulp which still boasted a "Rod and Gun News" department and regularly featured action-packed westerns and mettlesome adventure yarns, also ran his "The Voice from the Curious Cube", a brilliant little short-short which was 100 per cent science fiction and moreover held back the story's pay-off until the very last line. No one complained.

Bond cracked Astounding Science Fiction, edited by the formidable John W. Campbell Jnr, in the late 1930s the target for any young writer seriously obsessed with science fiction. Campbell, who demanded of his writers character as well as action, created one of the great humorous fantasy vehicles, Unknown (later Unknown Worlds), to which Bond gleefully contributed some of his best work, including the hugely popular story "Take My Drum to England . . ." (August 1941), in which (in a twist to Arthur Machen's famous "Bowmen of Mons" fantasy of the First World War) drowning British soldiers at Dunkirk are rescued by Drake's Golden Hynde, and the novel-length "The Fountain" (June 1941), which related the inescapable fate of someone who bathed in Ponce de León's "fountain of youth", hidden deep in the Florida swamps.

Bond sold space opera to Planet Stories, space action to Amazing Stories and detective action to Mammoth Detective (both edited by the legendary Howard Browne); humorous fantasy to Weird Tales (then edited by Dorothy McIlwraith), including "The Unusual Romance of Ferdinand Pratt" (November 1940), the cockeyed tale of a typewriter which falls in love with the author who pounds its keys; and a long series of comic SF yarns featuring a young and bumbling spaceman, Lancelot Biggs, to Fantastic Adventures.

At the same time he found a berth with Blue Book, 200 pages of swashbuckling historical and high-adventure fiction per month with superb interior illustrations by some of the finest commercial artists of the day. Here he worked a vein of dark as well as humorous fantasy, one of his earliest successes the novel-length "Exiles of Time", in which an archaeologist from the 20th century is flung into the far future to take part in Bond's version of Ragnarok (the "twilight of the gods").

Never one to waste a good idea, in the same year (1940) he sold "Exiles of the Dawn World" - a stage magician, a brassy girl reporter and a crazed Nazi are hurled back to Cro Magnon/ Neanderthal times (a sub-editor with but the faintest grasp of anthropological time-eras sidebarred the story "A novel of 1,000,000 BC") - to Action Stories.

But it was to Blue Book that Bond steered his finest work from 1940 through to 1951: the strange pet-shop owner with the most bizarre set of "pets in - and out of - the world"; the staircase that led to other worlds; the camera that only took pictures of future catastrophes; the union agitator who was thrown out of Hell for organising a union amongst the damned . . .

Much of his work had biblical resonances, Bond having a profound (though non-religious) regard for the language of the King James Bible, and the stories contained within it. "To People a New World . . ." was his clever retelling of the Cain and Abel myth; "The Cunning of the Beast" the expulsion from Eden: in both the penny only dropping for the reader in the final paragraphs. Greek and Norse myth, too, were fertile grounds for literary plunder: "The Spinsters", which he wrote to feature his two sons, Lynn and Kit, was a version of the fateful sisters who secretly weave mankind's destiny in their giant tapestry.

Other influences were T.S. Eliot (the poet's "Time present and time past" sequence from "Burnt Norton" probably sparked off a good few score stories over the years), most Jacobean playwrights, the Romantic poets, the American fantasist James Branch Cabell (who gave him the title, The Thirty-First of February, for his 1949 collection) and G.K. Chesterton, who bequeathed a love of florid story titles: "The Remarkable Talent of Egbert Haw", e.g., "The Amazing Invention of Wilberforce Weems", "The Fertility of Dalrymple Todd", etc.

Though born in Scranton, New Jersey (in 1908), with a boyhood spent in several cities including Washington DC, Bond ended up, for the remaining 60-odd years of his life, as a resident of Roanoke, Virginia, where, after he retired from writing in the 1960s, he busied himself in the PR business, as an antiquarian bookseller, bridge-player, chess champion, stamp-collector (he was the author of the reference catalogue The Postal Stationery of Canada, 1953), wine-lover and tinkerer at his own pet projects. He still drove a car in his mid-nineties.

Bond adapted George Orwell's Animal Farm as a play and for many years was active in the Roanoke Community Theatre. After writing prolifically for radio in its early days he shifted to television, contributing to a number of series, as well as scripting single dramas. In 1957 he incurred the wrath of Orson Welles after writing the teleplay for The Night America Trembled, a drama about Welles's notorious radio version of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Bond singled out the dramatist Howard Koch as being the play's main scriptwriter and Welles sued CBS for $375,000, citing Bond in the suit, and maintaining the script had been all his own work. When Koch himself pointed out that Welles had only touched up the finished script, the suit was dropped.

In the main his thoroughly entertaining short-story collections were published by small presses in America - The Thirty-First of February by Gnome, Nightmares and Daydreams (1968) by Arkham House, who recently (2002 and 2005 respectively) issued two further volumes, The Far Side of Nowhere (more fantasy than SF) and Other Worlds Than Ours (more SF than fantasy).

His first collection, Mr Mergenthwirker's Lobblies, had a small printing in 1946 and is now elusive.

Jack Adrian