<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A. F. Kidd (b. 1953) is the pseudonym of British supernatural author Chico Kidd. Born in Nottingham, she grew up in Co. Durham, Edinburgh, Southwell, and Shrewsbury. After seeing an advertisement for Rosemary Pardoe’s Ghosts & Scholars magazine, Kidd submitted her first ever M. R. James-ian tale, (“An Incident in the City”), which was accepted for the first issue (1979). The author’s traditional ghost stories have been published (often illustrated by her) in such small press magazines as Dark Dreams, Peeping Tom, Enigmatic Tales, All Hallows, and the anthologies Vampire Stories, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2, The Year’s Best Horror Stories X, XVI and XVIII, and the hardcover Ghosts & Scholars. Almost all the short stories were finally collected together in one volume by Ash-Tree Press as Summoning Knells & Other Inventions (2000). After being rejected by more than a dozen publishers, Kidd’s first supernatural novel, The Printer’s Devil, appeared under the name of Chico from Baen Books in 1995. A chapbook of A.F. Kidd and Rick Kennett’s stories continuing the exploits of William Hope Hodgson’s investigator Carnacki the Ghost-Finder was collected by the Ghost Story Society as No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki: The Untold Stories in 1992, and a revised edition appeared from Ash-Tree Press in 2002. Formerly a keen campanologist, she has also published the booklets Change & Decay (1985), In & Out of the Belfry (1987), Bell Music (1989), Bells Rung Backwards (1991), Wraiths & Ringers (1995) and Ghosts, Scholars, Campanologists & Others (1999). In September 2000, Kidd discovered that Luís Da Silva – a one-eyed Portuguese sea-captain who can see ghosts – had become a major protagonist in her novella “Cats and Architecture” in Supernatural Tales 2 (2001). Since then Da Silva has appeared in a number of other short stories, several of which have been collected in the self-published chapbooks Second Sight and Other Stories (2001), The Vengeance Jar and Other Stories (2002) and Visions & Voyages (2003). Four ”Da Silva novels, Demon Weather, The Werewolf of Lisbon, Resurrection and Sinned Against are as yet unpublished.