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

R. Chetwynd-Hayes (Ronald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes) (1919-2001) was known as “Britain’s Prince of Chill”. Born in Isleworth, West London, he left school in 1933 and for the next six years he worked at a variety of menial jobs. Always a movie fan, as a teenager he appeared as an extra in crowd scenes in a nuber of British films. Following his Quartermaster sergeant father into the Army at the start of World War II, he was evacuated from Dunkirk, but returned to the beaches of France on D Day. He started writing fiction in the early 1950s, and his first published book was the science fiction novel The Man from the Bomb (1959). After nineteen rejections from publishers, he finally sold his second novel, The Dark Man (aka And Love Survived, 1964), a supernatural romance that has been optioned several times for filming. During this period, he also sold his first horror story, “The Thing”, to editor Herbert van Thal’s The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories (1966).

While looking on a bookstall in the early 1970s, he noticed the profusion of horror titles and submitted a collection of his own stories simultaneously to two publishers. Much to his embarrassment, both publishers accepted the book, which eventually appeared in paperback at The Unbidden (1971). Chetwynd-Hayes decided to become a full-time writer, and he began producing a prolific number of ghost stories and sedate tales of terror, many tinged with his disarming sense of humour that led to the invention of such outlandish monstrosities as “The Hoppity-Jump”, “The Jumpity-Jim”, “The Slippity-Slop”, “The Fly-by-Night”, “The Gale-Wuggle”, “The Humgoo”, “The Cumberloo” and “The Gibbering Ghoul of Gomershal”. His stories were widely anthologised and collected in such volumes as Cold Terror (1973), Terror by Night (1974), The Elemental (aka From Beyond the Grave, 1974), The Night Ghouls and Other Grisly Tales (1975), The Monster Club (1975), Tales of Fear and Fantasy (1977), The Cradle Demon and Other Stories of Fantasy and Horror (1978), The Fantastic World of Kamtellar: A Book of Vampires and Ghouls (1980), Tales of Darkness (1981), Tales from Beyond (1982), A Quiver of Ghosts (1984), Tales from the Dark Lands (1984), Ghosts from the Mist of Time (1985), Tales from the Shadows (1986), Tales from the Haunted House (1986), Dracula’s Children (1987) and The House of Dracula (1987), Shudders and Shivers (1995), The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes (aka Looking for Something to Suck and Other Vampire Stories, 1997), Phantoms and Fiends (2000) and Frights and Fancies (2002).

The British Fantasy Society’s chapbook Shocks (1997) reprinted four stories. Although less prolific as a novelist, his full-length works include his only other science fiction novel, the post-Apocalyptic The Brats: A Novel of the Future (1979), plus The Partaker: A Novel of Fantasy (1980), The Curse of the Snake God (1989), Kepple (1992), Hell Is What You Make It (1994) and the heroic fantasy novel World of the Impossible (1998, but written much earlier). More than half-a-dozen of Chetwynd-Hayes’ stories feature the haunted mansion of Clavering Grange, and his four books about the malignant edifice are the “fix up” novel Tales from the Other Side (aka The Other Side, 1983), The King’s Ghost (aka The Grange, 1985), The Haunted Grange (1988) and the collection Tales from the Hidden World: Four Episodes in the History of Clavering Grange (1988).

The author also wrote eight stories and the novel The Psychic Detective (1993) featuring Francis St. Clare, “the world’s only practising psychic detective”, and his attractive psychic assistant Frederica Masters. Chetwynd-Hayes was also an accomplished editor, and he put together a number of exemplary anthologies, mostly for Fontana Books, including Cornish Tales of Terror (1970), Scottish Tales of Terror (1972, as “Angus Campbell”), Welsh Tales of Terror (1973), Tales of Terror from Outer Space (1975), Gaslight Tales of Terror (1976) and Doomed to the Night: An Anthology of Ghost Stories (1978).

He also edited six volumes of the young adult series The Armada Monster Book (1975-1980), in which he often included more than one of his own stories under the pseudonyms “Angus Campbell” or “Henry Glynn”, and Volumes 9-20 of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1973-84), after taking over the series from Robert Aickman. Great Ghost Stories (Cemetery Dance, 2004) and Tales to Freeze the Blood: More Great Ghost Stories (2006) are omnibus volumes of Chetwynd-Hayes’ Fontana series, selected by Stephen Jones.

He was also the author of two film novelizations, Dominique (1978), based on Harold Lawlor’s story “What Beckoning Ghost?”, and The Awakening (1980), based on Bram Stoker’s '[[The Jewel of Seven Stars ](1903), and his own stories were adapted for the screen in the anthology movies From Beyond the Grave(1973) and The Monster Club (1980). His story “Housebound” became the basis for “Something in the Woodwork”, a 1973 episode of the NBC TV series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. In 1989 R. Chetwynd-Hayes was presented with Life Achievement Awards by both the Horror Writers of America and the British Fantasy Society, and he was the Special Guest of Honor at The 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London.