It’s very sad to hear of the passing of Great Britain’s very own pulp horror legend Guy N. Smith. And yes, I do think that ‘legend’ is an appropriate term here. I’m ready to believe that Smith’s long writing career never made him a particularly rich man even if he did, happily, do well from the 70s horror paperback boom, but his fan following was and is a very dedicated one, and for good reason. Many of us think we’re quite something for turning out a book, or maybe a few books; Smith penned over a hundred titles throughout his career, many of them incredibly lurid, often wacky horror tales which balanced entertainment against creativity.
On more than one occasion, Smith’s writing style has been held aloft as an example of crass or insensitive work; certainly, some of his sexy-time dialogue between men and women could raise an eyebrow, and once you’ve gone for the full Sucking Pit experience, you never go back. But my god, isn’t that preferable to being bored by what you’re reading? Books and horror are allowed to be fun, and these are fun. They’re stories which move at pace, too. Nor can I really name a genre of horror to which he didn’t turn his hand at some point – werewolves, insects, zombies, witchcraft, slime beasts… I somehow amassed a sizeable collection of the most glorious 70s and 80s paperback editions of Smith’s when they were (shamefully) about to be thrown away, and I still have all of them. You know what you’re going to get when the book is titled Night of the Crabs. You’re going to get skinny dippers, obviously, and these will be killed by…killer crabs. It’s a glorious certainty in a world which offers sadly few certainties, or indeed killer crabs.
In his somewhat quieter later years – there was another Crabs sequel last year, after all – Smith was probably better known (in a mark of true British eccentricity, one might say) as an aficionado of pipe-smoking. Not only are you just now probably learning that Britain has a pipe-smoking championship, but know this: Smith won it in 2003, by keeping his pipe lit for 98 minutes in total. He wrote about his passion for smoking, as well as contributing to The Shooting Times and The Countryman’s Weekly during the years when print media, particularly pulp print media, dropped out of fashion. It will be to my regret that I never made it to any of the Guy N. Smith conventions – held at his family home, no less.
By all accounts a decent, hardworking man who valued his fans immensely, Guy N. Smith’s horror writing perhaps belongs to a simpler time, when you could just tell a rollicking story and be done with it. Now that nearly his entire body of work is available on eBooks, more people can come to it and appreciate it on its own terms, and I sincerely hope they do. More Guy N. Smith, less 2020 please. Incidentally, his last blog post reminds us that he once wrote a novel about the spread of a dangerous disease which spread via bats…