E. C. Vivian


Evelyn Charles Henry Vivian was the pseudonym of Charles Henry Cannell, a British editor and writer of fantasy and supernatural, detective novels and stories.

Biography

Prior to becoming a writer, Cannell was a former soldier in the Boer War and journalist for The Daily Telegraph. Cannell began writing novels under the pen-name "E. Charles Vivian" in 1907. Cannell started writing fantastic stories for the arts magazine Colour and the aviation journal Flying in 1917–18, sometimes publishing them under the pseudonym "A.K. Walton".
Vivian is best known for his Lost World fantasy novels such as City of Wonder
and his series of novels featuring supernatural detective Gregory George Gordon Green or "Gees" which he wrote under his "Jack Mann" pseudonym. Vivian also wrote several science-fiction stories, including
the novel Star Dust about a scientist who can create gold.
Critic Jack Adrian has praised Cannell's lost-world stories as "bursting with ideas and colour and pace", and
"superb examples of a fascinating breed".
Influences on Vivian's work included Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen
and the American novelist Arthur O. Friel. Vivian also published fiction under several
other pseudonyms, including Westerns as "Barry Lynd". Adrian has noted that some of the pseudonyms
Cannell used "will never now be identified".
For younger readers, Vivian wrote Robin Hood and his Merry Men, a retelling of the
Robin Hood legend.
Vivian also edited three British pulp magazines. From 1918 to 1922 Vivian edited The Novel Magazine, and later, for the publisher Walter Hutchinson, Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story Magazine. In addition to
UK writers, Vivian often reprinted fiction from American pulp magazines such as Adventure and Weird Tales in the Hutchinson publications.
Outside the field of fiction, Vivian was noted for the non-fiction book, A History of Aeronautics.
Some of the popular errors about his life are now corrected in the first and only full-length biography, The Shadow of Mr Vivian: The Life of E. Charles Vivian by Peter Berresford Ellis, PS Publishing Ltd, Hornsea, UK, 2014.

Works

Gees Series

  1. Gees First Case
  2. Grey Shapes
  3. Nightmare Farm
  4. The Kleinart Case
  5. Maker of Shadows
  6. The Ninth Life
  7. The Glass Too Many
  8. Her Ways Are Death

    Rex Coulson

  9. Coulson Goes South
  10. Reckless Coulson
  11. Dead Man's Chest
  12. Egyptian Nights
  13. Coulson Alone
  14. Detective Coulson

    Fields of Sleep

  15. Fields of Sleep
  16. People of the Darkness

    Terence Byrne

  17. Girl in the Dark
  18. The Man With the Scar
  19. Vain Escape

    Jerry Head

  20. Accessory After
  21. Shadow on the House
  22. Seventeen Cards
  23. Cigar for Inspector Head
  24. Who Killed Gatton?
  25. With Intent to Kill
  26. 38 Automatic
  27. Tramp's Evidence/The Barking Dog Murder Case
  28. Evidence in Blue/The Man in Grey
  29. The Rainbow Puzzle
  30. Problem by Rail
  31. Touch and Go

    Robin Hood

  32. Adventures of Robin Hood
  33. Robin Hood and His Merry Men

    Others