Fanthorpe's wife Patricia is also his agent, manager and business partner; they have also co-authored a number of books, including Rennes-le-Chateau: Its Mysteries and Secrets , The Oak Island Mystery: The Secret of the World's Greatest Treasure Hunt, The World's Most Mysterious People , Mysteries of Templar Treasure and the Holy Grail: The Secrets of Rennes Le Chateau, Mysteries and Secrets of the Templars: The Story Behind the Da Vinci Code, Mysteries and Secrets of the Masons: The Story Behind the Masonic Order, and Satanism & Demonology: Mysteries and Secrets. Today, the couple live in Roath in Cardiff. They have two daughters, Stephanie Dawn Patricia Fanthorpe, and Fiona Mary Patricia Alcibiadette Fanthorpe.
Television, Radio and film appearances
Television
Radio Lionel Fanthorpe wrote and narrated several episodes of the Fanthorpe Investigations for BBC Radio https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b038bf7s/episodes/guide
Writing
Lionel Fanthorpe's output can be grouped under three broad headings, as follows:
Approximately 180 paperback novels and short-story collections, in the science fiction and supernatural genres, produced for the UK publisher Badger Books during the 1950s and 1960s.
Numerous books on Christian themes, including the "Thoughts and Prayers" series.
Compilations of Forteana, co-written with his wife Patricia.
Badger Books
Fanthorpe began working for Badger Books in the early 1950s, and over the period of the next 15 years produced many books under different pseudonyms, some of which were pen-names shared with other of Badger Books' writers. These included: Victor La Salle, John E. Muller, and Karl Zeigfreid. Pseudonyms exclusive to Fanthorpe's short story output include Neil Balfort, Othello Baron, Noel Bertram, Oben Leterth, Elton T. Neef, Peter O'Flinn, René Rolant, Robin Tate and Deutero Spartacus. Names he used for novels include Erle Barton, Lee Barton, Thornton Bell, Leo Brett, Bron Fane, L.P. Kenton, Phil Nobel, Lionel Roberts, Neil Thanet, Trebor Thorpe, Pel Torro, and Olaf Trent. Using several of these pen names, he would often even write the entire contents of a pulp magazine such as "Supernatural Stories". The exact number of books and stories Fanthorpe wrote for Badger Books is not known, but is estimated to be in excess of 180, 89 of which were written in a three-year period – an average of a 158-page book every 12 days. During his time at Badger Books, Fanthorpe was essentially a small cog in a large publishing machine. The way the company worked was to acquire the cover art before the book was written, and send it to the author who then had to write a story about the cover. In some cases, Badger Books re-used cover art that had been produced to illustrate completely different novels. For example, Fanthorpe's 1960 novel Hand of Doom was written to suit a cover that had been produced to illustrate John Brunner's Slavers of Space, which formed one-half of Ace double D-421. Although generally based on situations and plots familiar from pulp fiction, the novels and stories are noteworthy for the unashamedly "nerdy" way they draw on a vast range of academic and pseudo-academic facts to fill out their background, including the mythology of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, India and Greece. The stories also demonstrate the author's wide knowledge of Fortean subjects, such as vimanas, Chase Vault and the Devil's Footprints, the disappearances of Benjamin Bathurst and the crew of the Mary Celeste, as well as the career of Charles Fort himself. Another novel that discusses Charles Fort explicitly is Forbidden Planet. This latter novel has no connection with the famous film of the same title, but instead describes a vast interstellar chess game played by superhuman entities using human beings as pawns. Other novels are pastiches of accepted works of the Western Canon – Beyond the Void is a loose rewrite of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and in Negative Minus the characters Suessydo and Epolenep reenact Homeric tales.
