Entering the Public Domain on 1st January 2016, by hitting the ’70 years after death’ limit on copyright in the UK and Europe:<\/p>\n
It’s a fairly good year for English fantasy…<\/p>\n
* Charles Williams<\/a>, a prolific writer now best known as part of the circle around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien. Wrote a string of mystical English adult novels in which the numinous or uncanny enters the ordinary English world. Non-fiction books include learned studies of The English Poetic Mind<\/em> and Witchcraft<\/em>.<\/p>\n * Maurice Baring<\/a>, a wide-ranging British author. He also produced occasional stories of delicate fantasy, macabre travel-adventure, some supernatural fiction, and at least one book of children’s fairy-stories. Should anyone be considering running off a modern volume of his more fantastical stories, note that he also wrote an introduction to a 1949 one-volume Bodley Press edition of Saki which discussed Saki’s “vein of macabre, supernatural fantasy”.<\/p>\n * David Lindsay<\/a>, the Scottish science-fiction and fantastical novelist, now best known for the early sci-fi novel A Voyage to Arcturus<\/em> (1920).<\/p>\n * E. R. Eddison<\/a>, known for the influential 1932 pre-Tolkien fantasy novel The Worm Ouroboros<\/em>, along with his adaptations of the Norse sagas.<\/p>\n American pulp culture is represented by:<\/p>\n * Achmed Abdullah<\/a>, a popular pulp-era mystery\/adventure writer. Now best known among movie history buffs, for his novelisation of the major movie The Thief of Bagdad<\/em> (1924) and his Academy Award nomination for The Lives of a Bengal Lancer<\/em> (1935).<\/p>\n * Malcolm Jameson<\/a>, Golden Age pulp sci-fi writer for adolescents. Little read today but quite possibly the inventor of the ‘time loop’ sci-fi genre plot, now so popular in contemporary movies. His John Bullard of the Space Patrol<\/em> series was immensely popular during the Second World War, and Bullard was said to have been the first sci-fi genre character to successfully gain mass recognition in America.<\/p>\n London low-life is well covered, and by those who grew up amid it all:<\/p>\n * Thomas Burke<\/a>, recorder of low life in the East End and the Limehouse in London. First in Nights in Town: A London Autobiography<\/em> (1915), then in melodramatic stories a year later in his Limehouse Nights<\/em> (1916) and later books.<\/p>\n * Arthur Morrison, another author writing “unflinching” realist novels of slum life in the East End of London, including Tales of the Mean Streets<\/em> and A Child of the Jago<\/em>. He was later an author of detective stories, featuring the mild-mannered Sherlock-alike character Martin Hewitt in Martin Hewitt, investigator<\/a><\/em> (followed by more Hewitt book collections, Chronicles of<\/em>, Adventures of<\/em>, and The Red Triangle<\/em>). Morrison apparently rose from a childhood in the London slums to become an incredibly wealthy collector of Japanese art. <\/p>\n I also spotted a few artists with a 1945 death date…<\/p>\n * The great American illustrator N. C. Wyeth<\/a>, creator of some especially vibrant pirate, Arthurian, and wild-western genre illustrations, among many other types of illustration.<\/p>\n
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