Richard A. Lupoff

Richard A. Lupoff says: I must have been programmed for fantasy. My earliest memories are all in the mode — Bedtime stories based on Sidney Kingsley’s “Water Babies” books…my Aunt Marion re-creating entire “Witch’s Tale” programs for my entertainment…Sunday Funnies, “Flash Gordon” and “Aladdin, Jr.”…children’s books, “The Teenie Weenies” and “Maximo the Amazing Superman”…comic books, of course, Captain Marvel, Green Lantern, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner…radio dramas, “Inner Sanctum,” “The Shadow,” and “I Love a Mystery”…movies, “Snow White,” “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.”

What a world of the imagination that was!

I grew up during the last heyday of the pulps and the brief, glorious boom of the digests, and lived to crack many of those markets (or their latter-day revivals) myself — F&SF, Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Other Worlds, Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Argosy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I never got rich but I had one hell of a lot of fun.

I’ve had the pleasure of winning a Hugo, snagging several Nebula nominations, and even an Oscar nomination for a film based on one of my stories. The Dallas Morning News gave my coffee-table book, The Great American Paperback, its “Now Let Us Praise Lurid Trash Award,” which resides proudly in my living room between the Hugo rocket ship and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Left Coast Crime convention.

I’ve seen my stories selected for Best of the Year anthologies in the science fiction, mystery, and horror fields. I don’t know how many authors have accomplished that hat trick, but I don’t think there can be very many of us.

These days I’m running a small publishing company, Surinam Turtle Press — and still writing books. Recent ones include Marblehead: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft, “lost” when first written in 1976 and published to glowing reviews thirty years later… Quintet: The Cases of Chase and Delacroix…Terrors…Visions… and coming in 2010, The Emerald Cat Killer…Dreams…Killer’s Dozen.