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This is based mostly on my memories of a talk I heard Fanthorpe give once. But it was long ago and in another country, and besides, the wench was not sober. So I won’t vouch for chapter and verse. However the gist is correct, and the anecdotes are true in general, if not exact in detail.
Once upon a time, John Spencer and Co. in London began to publish some of the tattiest SF magazines ever seen in the known universe. The young R. L. Fanthorpe picked one up in a moment of boredom, and read it. His first thought was, “I can write better than this!” His second thought was, “Hey! I can write worse than this.” And thus were the seeds of a brief career sown. From 1959 until 1966, virtually everything that Spencer published was written by Fanthorpe (under countless different names). At first he contented himself with simply writing the entire magazine, but later, when Spencer branched out into books (Badger Books—you may have seen them around) he wrote those as well. Millions of them.
The scenario worked like this. Spencer would ring Fanthorpe up on Friday and demand a fifty thousand word novel by Monday. Fanthorpe would take out his trusty tape recorder and yammer into it any nonsense that sprang to mind, and his family and friends and (later) various secretaries would take the tapes and transcribe them. On Monday morning the typescript would be delivered to Spencer, Fanthorpe would collect a cheque for £25, and then go to sleep for a while to recover. He kept this up for seven years…
Since he worked on the hot tape recorder principle, it was not unknown for the tapes to get lost, or mixed up. Indeed, once a secretary found herself transcribing a tape that seemed to have no connection whatsoever with the book she thought she was writing. But she carried on anyway, the typescript was never checked, and the book got published. No-one ever complained about it—which shows you the standard applied to the Badger operation.
The word limit on the novels was fifty thousand. Since Fanthorpe never counted the words he yelled so prolifically down the microphone, he often found himself near the end of his word limit with the plot (such as it was) only half resolved. Thus the endings of his books tended to be somewhat rushed as he tried to tie up the dangling threads. His favourite example of this concerned a book whose title even he has now forgotten (he claims to remember virtually nothing about those years of garbage). The book had reached its last page, and the crew of the spaceship were trapped. Outside the ship, hordes of ravening aliens were preparing to close in and do nasty things. The situation looked grim. Not only had Fanthorpe got to rescue his heroes, he had to do it in about two paragraphs. The ending of the book went something like this:
Grim faced, the captain went to the safe and opened it.
“We have no choice now,” he said as he removed the dreadful weapon and primed it.
“No, captain,” protested the crew. “Not that…”
“It’s the only way.”
Without further ado, the captain fired the terrible weapon at the alien hordes. Instantly they were all killed.
“We can go home safely now,” said the captain as he put the weapon away. “It’s all over.”
Needless to say, that was the first mention of the weapon in the whole book. And the last. That is probably the most blatant use of the deus ex machina in the whole SF canon. That he got away with it can only be attributed to the fact that Badger books were so uniformly awful that nobody ever read them anyway.
Badger Books went out of existence in 1966, and Fanthorpe fell silent. He claims that during those years he was the world’s most productive writer in the genre. A partial listing of his works in the Nicholls SF Encyclopedia takes up almost two columns of closely packed print, so perhaps the claim is not exaggerated.
I began this article with “once upon a time…” and I would like to end it with “they all lived happily ever after”. But unfortunately the ending is a sad one. When I heard Fanthorpe speak at a convention in England a few years ago, he told us that his hack past was behind him, that he had spent several years now writing a serious fantasy novel which was soon to be published. He asked us to forget his old reputation and to judge the book on its merits, which he thought were many. In due time, the book was published, but I think that few people heeded his plea. The last time I saw mention of the book was in the catalogue of an SF book dealer. He was offering to give away mint condition hardback copies of Fanthorpe’s novel in exchange for various items on his want list. It would seem that even the specialist dealers couldn’t sell it. Sometimes a reputation can be an impossible thing to transcend.
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