Haining, Peter 1940-2007 (Peter Alexander Haining)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 2, 1940, in Enfield, Middlesex, England; died of a heart attack, November 19, 2007. Journalist, anthologist, editor, and author. Haining wrote dozens of books in his lifetime, mostly nonfiction, but his name is probably associated most often with the dozens of thematic anthologies of short stories that he collected. Haining worked for a few years as a journalist, and the news stories that he uncovered led to his earliest books, from Devil Worship in Britain (1964) to Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1993). He spent nearly ten years on the editorial staff of the book publisher New English Library before turning to the freelance life, where he thrived. Haining's output over the next thirty-five years was prolific (more than 300 titles altogether) and wide-ranging. He wrote about historical events, popular culture, film stars, pulp magazines, vampires, serial killers, television series, ancient myths and legends, and the miscellaneous and strange-but-true oddities that captured his fancy, but he returned again and again, as he did in his anthologies, to the occult, the supernatural, and the macabre. Whether his story collections were classified as horror, science fiction, mystery, or general fiction, Haining attempted, as he once told CA, to present anthologies that were organized like novels: "with a beginning, middle, and end" and a cohesive development of the theme itself. He never seemed to run out of topics. One of his earliest collections was The Gentlewomen of Evil: An Anthology of Rare Supernatural Stories from the Pens of Victorian Ladies (1967); one of the more recent was The Wizard's Den: Spellbinding Stories of Magic and Magicians (2001). Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of fiction writers living and dead are represented in his popular collections. Haining's own writings toward the end of his life seem to reflect an interest in World War II, including The Banzai Hunters: The Small Boat Operations That Defeated the Japanese, 1944-45 (2006).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, 5th edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), January 5, 2008, p. 72.