Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915), British author known for gothic horror and pulp fiction, writing under the name Richard Marsh.
>His real name was Heldmann, and under it, in the early 1880s, he published a handful of school stories as well as a rousing, Hentyesque yarn of the sea, The Mutiny on Board the Ship Leander (1882). This was actually dedicated to G. A. Henty. A year later he had become joint-editor, with Henty, of The Union Jack, the weekly adventure-story paper for boys. His career... lasted just six months, when a curt announcement appeared in the paper's columns: 'Mr Heldmann has ceased to be connected in any way with The Union Jack.' >Heldmann then disappeared for nearly a decade - it seems impossible now to discover to where - bobbing up again as 'Richard Marsh', the name by which he was known until the day he died (his death certificate is under Heldmann). He wrote over fifty full-length novels (most of them thrillers), and published twenty volumes of short stories, two of which featured his vampish adventuress heroine Judith Lee. His most celebrated work, the extraordinary theriomorphic classic The Beetle (1897) was written in a matter of weeks …
