Sources
| Source | ID | Link | Books | Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GoodReads | 500357 | not fetched yet | 3 | 1 (33%) |
| Amazon | no author ID (search by name) | https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ADonald%20M.%20Grant | 1 | 1 (100%) |
Most recent book on record
Date: 1983
About
“Darrel Crombie” was the pseudonym of Joseph Fraser Darby, the son of Joseph Edwin Darby (1882-1965), a British-born Canadian accountant, and his wife, a school-teacher, Marion Louise Fraser (1883-1965), who were married in New Glasgow on 4 September 1914.
Darby, as “Darrel Crombie,” published very little, but small-press publisher Donald M. Grant thought very highly of him. Grant published his only-known short story, “Wings of Y’vren” in the anonymously-edited paperback anthology, Swordsmen and Supermen (1972). A short essay titled “Ghosts Walk . . .” is a memoir of Darby reading Talbot Mundy as a youth. It appeared in Grant’s Talbot Mundy: Messenger of Destiny (1983).
According to Grant, Darby studied writing for more than two years in the mid to late 1930s via a correspondence course with Arthur Sullivant Hoffmann (1876-1966), who had been the editor of Adventure during its glory years 1912-1927. Grant also notes that Darby “began to crack the British market with poetry and fiction. But World War II rolled around, and a hopeful start was erased in a day.” Darby gave up writing creatively for more than twenty-five years (though he worked for years as a journalist). Through the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked on a trilogy to be titled The Priestess of the Silver Star, but he never finished it. In the mid-1970s, after Grant was shown an unpublished El Borak story by Robert E. Howard titled “Three-Bladed Doom,” he passed it on to Crombie for re-writing. Crombie reworked this into a 102 page typescript under the title of “Lair of the Hidden Ones,” but again he never finished it.
Darby’s pen-name took the “Dar” from his last name, expanding it to Darrel, and Crombie came from his summer home in Abercrombie, just outside of New Glasgow in Nova Scotia.
Darby, as “Darrel Crombie,” published very little, but small-press publisher Donald M. Grant thought very highly of him. Grant published his only-known short story, “Wings of Y’vren” in the anonymously-edited paperback anthology, Swordsmen and Supermen (1972). A short essay titled “Ghosts Walk . . .” is a memoir of Darby reading Talbot Mundy as a youth. It appeared in Grant’s Talbot Mundy: Messenger of Destiny (1983).
According to Grant, Darby studied writing for more than two years in the mid to late 1930s via a correspondence course with Arthur Sullivant Hoffmann (1876-1966), who had been the editor of Adventure during its glory years 1912-1927. Grant also notes that Darby “began to crack the British market with poetry and fiction. But World War II rolled around, and a hopeful start was erased in a day.” Darby gave up writing creatively for more than twenty-five years (though he worked for years as a journalist). Through the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked on a trilogy to be titled The Priestess of the Silver Star, but he never finished it. In the mid-1970s, after Grant was shown an unpublished El Borak story by Robert E. Howard titled “Three-Bladed Doom,” he passed it on to Crombie for re-writing. Crombie reworked this into a 102 page typescript under the title of “Lair of the Hidden Ones,” but again he never finished it.
Darby’s pen-name took the “Dar” from his last name, expanding it to Darrel, and Crombie came from his summer home in Abercrombie, just outside of New Glasgow in Nova Scotia.