74-year-old American film historian John Cocchi (John Robert Cocchi, Jr.), author of the ground-breaking reference work Second Feature: The Best of the ‘B’ Films (1991) from Citadel Press, was determined to have died circa June 16 after having gone missing on April 25. His body was found in a shipping channel off Sandy Hook, Staten Island. Cocchi also wrote The Westerns: A Picture Quiz Book, contributed to such magazines as Castle of Frankenstein, Box Office and Classic Images, and worked (uncredited) on publicity for Al Adamson’s 1969 movie Five Bloody Graves.
Ditmar Award-winning Australian SF author Philippa [Catherine “Pip”] Maddern died of cancer the same day. She was also an expert on, and teacher of, medieval history.
American graphic designer Anthony Goldschmidt died of liver cancer on June 17, aged 71. Through his firm Intralink Film Graphic Design he created many iconic movie posters, including Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-terrestial, and worked on the title designs for such movies as Young Frankenstein, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Witches of Eastwick, Spaceballs, The Lost Boys, Scrooged, Stargate, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin.
British publisher Felix Dennis, whose roster of magazines included Fortean Times, died on June 22, aged 67.
American YA, children’s and LGBT author Nancy Garden (Antoinette Elisabeth Garden) died on June 24, aged 76. Her controversial 1982 novel, Annie on My Mind, was banned in the Kansas City school system because of its teen lesbian characters. Her many other books include Vampires, Werewolves, Witches, Devils and Demons, Fours Crossing, Mystery of the Night Raiders, The Ghost Inside Me, Prisoner of the Vampires, My Sister the Vampire and My Brother the Werewolf.
American musical composer and children’s author Mary Rodgers, the daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, died on June 26, aged 83. She is best known for her body-swap fantasies Freaky Friday (which has been filmed by Disney three times), A Billion for Boris and Summer Switch. Rodgers also collaborated with lyricist Sammy Cahn on the children’s album Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves for Little Golden Records, which featured performances by Bing Crosby. Her other projects include Once Upon a Mattress (1959), based on the story ‘The Princess and the Pea’ by Hans Christian Anderson; The Mad Show, a 1966 Off Broadway musical review based on MAD Magazine; the screenplay for Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin (1981), and a 1991 musical adaption of her own novel Freaky Friday.
Jan Shepherd (Janet E. Evenden), who was the first art editor of British comic 2000 AD in 1977 (she created the iconic ‘Judge Dredd’ title logo), died on June 27, aged around 79. She also worked as a designer on such comics as Valiant, Starlord, Tornado, Eagle and Scream!.
American author Jory [Tecumseh] Sherman (aka “Cort Martin”), best known for his series of “Gunn” adult Westerns, died on June 28, aged 81. He published more than 300 books, including seven psychic investigator “Chill” Chillders titles between 1978-80, beginning with Satan’s Seed.
Author, editor and pulp magazine collector Frank M. (Malcolm) Robinson died on June 30, aged 87. He had suffered from health problems, including heart trouble, in recent years. In the early 1940s Robinson had worked as an office boy at Amazing Stories before World War II intervened. His first SF sale was to Astounding Stories in 1950, and his first novel, The Power (1956), was filmed by George Pal in 1967. With Thomas N. Scortia he co-wrote the techno-thrillers The Glass Inferno (filmed as The Towering Inferno), The Prometheus Crisis, The Nightmare Factor, The Gold Crew and Blowout!, while his own books include The Dark Beyond the Stars, Waiting and The Donor, along with the collections A Life in the Day of…and Other Short Stories, Through My Glasses Darkly and The Worlds of Joe Shannon. Robinson was an expert on pulp magazines, and he shared his knowledge in Pulp Culture: The Art of Fiction Magazines (with Lawrence Davidson), the Hugo Award-winning Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History, Art of Imagination (with Robert Weinberg and Randy Broecker) and The Incredible Pulps: A Gallery of Fiction Magazine Art. He was also managing editor at Rogue (1959-65) and Cavalier (1965-66), a staff writer for Playboy (1969-73), and during the 1970s he was a speech-writer for openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk (Robinson basically played himself in a cameo in the 2008 movie).
British fan writer and editor Di Reynolds (aka Di Wathen) also died in June. She had been suffering from bowel cancer for a couple of years. With her former husband, Mike Wathen, she was involved in running the British Fantasy Society and various Fantasycons during the 1980s and early ‘90s, and they were in charge of registration and hotel bookings for the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London.
American YA and children’s author Walter Dean Myers (Walter Milton Myers), died on July 1, aged 76. He wrote more than 100 books, including the fantasies Shadow of the Red Moon and Dope Stick, along with the ghost story ‘Things That Go Gleep in the Night’.
American space expert Frederick I. (Ira) Ordway, III died the same day, aged 87. Inspired by the SF pulp magazines as a child, in his early twenties he met and befriended Arthur C. Clarke. Fifteen years later Ordway was a top official at NASA, working closely with the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, when on Clarke’s reccomendation he became the chief technical consultant and scientific advisor on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Ordway wrote more than two dozen books, including History of Rocketry and Space Travel (1975) with von Braun and 2001: The Heritage and Legacy of the Space Odyssey (2014) with Robert Godwin.
41-year-old Hachette Australia CEO and Hachette New Zealand chairman Matthew Richell was was killed in a surfing accident in New South Wales on July 2, when he was swept onto rocks and suffered a fatal head injury. Richell worked in the UK for such imprints as Bloomsbury, Pan Macmillan and John Murray before taking over as marketing director of Headline and Hodder in Australia in 2006. He was promoted to CEO in 2013.
American horror, hard-boiled crime and comics writer C. (Christopher) J. (John) Henderson (Christopher Henderson) died of cancer on July 4, aged 62. Best known for his “Teddy London” supernatural detective series (written as “Robert Morgan”), under his own name he also wrote the “Jack Hagee” and “Piers Knight” series, along with Misery and Pity, Baby’s First Mythos, To Battle Beyond, The Reign of the Dragon Lord, A Rattling of Bones, The Spider: Shadow of Evil and a Quantum Leap tie-in. His short fiction is collected in numerous volumes, including The Occult Detectives of C.J. Henderson, The Tales of Inspector Legrasse (with H.P. Lovecraft) and Degrees of Fear and Others. Henderson co-edited the anthology Hear Them Roar (with Patrick Thomas), wrote the graphic novel William Shatner Presents Man O’ War, contributed to such comics series as Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight and Neil Gaiman’s Lady Justice, and combined investigative journalist Carl Kolchak with various Lovecraftian horrors in a series of illustrated novellas for Moonstone Books. His non-fiction includes The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies: From 1987 to the Present and Breaking Into Fiction Writing! (with Bruce Gehweiler).