The "Fortean Times" is a magazine that I've been buying every month for a long time. I see it pretty much as an entertainment but I must admit that SF writer Ken MacLeod turned it into a guilty pleasure for me with the incisive comments on his blog back in January.
Most issues contain a "necrolog" or collection of obituaries about individuals who existed on the fringes of the weirdness which the magazine serves up. The latest came as something of a shock when I read about the death of an author by the name of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre.
It was a fairly long obituary and each new paragraph seemed to cram in more and more outrageous details of a very eccentric individual's life.From his tales of being abused as a child in Scotland (or possibly Wales), through his time living with Australian aborigines to his final years in New York where he had abducted and tied up a neighbour the details of his life seem increasingly preposterous. By the time I'd finished reading I was 75% sure that it was a hoax. You can judge for yourself. A more detailed story in the New York Times makes it seem even more incredible.
MacIntyre wasn't the most productive of writers but I'd read and enjoyed several of his short stories over the years. He was a regular contributor to the "Mammoth Book of...." series produced by Robinson publishing. I particularly remember a Sherlock Holmes pastiche involving Ambrose Bierce, Aleister Crowley and the early days of silent film. It appeared in "The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures" and was entitled "The Enigma of the Warwickshire Vortex". It combines many of MacIntyre's enthusiasms to entertaining effect.
Interest in the occult along with his fantasy and science fiction meant that his death was bound to be flagged up by "Fortean Times" but, in researching the details of his death on line, I also discovered that he regularly reviewed films on IMDB and was well known (or infamous) among cinephiles. The discussion on this message board will give you some sense of this. A website dedicated to the silent film comedienne Mabel Normand contains a rather cutting variation on MacIntyre's "necrolog".
Ultimately it's a rather sad end for an enigmatic character but I suspect that he would have taken a perverse pleasure in the mystery he left behind. Is his review of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" a sardonic joke or a very strange suicide note ?
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