Jim Harmon

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A 1962 photo by Don Glut of (l. to r.) film editor Bob Burns, author Jim Harmon and musician Ron Haydock following a screening of Glut's films at CBS in Hollywood. All three were editors on the magazine Fantastic Monsters of the Films.

James Judson Harmon, aka Jim Harmon (born 1933), is an American short story author and popular culture historian who has written extensively about the Golden Age of Radio. He sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Judson Grey, and occasionally he was labeled Mr. Nostalgia.

1 Fiction
2 Radio
3 Radio into fiction
4 External links

[edit] Fiction

During the 1950s and 1960s, Harmon wrote for if, Venture Science Fiction Magazine, Galaxy Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and other magazines. The best of his science fiction stories were recently reprinted in Harmon's Galaxy (Cosmos Books, 2004) with an introduction by Richard A. Lupoff. The collection includes one from the December 1962 issue of F&SF ("The Depths") and five from Galaxy -- "Charity Case" (December 1959), "Name Your Symptom" (May 1956), "No Substitutions" (November 1958), "The Place Where Chicago Was" (February 1962) and "The Spicy Sound of Success" (August 1959).

[edit] Radio

When Harmon began writing about the classic radio shows, almost no books on the subject had been published, so he had the field to himself. He got underway with The Great Radio Heroes (1967), reprinted by McFarland & Company in 2002. Library Journal reviewed:

Radio producer Harmon here expands his 1967 original to include numerous photos of actors who starred in the radio shows of yesteryear and to update their profiles (what they are doing now, who died, etc.). Chapters cover the stars of cop shows, Westerns, comedies, adventures, and dramas. A good one-stop resource for information on the days when radio was the leading form of home entertainment.

Harmon's other books include The Great Radio Comedians (Doubleday, 1970), Jim Harmon's Nostalgia Catalogue (J.P. Tarcher, 1973), The Great Movie Serials (Routledge, 1973), The Godzilla Book (Borgo, 1986), Radio & TV Premiums: A Guide to the History and Value of Radio and TV Premiums (Krause, 1997), Radio Mystery and Adventure and Its Appearances in Film, Television and Other Media (McFarland, 2003).

[edit] Radio into fiction

He edited volumes two and three of It's That Time Again (Bearmanor Media, 2004 and 2006), an anthology series of new fiction featuring the characters of old-time radio. His story in the first volume is "Tom Mix and the Mystery of the Bodiless Horseman." For the second book in the series, he contributed "Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Duplicate Daughter" and "The Avenger and the Maker of Werewolves." The third volume in the series introduced character crossovers, and Harmon combined Nick Carter, Jack Armstrong and Tom Mix into a single novelette, Jack Armstrong and the Horde of Montezuma.

One of the earliest dealers to issue a catalog of tapes of old time radio shows, Harmon also wrote, produced and appeared in a radio revival of the Tom Mix radio series during the early 1980s. He was the Guest of Honor at the Multicon 70 science-fiction convention, held in Oklahoma City in June 1970, and a 1977 recipient of the Inkpot Award, given annually at the San Diego Comic-Con.