Christine Campbell Thomson

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Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985) was a British horror fiction author best known for the Not At Night series. She also wrote under the name Flavia Richardson.

Originally intended as a one off collection, the series was such a success that Campbell Thomson edited eleven volumes and an omnibus between 1925 and 1937. In all, there were 170 stories and, according to noted fantasy bibliographer Mike Ashley, exactly 100 of these came from the legendary American pulp Weird Tales. Among the contributors were such greats of horror fiction as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Oscar Cook and Rupert Grayson. The books in the series were all published by Selwyn & Blount.

After "Not At Night", Campbell would later publish her autobiography I Am A Literary Agent (Sampson Low, 1951). She and Not At Night legend Oscar Cook were divorced in 1938, and Christine remarried in 1945, adopting her second husband's surname, Hartley, for her two non-fiction occult titles, The Western Mystery Tradition (1968) and A Case For Reincarnation (1972).

Christine passed away, aged 88, on September 29th 1985. Six weeks later, Charles Birkin, ten years her junior died on November 8th. Between then, they had been responsible for arguably the two most intriguing series' of horror fiction to be published in England between the wars.

[edit] Not At Night titles

• Not At Night (October, 1925
• More Not At Night (Sept. 1926)
• You'll Need A Night Light (Sept. 1927)
• Gruesome Cargoes (July, 1928)
• By Daylight Only (Oct. 1929)
• Switch On The Light (April, 1931)
• At Dead Of Night (Nov, 1931)
• Grim Death (Aug, 1932)
• Keep On The Light (July, 1933)
• Terror By Night (Aug., 1934)
• Nightmare By Daylight (April, 1936)
• Not At Night Omnibus (April 1937)

Arrow books published three paperback compilations from the series from 1960-62 as:

• Not At Night (1960)
• More Not At Night (1961)
• Still Not At Night (1962)