FT268
Over the last 15 years, the writer who adopted this name often wrote to Fortean Times, on such subjects as koala handprints, buried telephones, magic squares, the OTO in Weston-super-Mare and lookalike competitions. He claimed to be living in Glasgow. Much of what follows is based on his online memoirs, and may be fanciful.
He was born in Perthshire, maybe as a twin, but soon moved with his working class family to Glasgow. Rejected by his alcoholic parents, he was placed in an orphanage in Cardonald. “Effectively, my parents aborted me after I was already born,” he wrote, “although they decided to keep my nine siblings.” In the mid-1950s, he was shipped out to Australia as part of the infamous UK child migrant scheme, and incarcerated in “slave-labour camps that masqueraded as orphanages”. He did bird in at least six of these hell-holes, and was made to impersonate dead children of either sex as a ploy by unscrupulous owners to collect aid money for the children from local authorities. He told his friend, Professor Ian Charles Scott, that he was haunted by the souls of these dead children for the rest of his days.
Finally escaping, he worked as a jackaroo at livestock stations in rural Australia, baling wool, castrating sheep, and mustering brumbies (wild horses). He also worked alongside Aboriginals, and came to understand their concepts of time and distance, so utterly unlike those of Western culture, “and far beyond the absurdities of that over-rated sexist buffoon, Aristotle.”
He was especially proud of two of his published stories: “Death in the Dawntime”, a murder mystery set among the Wiradjuri people of ancient southeastern Australia in 40,000 BC (published in The Mammoth Book of Historical Detectives, 1995) and “Martian Walkabout”, a science fiction story about a young Arunta male’s initiation into manhood, and his journey into adulthood, ultimately becoming a member of the first Earth expedition to Mars. The latter was published in the December 1981 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
“At an early age,” he wrote, “I discovered my secret to wealth and success: what some despise, others prize! During the slaughter season in the Queensland cattle stations, I saw stockmen slaughtering cattle but discarding their gallstones, or using them for fertiliser. I collected the gallstones, took a few days’ sickie and went to Kowloon, where I sold the gallstones to Chinese apothecaries who considered them valuable ‘cow pearls’. I made more money in that one transaction than any of the drovers made in a full season of hard yacker.”
Moving to England in the early 1960s, he toured round large country houses offering to clear attics for a small fee, thus accumulating “huge amounts of rubbish” and “respectable amounts of antiques”, which he turned over for a tidy profit. He also wrote paperback novels (science fiction and horror) under various pseudonyms for Badger Books. In the late 1960s and for much of the 1970s, he worked for Lew Grade, which included being a tech crewman on television programmes, notably The Champions and The Prisoner, occasionally appearing onscreen in crowd sequences. He befriended George Markstein, the former newspaperman who created The Prisoner and who actually knew what it all meant – why Patrick McGoohan was Number Six, for instance.
In the 1970s, he adopted “Fergus Gwynplaine MacIntyre” as his legal name; Gwynplaine is the name of the smiling but unhappy protagonist in Victor Hugo’s novel The Man Who Laughs. The records revealing his birth name are officially sealed. His friends called him “Froggy MacIntyre”. For the taxman he was “Timothy C. Allen”, his passport was in the name of “Paul Grant Jeffery” and he subscribed to magazines as “Oleg V. Bredikhine”. He claimed to have been married three times and to have two adopted children.
For the rest of his life he worked as a freelance author and journalist – fantasy, horror, SF, mysteries and erotica – with night jobs in Manhattan as a telemarketer and printer. His short stories were published in Weird Tales, Analog, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Absolute Magnitude, Interzone, the Strand Magazine, the Russian-language science fiction magazine Esli, and numerous anthologies. “A Real Bang-Up Job” (Analog, July 2000) explained the Tunguska explosion as a multiple crash of time-travellers [FT261:85]. His longer works included at least one novel in the Tom Swift IV series, The DNA Disaster (1991), published under the name Victor Appleton; a science-fiction novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994), an early example of the genre now called steampunk, under the name MacIntyre; and his anthology of verse and humour pieces MacIntyre’s Improbable Bestiary (2001). He had a penchant for resurrecting obscure words and coining new ones: language authority William Safire has acknowledged his neologisms (The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time, 2004, pp48, 379). He also worked extensively as a ghost-writer, most notably contributing to Jerzy Kosinski’s Pinball (1982), giving a character in the book his own unusual middle name. “Immortality is for suckers,” he wrote. “If even a few of my words outlive me by even one hour, then I have cheated death.”
Professor Scott describes Fergus’s appearance when they first met, at the American Folk Art Museum in Manhattan: a white long-sleeved “Oor Wullie” T-shirt stretched to bursting point over a Falstaffian torso, black leather gloves, a makeshift kilt and hob-nailed boots. “Even this could not prepare you for the head: a middle-aged Piggy from Lord of the Flies surrounded by an aurora of blazing long red hair and beard. He had a bizarre accent – Fife Robertson meets Alan Wicker with an ever-so-slight salting of mid-Atlantic. I introduced myself and we immediately hit it off.”
According to his New York literary agent Darrell Schweitzer, MacIntyre said he wore gloves to hide his hands. “He claimed he had a hideous skin condition, but there was also the webbed-fingers story,” said Schweitzer, adding that he had told some people that webbed fingers were the origin of his nickname “Froggy”, and others that it derived from an obscene phrase his father had called him. “Other times, he’d claim he had prosthetics, and then there was the story about having had his fingernails pulled out by Idi Amin’s soldiers while working as a reporter in Africa.”
Since the mid-Eighties, MacIntyre lived in Apartment C9 of a building on the corner of 20th Avenue and 70th Street in Bensonhurst, a working class area of Brooklyn, New York. No one ever visited him there. He sometimes hurled obscenities in the middle of the night. “He would scream and curse out his mother, things like, ‘You ruined my life!’” said Sadie Huang, 25, who lived directly above. Across the hall lived Helen Lapointe, whom he paid to remove his rubbish bags. On 10 September 2000, he grabbed her, duct-taped her to a chair and began torturing her and threatening her life. “He stripped me and buzz-shaved my head and then spray-painted me black – my whole body,” she said. Breaking free, she ran to a friend’s house. MacIntyre was arrested and wound up pleading guilty to third-degree misdemeanour assault. Ms Lapointe,
now 55, moved out immediately.
In recent months, MacIntyre was desperate for work, having apparently lost his printing job last year. In early June, he told his neighbours he no longer wanted to live. On 24 June, he was taken to Coney Island Hospital after police learned he had emailed a goodbye letter to friends. However, he was released from hospital, and the next morning he set two fires inside his cluttered one-bedroom apartment. His 6ft 3in body was found burned beyond recognition amid tons of charred newspapers, books, manuscripts and all sorts of rubbish. The blaze took 12 trucks and 60 firefighters more than an hour to extinguish. Many of his neighbours learned he was a writer only when charred, double-spaced pages of a manuscript fluttered down from his burned-out windows. In several places on the Internet he seemed to be saying goodbye, for instance on IMDB, where a review of the new version of Metropolis posted on 24 June stated: “Nitrate film stock doesn’t last forever, and all good things come to a happy ending. This is my last review here.”
His body remained unclaimed for months, but on 8 September a spokeswoman for the Brooklyn morgue said that “a relative was recently located, and DNA testing is being conducted to positively identify the body.” She would not name the relative, citing privacy policies.
Fergus Gwynplaine MacIntyre, writer, born Perthshire, Scotland, c. 1948; died Brooklyn, New York 25 June 2010, aged c. 61.
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