Mysterious Days: 3 May

1901
John Collier, whose short stories of the bizarre, fantastic and mysterious are unlike anything else im modern fiction, is born in London.

His best (and largest) collection is Fancies and Goodnights (1951) and is included in Queen's Quorum.

Collier had first achieved popularity when Dashiell Hammett included his "Green Thoughts" [the story that inspired Little Shop of Horrors] in his 1931 anthology of short horror fiction, Creeps by Night.

From Wikipedia:
John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-born author and screenplay writer best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were collected in a 1951 volume, Fancies and Goodnights, which is still in print. Individual stories are frequently anthologized in fantasy collections.

John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon and Paul Theroux. He was married to early silent film actress Shirley Palmer. His second marriage in 1942 was to New York actress Beth Kay (Margaret Elizabeth Eke). They divorced a decade later. He had one child, a son, from his third marriage.

Born in London in 1901, John Collier was privately educated by his uncle Vincent Collier, a novelist. When, at the age of 18 or 19, Collier was asked by his father what he had chosen as a vocation, his reply was, "I want to be a poet." His father indulged him; over the course of the next ten years Collier lived on an allowance of two pounds a week plus whatever he could pick up by writing book reviews and acting as a cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper. During this time, being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes and visits to picture galleries.

Poetry to novels and short storiesFor ten years Collier attempted to reconcile intensely visual experience opened to him by the Sitwells and the modern painters with the more austere preoccupations of those classical authors who were fashionable in the 1920s.[2] He felt that his poetry was unsuccessful, however; he was not able to make his two selves (whom he oddly described as the "archaic, uncouth, and even barbarous" Olsen and the "hysterically self-conscious dandy" Valentine) speak with one voice.[3]

Being an admirer of James Joyce, Collier found a solution in Joyce's Ulysses. "On going for my next lesson to Ulysses, that city of modern prose," he wrote, "I was struck by the great number of magnificent passages in which words are used as they are used in poetry, and in which the emotion which is originally aesthetic, and the emotion which has its origin in intellect, are fused in higher proportions of extreme forms than I had believed was possible."[3] The few poems he wrote during this time were afterwards published in a volume under the title Gemini.[2] While he had written some short stories during the period in which he was trying to find success as a poet, his career did not take shape until the publication of His Monkey Wife in 1930. It enjoyed a certain small popularity and critical approval that helped to sell his short stories.[1] As a private joke, Collier wrote a decidedly cool four-page review of His Monkey Wife, describing it as an attempt "to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel," and concluding with the following appraisal of the talents of its author: "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humor is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude." [4]

His stories may be broadly classified as fantasies but are really sui generis. They feature an acerbic wit and are usually ironic or dark in tone. Like the stories of P. G. Wodehouse, they are perfectly constructed and feature a brilliant literary craftsmanship that can easily escape notice. His stories are memorable; people who cannot recall title or author will nevertheless remember "the story about the people who lived in the department store" ("Evening Primrose") or "the story in which the famous beauties that the man magically summons all say 'Here I am on a tiger-skin again'" ("Bottle Party").

A characteristic point of his style is that the titles of many of his stories reveal (or at least telegraph) what would otherwise be a surprise ending.

Two examples, both from "Over Insurance," may illustrate his style. The story opens:

Alice and Irwin were as simple and as happy as any young couple in a family-style motion picture. In fact, they were even happier, for people were not looking at them all the time and their joys were not restricted by the censorship code. It is therefore impossible to describe the transports with which Alice flew to embrace Irwin on his return from work, or the rapture with which Irwin returned her caresses.... It was at least two hours before they even thought about dinner.... Whatever was best on his plate, he found time to put it on hers, and she was no slower in picking out some dainty tidbit to put between his eager and rather rubbery lips.

They become distressed at the possibility of each others' death, and agree that their only consolation would be to cry. However, they decide that it would be better to cry in luxury. Irwin observes:

I would rather cry on a yacht," said he, "where my tears could be ascribed to the salt spray, and I should not be thought unmanly. Let us insure one another, darling, so that if the worst happens we can cry without interruption. Let us put nine-tenths of our money into insurance....

"And let us," cried she, "insure our dear bird also," pointing to the feathered cageling, whom they always left uncovered at night, in order that his impassioned trills might grace their diviner raptures.

"You are right," said he, "I will put ten bucks on the bird."

[edit] Other mediaIn the succeeding years, Collier traveled between England, France and Hollywood.[1] While he did continue to write short stories, as time went on he would turn his attention more and more towards writing screenplays.

Having moved to Hollywood in 1935, Collier wrote most prolifically for film and television. He contributed notably to the screenplays of The African Queen along with James Agee and John Huston, the Elephant Boy, The War Lord, I Am A Camera , originally Goodbye to Berlin remade later as Cabaret, Sylvia Scarlett, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy.

He received the Edgar Award in 1952 for the short story collection Fancies and Goodnights which also won the International Fantasy Award in 1952. His short story "Evening Primrose" was the subject of a 1966 television musical by Stephen Sondheim, and it was also adapted for the radio series Escape and by BBC Radio. Several of his stories, including "Back for Christmas," "Wet Saturday" and "De Mortuis" were adapted for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Death
John Collier died in 1980 in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California. Near the end of his life, he wrote, "I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer."[