Gibbons, Cromwell
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1893-1977) US author – probably the working name of Francis Cromwell Gibbons, a chemical engineer whose two-book thriller sequence featuring the Pulp magazine-style para-legal scientific detective Rex Huxford comprises Murder in Hollywood (1936) – set amid the California film industry, with some mildly speculative radio Communications – and The Bat Woman (1938). Both tales are eventful, especially the second, in which Gibbons depicts a Neanderthal-like German Mad Scientist, numerous captive vampire bats, inset accounts of supposed cases of vampirism, and the eponymous Vampire. When not playing Wagner on his organ, the mad scientist devotes the resources of his secret laboratory in Greenwich Village (see New York) to the successful revivification of the corpse of a beautiful young woman, upon whom he experiments; until the revival she is separately stored as a body and a Brain in a Box. Scientific Errors abound: there are, for example, repeated references to "duckless glands". [JC/DRL]
Francis Cromwell Gibbons
born Jacksonville, Florida: 30 November 1893
died Charles City, Iowa: February 1977
works
series
Rex Huxford
- Murder in Hollywood (New York: David Kemp and Co, 1936) [Rex Huxford: hb/]
- The Bat Woman (New York: World Press, 1938) [Rex Huxford: hb/uncredited]
further reading
- Bill Pronzini. Son of Gun in Cheek (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1987) [nonfiction: hb/Pamela Noftsinger]
links
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