Pollard, Capt A O
Entry updated 21 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1893-1960) UK soldier and author, not simultaneously. In active combat throughout World War One, he was repeatedly honoured, and in 1917 was awarded the Victoria Cross; active from 1930. His war memoir, Fire-Eater: The Memoirs of a VC (1932), has been likened, because of its almost surreal buoyancy in the face of apocalypse, to the work of Ernst Jünger, though it lacks any philosophical ambition. In his later career as a prolific writer of thrillers and crime novels, he published at least forty-five books, including some sf, thrillers tending to introduce Inventions used for evil: The Cipher Five (1932), The Murder Germ (1937), in which a Mad Scientist figure infects others so that they commit atrocities identical to those he himself perpetrates (see Horror in SF), Air Reprisal (1938), The Secret Formula (1939) and The Secret Weapon (1941). The Fifth Freedom (1944), set in the invented state of Estavania as World War Two reaches its climax, is modestly Ruritanian. [JC]
Captain Alfred Oliver Pollard
born Wallington, Surrey: 4 May 1893
died Bournemouth, Hampshire: 5 December 1960
works (selected)
- The Cipher Five (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1932) [hb/]
- The Murder Germ (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1937) [hb/Catling]
- Air Reprisal (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1938) [hb/]
- The Secret Formula (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1939) [hb/]
- The Secret Weapon (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1941) [hb/]
- The Fifth Freedom (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1944) [hb/]
links
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