Jean Ray

Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (8 July 1887 – 17 September 1964 was a prolific Belgian (Flemish) writer best known under the pen name Jean Ray.

Among English speakers, his most prominent work is the macabre novel Malpertuis (1943) under the Ray name, which was filmed by Harry Kümel in 1971 (starring Orson Welles). He also wrote journalism, stories for young readers in Dutch by the name John Flanders, and scenarios for comic strips and detective stories. He also used the pseudonyms John Flanders, King Ray, Captain Bill, Alix R. Bantam and Sailor John, among others.

Biography

Ray was born in Ghent, his father being a minor port official, his mother the director of a girls' school. Ray was a fairly successful student but failed to complete his university studies, and from 1910 to 1919 he worked in clerical jobs in the city administration.

By the early 1920s he had joined the editorial team of the Journal de Gand. Later he also joined the monthly L'Ami du Livre. His first book, Whiskey Tales, a collection of fantastic and uncanny stories, was published in 1925.

In 1926 he was charged with embezzlement and sentenced to six years in prison, but served only two years. During his imprisonment he wrote two of his best-known long stories, The Shadowy Street and The Mainz Psalter. From the time of his release in 1929 until the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote virtually non-stop.

Between 1933 and 1940, Ray produced over a hundred tales in a series of detective stories, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes, an investigator dedicated to the paranormal and the occult. He had been hired to translate a series from the German, but Ray found the stories so bad that he suggested to his Amsterdam publisher that he should re-write them instead. The publisher agreed, provided only that each story be about the same length as the original, and match the book's cover illustration. The Harry Dickson stories are admired by the film director Alain Resnais among others. During the winter of 1959–1960 Resnais met with Ray in the hope of making a film based on the Harry Dickson character.Despite the fact that Resnais carried out a series of location scouting trips in London and various other places in the United Kingdom, nothing came of the project.

During the Second World War Ray's prodigious output slowed, but he was able to publish his best known works in French, under the name Jean Ray: Le Grand Nocturne (1942), La Cité de l'Indicible Peur, also known as "La Grande Frousse", was adapted into a film by Jean-Pierre Mocky, starring Bourvil, Malpertuis, Les Cercles de L'Epouvante (all 1943), Les Derniers Contes de Canterbury (1944) and Le Livre des Fantômes (1947).

After the war he wrote comic-strip scenarios by the name of John Flanders. Among the comics he wrote scripts for are Buth's Thomas Pips and text stories by Antoon Herckenrath, Gray Croucher, Rik Clément. He was rescued from obscurity by Raymond Queneau and Roland Stragliati, whose influence got Malpertuis reprinted in French in 1956.

A few weeks before his death, he wrote his own mock epitaph in a letter to his friend Albert van Hageland: Ci gît Jean Ray/homme sinistre/qui ne fut rien/pas même ministre ("Here lies Jean Ray/A man sinister/who was nothing/not even a minister").

Jean Ray recounted some of his personal experiences with the supernatural in a short story from The Book of Ghosts called "My Ghost".