John Lymington was born on April 21, 1911 in London, England. His birth name was John Richard Newton Chance. His father was Dick Chance, who served as the managing editor of Amalgamated Press. Raised in London, he attended a private school and then went on to technical college with the intention of becoming a civil engineer or quantity surveyor (insert Ethel the Aardvark).  Instead, by 1932, he decided to work full time as a writer.

He learned to fly in 1928 and during World War II served as a flight instructor for the Royal Air Force, based out of the Cotswolds. He served there, overseeing training at three different airfields until 1943, when he was given indefinite leave and eventually invalided out of the service as a flight lieutenant. Around the time he was put on leave, he met Shirley Savill, who was serving as a WAAF section officer and the two married on July 22, 1943.  Following the war, they settled in Hampshire, where they had three sons. By 1956, they had moved to the Isle of Wight, where Lymington managed a pub.

He sold his first story to BBC Radio before turning to novels and short fiction. His first novel, Wheels in the Forest, was a crime novel published in 1935 under his birth name, which he continued to use for his crime novels throughout his life. He wrote several of the Sexton Blake Library using the pseudonym John Drummond, although he used the pseudonym Desmond Reid for the Sexton Blake novel Anger at the World’s End, a science fiction novel.

He began writing juvenile science fiction in 1947 with The Black Ghost, under the pseudonym David C. Newton. It was the first in the Bunst series, comprised of six novels published before 1953. The last four of them appeared under the name John Newton Chance. The series focused on the inventor Audacious Cotterell and his sidekick, Bunstuffer.

His first adult science fiction novel, for which he adopted the Lymington name, was The Night of the Big Heat, published in 1959. Over the next 25 years, he published 26 science fiction novels under that name, including The Coming of the Strangers, FROOMB!, and The Vale of Sad Banana.

Several of his short stories, including the titular story, were collected in The Night Spiders in 1964. The Night Spiders was also the title of a novel Lymington published in 1967. John Clute and Peter Nicoll comment in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia that “Lymington’s main deficiency as a writer of SF was a lack of interest in the forward thrust of the genre; he was, at heart, a horror writer.”

His novel Burnt and the Flying Eye was adapted into the film The Flying Eye in 1955. His novel 1959 science fiction The Night of the Big Heat was adapted twice, in 1960, it was shown as part of the ITV Play of the Week. Seven years later, it was adapted for a film directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. His crime novel, The Last Seven Hours, was adapted into the film Crosstrap in 1962.

Lymington died in Liskeard, England on August 3, 1983.

---

Steven H Silver is a twenty-two-time Hugo Award nominee and was the publisher of the Hugo-nominated fanzine Argentus as well as the editor and publisher of ISFiC Press for eight years. He has also edited books for DAW, NESFA Press, and ZNB. His most recent anthology is Alternate Peace and his novel After Hastings was published in 2020. Steven has chaired the first Midwest Construction, Windycon three times, and the SFWA Nebula Conference numerous times. He was programming chair for Chicon 2000 and Vice Chair of Chicon 7.