

In 1942, he succeeded his uncle as the 5th Baronet Birkin, and he served in the Second World War in the Sherwood Foresters.Īfter a long break, Birkin resumed writing following his return to London in 1960, and, perhaps at the instigation of Dennis Wheatley, began publishing new collections of short stories with The Kiss of Death (1964), for which Wheatley provided an introduction. Birkin’s contributions to the Creeps volumes were collected in his first book, Devil’s Spawn (1936), the last book published by Birkin before a long hiatus. Wakefield, Lord Dunsany, Russell Thorndike, and Birkin himself (under the name Charles Lloyd) are highly collectible today and were the precursors of later popular British horror anthologies, such as the Pan Books of Horror Stories. The books, with their sensational dust jacket art and stories by writers like H.R.

His contributions to British horror began in 1932 when publisher Philip Allan employed him to edit the Creeps series of short story collections, which included volumes with titles like Creeps, Shudders, Shivers, Nightmares, Tales of Death, and Tales of Fear. Charles Lloyd Birkin was born in England in 1907 and was educated at Eton College from 1921-1926.
