VIVIAN, E(velyn) Charles

(1882-1947)

   UK writer of popular fiction, born Charles Henry Cannell but changing his name to ECV in early adulthood, though he wrote some non-genre novels as Charles Cannell. He is now best remembered for the Gees sequence of novels (see listing below), all written as by Jack Mann,about a psychic detective whose cases sometimes involve sf-like phenomena - e.g., travel through other DIMENSIONS - but are essentially fantasies.Much of ECV's prolific output had a mystical tinge. Some of his novels, like Passion-Fruit (1912), had fantasy elements, and several were LOST-WORLD tales, including: City of Wonder (1922), which features Asiansurvivors from Lemuria; the Aia sequence, comprising Fields of Sleep (1923), in which Babylonian survivors are trapped in a Malaysian valley bya strange plant within range of whose aroma, once inhaled, one must stay or die, and People of the Darkness (1924), set in an underground world inhabited by a tentacled species who were originally slaves in ATLANTIS; The Lady of the Terraces (1925) and its sequel A King There Was - (1926),which feature pre-Incan survivals and further hints of Atlantis; and Woman Dominant (1929), set in Asia, where an aged woman rules a land through theagency of a drug which makes men halfwitted. ECV's most straightforward sf tale, Star Dust (1925), describes an inventor/scientist's attempts to make the world better by indiscriminately transmuting dross into gold; this (he thinks) will make some sort of UTOPIA inevitable. Not one of ECV's books is fully satisfying; not one is without interest.

   JC

   Other works, all as Jack Mann: Coulson Goes South (1933), marginal; Dead Man's Chest (1934); the Gees sequence, comprising Gees' First Case (1936), associational, Grey Shapes (1937), Nightmare Farm (1937), The Kleinert Case (1938),associational, Maker of Shadows (1938), The Ninth Life (1939), Her Ways are Death (1939) and The Glass Too Many (1940).

   See also: HISTORY OF SF; MACHINES.