Celia Fremlin

Celia Margaret Fremlin (20 June 1914 – 16 June 2009) was an award-winning writer of mystery fiction.

Life

Celia was born in Kingsbury, now part of London, England. She was the daughter of Heaver Fremlin and Margaret Addiscott. Her older brother, John H. Fremlin, later became a nuclear physicist. Celia studied at Somerville College, Oxford University. From 1942 to 2000 she lived in Hampstead, London. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, with whom she had three children; he died in 1968. In 1985, Celia married Leslie Minchin, who died in 1999. Her many crime novels and stories helped modernize the sensation novel tradition by introducing criminal and (rarely) supernatural elements into domestic settings. Her 1958 novel The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960.

With Jeffrey Barnard, she was co-presenter of a BBC2 documentary “Night and Day” describing diurnal and nocturnal London, broadcast 23 January 1987

Fremlin was an advocate of assisted suicide and euthanasia. In a newspaper interview she admitted to assisting four people to die.[1] In 1983 civil proceedings were brought against her as one of the five members of the EXIT Executive committee which had published “A Guide to Self Deliverance” , but the court refused to declare the booklet unlawful.[2]

Death

She died on 16 June 2009 in Bournemouth.

Bibliography

Manners and Society
  • 1940 – The Seven Chars of Chelsea
  • 1943 – War Factory (with Tom Harrisson)

Novels
  • 1958 – The Hours Before Dawn; (Edgar Award for Best Novel, 1960)
  • 1959 – Uncle Paul
  • 1961 – Seven Lean Years (US: Wait for the Wedding)
  • 1963 – The Trouble Makers
  • 1964 – The Jealous One
  • 1967 – Prisoner's Base
  • 1969 – Possession
  • 1972 – Appointment with Yesterday
  • 1975 – The Long Shadow
  • 1977 – The Spider-Orchid
  • 1980 – With No Crying
  • 1982 – The Parasite Person
  • 1990 – Listening in the Dusk
  • 1991 – Dangerous Thoughts
  • 1993 – The Echoing Stones
  • 1994 – King of the World

Collections
  • 1970 – Don't Go to Sleep in the Dark
  • 1974 – By Horror Haunted
  • 1984 – A Lovely Day to Die

Poetry
  • 1996 – Duet in Verse (with Leslie Minchin)
gollark: Er, beaten.
gollark: I've never beat it in vanilla.
gollark: This lighting system has the energy budget of a small nation.
gollark: Ah, *vanilla*.
gollark: Oh, do you run a minecraft server?

References
  1. "The good companion: Celia Fremlin is fit, happy and still busy writing crime novels in her eighties. But when it's time to go, she's determined she will go. She has helped four people in extremis to die. And she doesn't see why, some day, she shouldn't do the same for herself - legally." Guardian, 21 June 1997
  2. “Striking Link between Suicides and Booklet”, London Times, 19 April 1983
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