Established as a new genre writer with real flair, Smith gave up banking and hit the typewriter full time. Werewolf by Moonlight was published in 1974 and was popular enough to warrant two sequels. In the early ’70s he put his foot in the door at New English Library, a lively British house with a heart of pulp, and sold it an outline for a novel about a rural English werewolf, which took 30 days to write (earning, up front, a meager 200-pound advance). In his spare time he wrote articles about country living, then mystery stories for a newspaper syndicate. The son of a banker father and a novelist and magazine editor mother, Guy as a youth was drawn to his mother’s creative world (he wrote and illustrated a comic strip for her section of the local newspaper) even as family pressures led him to a career in banking.
From the 1980s, he became one of Britain’s great imaginative writers. After the success of the crab novels, Smith followed up with various marauding-creature topics and also-eventually- earned the clout with developers to expand his repertoire. Five sequels (including a de facto prequel, Origin of the Crabs) and assorted short stories followed. In fact, Smith’s topic was better written and scarier than Bench-ley’s American megaseller Jaws. In the summer of 1976 New English Library brought out Smith’s Night of the Crabs, about a deadly crustacean army that wreaks havoc on Welsh beachgoers (“From the depths of the sea they come to watch us. Smith can certainly lay claim to being the greatest of all writers on the subject of giant killer crabs. Among his other achievements as a prolific modern pulpster, Guy N.
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