Guy N. Smith

Smith was born in Hopwas, near Tamworth, Staffordshire, England. His mother was a pre-war historical novelist (E. M. Weale). Smith was first published at the age of 12 in the Tettenhall Observer. Between 1952-57 he wrote 56 stories for them. His father was a bank manager and Smith was destined for banking from birth. Guns and shooting became another early interest. In 1961 he designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, intending to follow it up with six more. During 1960-67 he operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business. During this time, he wrote regularly for most of the sporting magazines, interspersed with fiction for such magazines as the legendary London Mystery Selection, a quarterly anthology. In 1972 he launched a second hand bookselling business which eventually became Black Hill Books, which still operates today. In 1974 he published his first horror novel, Werewolf by Moonlight, but it was the bestselling Night of the Crabs in 1976 which really launched him as a writer of paperback horror originals. Amicus bought the film rights to Crabs in 1976, released as Island Claws in 1981 (albeit with no credit to Smith). The sale, however, gave Smith the chance to leave banking and support himself full-time by writing, spawning five sequels to Night of the Crabs, and was followed by another 60 or so horror novels through to the mid-1990's, spanning all genres including crime and mystery (as Gavin Newman), children's animal novels (as Jonathan Guy), a series of novelizations of popular Disney animated films including Song of the South and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, a series of softcore erotic novels under various pseudonyms, and numerous how-to books devoted to fishing, shooting, animal identification, and other matters of practical gamekeeping.

Smith lived with his wife Jean. Together they had four adult children, Rowan, Tara, Gavin and Angus. A lifelong pipe-smoker, Smith won the British pipe-smoking championship in 2003, collected pipes and smoking ephemera, and wrote a book on tobacco.

Smith died due to complications of COVID-19, at the age of 81.