KENNETH BULMER: Advertise Your Cyanide One of the mainstays of the British magazines throughout the 1950s was Kenneth Bulmer. As arule Bulmer concentrated on the longer stories in fact he does not consider himself a shortstory writer. He prefers the length of a novel which allows him space to develop his charactersand his often bizarre themes. Henry Kenneth Bulmer was born in London on January 14th 1921 and was an avid sf fan from hisearly days producing seven issues of his own fanzine Star Parade during 1941. Then Bulmerbecame entangled in the war in the Royal Corps of Signals but afterwards returned to the sffold. After an apprenticeship on the Panther series of sf novels for Hamilton’s Bulmer sold ashort story First Down to Authentic and it appeared in the April 1954 issue.Thereafter he appeared regularly in the magazines under his own name and a few aliases likeNelson Sherwood and H Philip Stratford. Also he collaborated on scientific articles withresearch chemist John Newman under the name Kenneth Johns. In 1970 Bulmer edited a fantasy companion magazine to Vision of Tomorrow called Swordand Sorcery but after two issues were set in type the magazine was aborted because of thecrippling distribution problems which also killed Vision. Most of the unused material wassnapped up by other magazines and the experience stood Bulmer in good stead. Today hesuccessfully edits the original anthology series New Writings in SF which he took overafter John Carnell’s death in 1972. Readers of New Writings 24 will have noticed Ken Bulmer drew attention to a story Advertise Your Cyanide in his introduction. That story first appeared in the April 1958 Nebula a magazine edited and published single-handedly by Glasgow fan Peter Hamilton. Thedrive and tenacity of Hamilton produced a highly memorable and exciting if amateurish lookingmagazine that often contained superior fiction to New Worlds and the other publications.Hamilton produced the magazine