But following his mainstream breakthrough Lancer Books fortuitously rediscover this modest debut – published in 1935 under the cunning guise of John Beynon Harris.

Written with more fanciful enthusiasm than technique, ‘The Secret People’, Wyndham’s first novel, is a thrill-a-minute adventure of the same dubious vintage.

And then there’s “Perfect Creature” ( ‘Tales Of Wonder’, 1937) taking an absurdist nod at HG Wells ‘The Island Of Doctor Moreau’ as well as Mary Shelley, when Una, a hideously monstrous creation animated by Doctor Dixon at Membury Grange abducts the Society For The Maltreatment Of Animals inspector – Alfred Weston, with amorously reproductive intentions! It attempts to talk to a stalled car, ‘I was lost – the only one of my kind upon this primitive world… an intelligent machine in a world of madness.’ Mixing comic satire about drunken human behaviour with the poignancy of Zat’s final self-termination, the tale’s clumsy energy is matched by “The Man From Beyond” ( ‘Wonder Stories’, September 1934) – also told in flashback, in which Morgan Grantz revenges himself on the International Chemicals corporation by sabotaging their ‘Nuntia’ expedition to Venus, but in doing so maroons himself in the ‘Takon’ Valley of Dur where toxic gases place him in a form of suspended animation, revived by the six-limbed Venusian Takonians at a time when Earth has blown itself into ‘a celestial cinder’. It was followed by “The Lost Machine” – as by John Beynon Harris, in ‘Amazing Stories’ (April 1932), in which Zat, a stranded coffin-shaped Martian robot on crab-legs, strives to make sense of these ‘animal structures’ of Earth. His first sale, “Worlds To Barter”, appeared in ‘Wonder Stories’ as long ago as 1931. Those same readers who saw fit to add a little daring to their Lit-approved book-shelves, were unaware that Wyndham, behind a spread of aliases taking advantage of his wealth of forenames, had been one of the British-invasion writers, along with William F Temple, Eric Frank Russell and John Russell Fearn during Pulps most extravagant years. Although he’d actually been around quite a while.

The secret people john wyndham