John Flanders

Jean Ray is the best-known pseudonym among the many used by Raymundus Joannes de Kremer (8 July 1887 – 17 September 1964), a prolific Belgian (Flemish) writer. Although he wrote journalism, stories for young readers in Dutch by the name John Flanders, and scenarios for comic strips and detective stories, he is best known for his tales of the fantastique written in French under the name Jean Ray. Among speakers of English, he is famous for his macabre novel Malpertuis (1943), which was filmed by Harry Kümel in 1971 (starring Orson Welles). He also used the pseudonyms King Ray, Alix R. Bantam and Sailor John, among others.

Ray was born in Ghent, his father being a minor port official, his mother the director of a girls' school. Ray was a fairly successful student but failed to complete his university studies, and from 1910 to 1919 he worked in clerical jobs in the city administration.

By the early 1920s he had joined the editorial team of the Journal de Gand. Later he also joined the monthly L'Ami du Livre. His first book, Les Contes du Whisky, a collection of fantastic and uncanny stories, was published in 1925.

In 1926 he was charged with embezzlement and sentenced to six years in prison, but served only two years. During his imprisonment he wrote two of his best-known long stories, The Shadowy Street and The Mainz Psalter. From the time of his release in 1929 until the outbreak of the Second World War, he wrote virtually non-stop.

Between 1933 and 1940, Ray produced over a hundred tales in a series of detective stories, The Adventures of Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes. He had been hired to translate a series from the German, but Ray found the stories so bad that he suggested to his Amsterdam publisher that he should re-write them instead. The publisher agreed, provided only that each story be about the same length as the original, and match the book's cover illustration. The Harry Dickson stories are admired by the film director Alain Resnais among others. During the winter of 1959–1960 Resnais met with Ray in the hope of making a film based on the Harry Dickson character, but nothing came of the project.

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