If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
Buried in cloud files? We can help with Spring cleaning!

Whether you use Dropbox, Drive, G-Suite, OneDrive, Gmail, Slack, Notion, or all of the above, Dokkio will organize your files for you. Try Dokkio (from the makers of PBworks) for free today.

Campbell, RT

Page history last edited by Jon 10 years, 4 months ago

RT Campell was the pseudonym of Ruthven Campell Todd

Ruthven Campbell Todd (14 June 1914 – 1978) was a Scottish poet and novelist, known also as an editor of William Blake, and as an artist. (Ruthven is pronounced 'riven'.)

He was born in Edinburgh, and educated at Fettes College and Edinburgh School of Art. After a short spell in the office of his father, an architect. he worked as an agricultural labourer on Mull, for two years. He then started a career in copy-writing and journalism, while writing poetry and novels, based in Edinburgh, London, and Tilty Mill near Dunmow in Essex (later rented to Elizabeth Smart).

He was involved with the surrealists at the time of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition. In London in the late 1930s he was on good terms with Wyndham Lewis, contributing to the Lewis issue of Julian Symons's Twentieth Century Verse, and being brought in to keep awake the dozing Ezra Pound, whose portrait Lewis was painting.

During World War II he was a conscientious objector. Julian Maclaren-Ross in his Memoirs of the Forties tells the story of their encounter in the Highlander pub, in Dean Street, London, in 1943. The meeting got off to a sticky start, Maclaren-Ross having misheard 'Ruthven' as 'Reverend'.

But before I could apologize for having misheard the introduction, Ruthven Todd who now held a whisky in his hand said: 'I didn't get your name either. Who the hell are you anyway'? I gave my name, Todd's whisky went down the wrong way, and when I'd patted him on the back he spluttered 'But I discovered you!.' 'I thought Cyril Connolly discovered me.' 'On my recommendation.'

He moved to the USA in 1947. There he had a position at the University of New York, and ran a small press, the Weekend Press, during the 1950s. He settled in Majorca in 1958, where he died.

After the War Todd wrote a number of detective novels under the pseudonym of RT Campell, most of them with the serial amateur detective Prof. John Stubbs. With the exception of Unholy Dying (1945) and Bodies in a Bookshop (1946), which were republished in the 1980s by Dover Publications, his mysteries are hard to find today.