Jason Dark
50 years of John Sinclair – Its author has the horror in his head
Helmut Rellergerd types his stories on a typewriter. photo
© Thomas Banneyer/dpa
Helmut Rellergerd has been writing the adventures of ghost hunter John Sinclair for 50 years. He keeps coming up with new horror stories. One of his sources of inspiration: the church newspaper of the Archdiocese of Cologne.
The old grandfather clock next to Helmut Rellergerd’s desk shows twelve o’clock sharp – midnight, witching hour! It’s the fitting inspiration for ghostbuster creator John Sinclair. His first adventure, “The Night of the Witcher”, appeared on July 13, 1973 – on Thursday it was 50 years ago.
The Cologne publisher Bastei Lübbe estimates the total circulation of the now more than 2300 novel booklets to be well over 250 million. “The Zombie Train”, “The Alpine Devil”, “The Killer Dwarf” are typical titles of the horror adventures that Rellergerd (78) writes under the pseudonym Jason Dark.
“Everything in the head”
The grandfather of three lives with his wife Roswitha in a detached house in Refrath, a district of Bergisch Gladbach near Cologne. Bergisch Gladbach is already very quiet, but Refrath is practically uneventful. If you ask him where he gets all his ideas from in this unspoilt environment, he just taps his temple: “It’s all in my head. I can’t do anything else. I don’t even drive a car.”
The ideas just come like that. He may suddenly say to his wife, “Imagine I turn to you in the morning and you’re a skeleton.” His wife isn’t amused at all. She doesn’t read his novels either. As a child, he made up stories himself. Later he wanted a job “where I wouldn’t get dirty”.
He gets some inspiration from non-fiction books and documentaries on 3Sat and Arte. And then there is the church newspaper of the Archdiocese of Cologne, to which Rellergerd subscribes. There is definitely something in there that he can spin out. On his desk are some cut out articles with headings like: “All Souls’ Day and Purgatory” and “Guardian Angels Don’t Need Wings”.
He’s never been to London
Rellergerd understands a “Sinclair” to mean that the stories come along “a bit smiling and not too brutal”. After all, he has “60 percent female readers”. A curiosity is that all the novels are set in London, but the author himself has never been there. The English breakfast, he says, is not really his thing. And besides, the hotels are quite expensive.
Four new Sinclair adventures are still released each month. But they aren’t all his anymore. “My wife said: ‘You do less now’.” Since then, co-authors have stepped in.
Rellergerd types his stories on a mechanical typewriter. However, the original 1970s olive green bathroom furnishings were lost at an exhibition in Bonn. Now he has a gray one. He doesn’t get along with the computer, he says.
Jonathan Meese is a fan
Designations like “trivial author” and “king of dime novels” don’t bother him. But it is a misconception to think that John Sinclair has no educated readers – among the fans are doctors, professors – and even the famous artist Jonathan Meese. During a visit some time ago, he brought him a stuffed shark he had designed. As a thank you, Rellergerd has the artist appear in a new John Sinclair case, “Horror Pictures.” In the story, Meese has a guest exhibition in London, and unusual things happen. Release date in September.
Rellergerd himself isn’t afraid to go to the attic at night – he doesn’t believe in ghosts. The horror for him was the missed BVB championship – the native of Dortmund is a big fan. What is he afraid of? “A little before death,” he admits. “I’m getting old now. Almost ready for a coffin.” But life is just too much fun for him to want to retire anytime soon. And there’s still plenty of room in his basement archive for new John Sinclair books.