Frederic Mullally

Frederic Mullally (25 February 1918 – 7 September 2014) was a British journalist and author. He worked as a political editor and anti-fascist columnist in the post-war London press before co-founding the Mayfair public relations firm Mullally & Warner in 1950. From the late 1950s onward, he worked primarily as a novelist, publishing notable books including the bestseller Danse Macabre and the alternate history novel Hitler Has Won (1975).

Early life and India Mullally was born in London on 25 February 1918, of Irish descent and from a working-class background. As a teenager he paid his own passage to India, where he worked on The Statesman in Calcutta before becoming editor of the Sunday Standard in Bombay at approximately nineteen, one of the youngest editors of a national newspaper in India. From 1946 he was political editor and columnist of the Sunday Pictorial, writing the column "Candid Commentary" for a paper with an estimated readership of ten million. His 1946 book Fascism Inside England argued that Britain had no natural immunity to fascism; the historian Nigel Copsey later cited it in Anti-Fascism in Britain as an early identification of crypto-fascist organisations such as the British League of Ex-Servicemen.

In August 1947, Mullally used his Sunday Pictorial column to challenge the Mosleyite speaker Jeffrey Hamm at Ridley Road in Dalston, demanding ten minutes on his platform. At the meeting, despite a cordon of some 200 police, fascist supporters broke through and beat him to the ground. Members of the 43 Group intervened, breaking through the police lines to extract him; Mullally later said the group had saved his life.

Mullally & Warner

In 1950, Mullally and his first wife, Suzanne Warner, an American publicist who had represented Howard Hughes in Britain, founded the public relations firm Mullally & Warner in Mayfair. The firm operated until 1955. Its clients included Audrey Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., J. Paul Getty, Vera Lynn, Yvonne De Carlo, Sonja Henie, Johnnie Ray, Jo Stafford, Les Paul and Mary Ford, the Festival Ballet, Picture Post, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.

Hitler Has Won (1975) was an alternate history novel in which Hitler's early assault on the Soviet Union succeeds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described it as "a competent presentation of what has become a very common alternate-history vision."

Oh, Wicked Wanda!

Mullally created Oh, Wicked Wanda!, a satirical adult feature for Penthouse magazine. It initially appeared as illustrated text stories with artwork by Brian Forbes, running from September 1969 to October 1979. From 1973 to 1980, it was also produced as a full-colour comic strip drawn by Ron Embleton. The strip followed the adventures of the would-be world conqueror Wanda Von Kreesus and her companion Candyfloss. It has been described as Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's counterpart to Playboys Little Annie Fanny. Mullally also wrote a short-lived newspaper strip, Amanda, for The Sun.

Non-fiction In addition to his anti-fascist works, Mullally wrote The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family (Granada, 1981), a history spanning 250 years of the brewing, banking and missionary branches of the Guinness family. He lived at various periods in Ibiza and Malta.

During the 1950s, Mullally had become friendly with the society osteopath Stephen Ward. Through Ward, he met Joy Lewis, the wife of former Labour MP John Lewis, and the two began an affair. Lewis subsequently won both a libel action and a divorce action against Mullally; the combined costs, estimated at £7,000, were financially ruinous. The vendetta Lewis developed as a result extended to Ward, and Philip Knightley, in An Affair of State (1987), identified it as a significant thread in the events that culminated in the Profumo affair of 1963, when Lewis passed information about Christine Keeler's relationships to the Labour MP George Wigg.

Selected bibliography Fiction

Danse Macabre (1958; US title: Marianne) Man with a Tin Trumpet (1961; US title: Sara) Split Scene (1963) The Assassins (1964) No Other Hunger (1966) The Prizewinner (1967) The Munich Involvement (1968) Clancy (1971) The Malta Conspiracy (1972) Venus Afflicted (1973) Hitler Has Won (1975) The Deadly Payoff (1976) The Daughters (1988)

Non-fiction

Death Pays a Dividend (1944; with Fenner Brockway) Fascism Inside England (1946) The Penthouse Sexicon (1968) The Silver Salver: The Story of the Guinness Family (1981) Primo: The Story of 'Man-Mountain' Carnera (1991)