James Malcolm Rymer

James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884) was a prolific, intensely private British penny-dreadful writer, a former civil engineer, held to be the principal author of Varney the Vampire (1845–47), which did more than almost any work to shape the popular vampire before Dracula, and of The String of Pearls, which introduced Sweeney Todd. Writing under many pseudonyms, he ranks with Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker among the vampire’s founding authors.