JOHN GRIMES

What does John Grimes look like?

Well, from his own unflattering descriptions, he's not a poster-boy for the Federation Survey Service. One of his women friends remarked that he's 'not much to look at'. A Rim Runner's Third Mate described him as a 'meteor-pitted old bastard' and frequent mention of his 'too prominent' ears is often made, particularly when they are reddening.

Chandler doesn't go into tremendous detail, preferring to summarize as in many of the above examples. We do, on the other hand, have numerous depictions of Grimes, at various times during his career, provided by 20th and 21st century artists. (Of course, since none of them were contemporaries of Grimes' and all official portraiture seems to have been lost during the Australian Subsidence, we can only really guess.)

The illustration with perhaps the greatest versimilitude is David B. Mattingly's B&W illo found inside DAW's publication of THE ANARCH LORDS. Mr. Mattingly has kindly granted me permission to reproduce a scan of that illustration here. The image remains Copyright © by David Mattingly and if you desire to obtain any of his artwork, please visit his site -

The images below were cropped from various book cover illustrations, under my interpretation of the Fair Use copyright laws (this is an academic pursuit, I am only using a portion of the illustration and I am using the illustration for explanatory purposes: if any of the publishers or artists object to this usage, please let me know and I will be happy to oblige their objections).

Interesting that only a single one portrays John with his ever-present pipe. A lot of them seem to portray a rather handsome individual which is generally at odds with the few written descriptions we do have. On the other hand, he has become somewhat of a legend and I suppose we can't fault the artists for exercising a little license. Personally, I think the Van Dongen illustration from To Keep The Ship would be the fairest representation, if it weren't for the swollen mushroom-like shape of the head.

There's one with Grimes sporting a mustache - where that idea came from I'll never know, as Grimes always maintains a shaven puss - even if he's not fond of the same when sported by his women, (apologies for the convolutions, but I should pay some homage to family values...) and there are quite a few that depict him with gray or graying hair, which I supposed is reasonable, but the ones with various shades of blonde are also off the mark.

CREDITS: All of the images were cropped from full-page cover art for books published by Ace, Act Mockba, Daw, Delta SF, Goldman, Hale, Hayakawa SF, Hayakawa Shobo SF, Horowitz, Paul Collins, SFBC

Cover artists: Paul Alexander, George Barr, Jim Burns, A.C. Farley, GASPP, Naoyuki Kato, Bob Petillo, Allan Pollack, Matt Stawicki, H.R. Van Dongen, Paul Youll