James Malcolm Rymer

Rymer appears in the London directory for 1841 as a civil engineer, living in Burton Street. Within a year he was editing a magazine, and shortly after that he was writing for Edward Lloyd, the publisher who effectively invented the penny dreadful — cheap serial fiction sold in weekly instalments to a new working-class readership. Between 1842 and the late 1860s he produced as many as a hundred and fifteen novels.

Two of them mattered. Varney the Vampyre ran for around two years and set most of the vampire furniture that Stoker would later rearrange. The String of Pearls introduced Sweeney Todd.

Both were long credited to Thomas Peckett Prest, and the attribution to Rymer was only established in 1963, when the historian Louis James worked it out using Rymer's own surviving scrapbooks. He published under his own name and under anagrams of it — Malcolm J. Errym, Malcolm J. Merry — and seems to have wanted the anonymity: he was famously private, and the man himself is very hard to find in the record.

He died in 1884. No portrait of him is known to survive.