Hayford Peirce

Peirce was raised in a family of wealthy timber-land owners who were both cultivated and eccentric. His father, also named Hayford, a recognized authority on Byzantine art, wrote several books on the subject in French.[2] His mother, Polly, was a would-be playwright and summer playhouse owner. His uncle, Waldo Peirce, was a painter and bohemian character. Peirce attended, with no great distinction, Exeter, Stanford, and Harvard. At age 22 he married a Tahitian girl and moved to Tahiti, where he lived for the next 23 years. At various times he was a part owner, and sometimes accountant, for a mother-of-pearl button factory, a garden center, a one-hour laundry, and an import business.

Peirce began writing in 1974, with the sale of "Unlimited Warfare" a science-fiction short story to Analog magazine.[1] The story is typical of the fairly short, somewhat sardonic, black-humored stories that he wrote for a number of years. It takes an unlikely premise—England wages an undeclared war upon France by destroying its vineyards, while France retaliates and ultimately wins the war by destroying the world's tea supply—and treats it with an apparently deadpan yet whimsical manner. The writing is clear and direct, modeled on that of his favorite author, Evelyn Waugh, with occasional jaunty overtones of P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.

In 2017, The Motley Fool published a financial article describing how Peirce became a "dividend millionaire" by investing in high-dividend stocks over a 22 year period.[3]

On November 19, 2020, Peirce was found in critical condition at his home in Tucson, Arizona, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound; his wife, Wanda Zhang Peirce, was found dead at the scene in "a possible murder suicide", according to police.[4] Peirce was hospitalized, and subsequently died.[5] His wife is the former owner of Wanda Z's Chinese, a restaurant in Oro Valley.[6]

He wrote a number of science-fiction and mystery novels, some of which were published by Tor, and the others by Wildside Press. They have been translated into several languages. Typical of them are Napoleon Disentimed and Blood on the Hibiscus. His one spy thriller, written in London in 1968 at the height of the fictional spy mania, was The Bel Air Blitz.

Many of Peirce's short stories concern on-going protagonists. In the science fiction field there have been collections of his Chap Foey Rider, Capitalist to the Stars stories, of his Jonathan White, Stockbroker in Orbit stories, and of his Sam Fearon, Time Scanner stories. In the mystery field, he has had two collections about protagonists living in Tahiti, Commissaire Tama, a chief of police, and Joe Caneili, a private eye.

Peirce also collaborated with David M. Alexander on stories that have appeared in Analog.

• Hayford Peirce at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Hayford Peirce SF Encyclopedia entry