Rohan O’Grady

As a result of the Believer article, Let’s Kill Uncle was reprinted by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2010 with an endorsement from Donna Tartt; it was released the following year in the United States. The 2014 Spanish edition, Matemos al tio, features a reproduction of the original Let’s Kill Uncle cover drawn by Edward Gorey in 1963.

After nearly three decades of relative obscurity, Skinner returned to public attention as the subject of a January 2009 feature in The Believer, the monthly literary magazine published by McSweeney’s. In the piece, “A Certain Kind of Murder,” author Theo Schell-Lambert writes of his childhood encounter with Let’s Kill Uncle and his search for its mysterious author. Like Shell-Lambert, The Guardian political cartoonist, Martin Rowson, was deeply affected by his childhood reading of Let’s Kill Uncle and credits the book for changing his life and influencing his choice of career.

A popular metal band from Perth, Australia, named itself “Let’s Kill Uncle” after the movie, and British singer-songwriter Morrissey was also inspired by the film to name his 1991 solo album, Kill Uncle. The film was re-released in 2020 by Kino International.

Between 1961 and 1970, Skinner published four novels as Rohan O’Grady. Her fifth and final work, The May Spoon, was released in 1981 and credited to A. Carleon (Ann Carleon was the name of Skinner’s great-grandmother). Her third book, Let’s Kill Uncle, was her most successful and was made into a movie Let’s Kill Uncle by the legendary horror-film producer William Castle in 1966, starring Nigel Green, Mary Badham, Pat Cardi and Robert Pickering. First editions of Skinner’s second book, Pippin’s Journal, are prized by collectors for their illustrations by Edward Gorey.

Rohan O’Grady was the chief pen name of Vancouver-born Canadian novelist June Skinner (July 23, 1922 – March 17, 2014), who was born June Margaret O’Grady. After graduating from Lord Byng Secondary School in 1940, she worked for the Capilano Golf and Country Club as assistant resident manager, and then in the library at the Vancouver Sun. At the paper she met journalist Frederick Snowden Skinner, who became her husband, and they raised their three children in West Vancouver.