Walter L. Kleine

Walter L. Kleine appears to have been a versatile, hard-to-pin-down author whose published work spans several decades. Reliable catalog and archive sources link him to the mid-century science fiction novel Deadline, now available through Project Gutenberg, and to stories included in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress anthologies in the early 1990s.

A surviving note attached to an older listing for Deadline says he was doing graduate journalism work at the University of Iowa when that novel was written, which hints at a background in both fiction and nonfiction writing. Book databases also connect his name to Bitsy and the Biker, a later collaboration with Linda Suzane, suggesting that his published work ranged from classic speculative fiction to other forms of popular storytelling.

Very little clearly documented biographical material seems to be available online, which makes Kleine one of those authors best known through the work itself. What can be confirmed points to a writer with an unusually wide spread of interests, from Mars-bound adventure to heroic fantasy.