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Character Name

Harold Gaynor

Also Known As

No other names are known. He will answer to Harold or Gaynor, but resents 'Harry' bitterly and will not answer to it.

First Seen in

The Laughing Corpse

Character Description

Gaynor is a large man with a pleasant round face and a double chin. He uses an electric wheelchair and hides his legs with a blanket. He is clean-shaven and his eyes are dark.

Character Casting Picture

Raymond Burr, in his role as Ironside, has been cast as Harold Gaynor.

Character Occupation

He is suspected but not known with certainty to launder money for the Mob. He is sufficiently unsavory for Irving's paper to have a three inch thick file with pictures.

Character Race

Harold Gaynor is a human of Caucasian descent.

Character Status

He is deceased as of the end of TLC.

Character Associations and Ties

He has a business relationship with Dominga Salvador.
He is in a wheelchair, and favors women with physical handicaps for girlfriends. He dated Wheelchair Wanda for a time, and at the time of the book, was seeing Cicely, who was deaf.
Some of his ancestors were vaudun practitioners and necromancers.
His mother died about ten years earlier and his father seems to exist only on paper, so Anita speculates that he was an illegitimate child. Wanda confirms this, saying the father's family was well placed and old money, and the mother was a whore turned mistress who was discarded when she became pregnant.

Also seen in

He has appeared in no other books.

Character Factoids

• Gaynor is a wealthy and unscrupulous businessman: nothing outside of what he wants is quite real to him. Human sacrifice to obtain his desires barely makes him blink. He understands the raising process enough to know a human sacrifice will be needed to raise a 283 year old corpse.
• His exact field is not specified, but it is something that calls for hard men with guns and cold eyes as bodyguards, or perhaps he likes the feeling of badness and power it gives him to have them around.
• He has enough money to offer a million dollars, then a million and a half dollars, for an ancestor to be raised. As the zombies closed in on him, he raised the ante to four million dollars, but it might have been hard to collect, and Anita turned him down anyway.
• A girlfriend who sued him for palimony disappeared and is feared dead.
• His legs are crippled from some undisclosed problem, but he has feeling in them.
• He has exotic taste in sex: he would cut Wanda's legs, let Cicely torture her, and have them both in bed at once.
• He kills, or orders killings, easily; many people are are afraid he would kill them. Wanda thinks he would kill her for telling his bedroom secrets.
• Gaynor's wrath against his father's family is a driving force in his life: he became wealthy in order to spite them. He wishes to raise the long dead ancestors in order to prove that the father's family is descended from river pirates and other low-lifes, and in hope they could direct him to further long-buried wealth.
• Even Dominga Salvador fears him, and would not raise his dead personally, lest he hold the 'sacrifice of the hornless goat' over her as blackmail.
• He no longer trusts Dominga, since one zombie raising went awry, though it was due to the corpse being an animator, not due to a failure of her power. Dominga was unaware of the corpse's powers, and lost control of it.
• Wanda was addicted to him, or possibly really loved him, even though she feared him.

Character Quotes

Popular sayings, quotes and quips attributed to this character:

• book, page, set-up, quote

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