preorder only, alas   "Mom!"--Megan Abbott, author of The Fever, Dare Me and The End of Everything

Excellent--you want the DVD/CD package

Just released, from Richard Lupoff's imprint...the Brian Aldiss story is almost worth the price of the book by itself...

Espionage, erotica and wit: the Chastity Flame novels, now in hardcopy!

James Reasoner publishes a Gorman/Crider...

Check out the radio show and podcasts...

Publisher's page should say more!

There be dragons...reissued in ebooks...

I'm under the weather, and working. Yes, it's that kind of month, and I'm that stupid. But never let it be said that I don't want to give the people what they want, so here are two of the most popular FFB entries I've done:

 

Friday, September 7, 2012

FFB: some suspense-fiction anthologies

So, I've made a very preliminary pitch of a suspense-fiction anthology to a publisher. It's one of several projects I've been mulling for years, and no one's quite done the book I envision, albeit the following volumes have some of the flavor of what I'm after, a compilation of notable stories about characters under the most dire threat of extinction, but not horror stories in that they're essentially realistic fiction (in the sense of actually possible in our world as we currently understand it, leaving aside for this purpose the varying degrees to which some of We might believe in one sort of supernatural force or another). The Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies and their fellow-travelers (and here, here, here and here) leaned in the direction of what I'm after with my potential book (although they were also very eclectic, including horror, black humor, mystery, fantasy and science fiction, and sometimes some things not classifiable among these)...as did a number of Bill Pronzini's anthologies, edited in collaborationand solo.

A few more interesting examples of what I refer to:





Great Tales of Action and Adventure edited by George Bennett (Dell, 1959)








The Bamboo Trap by Robert S. Lemmon
Leiningen Versus The Ants by Carl Stephenson
The Blue Cross by G.K. Chesterton
The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell
The Fourth Man by John Russell
The Interlopers by Saki
The Adventure of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke
August Heat by W.F. Harvey
To Build A Fire by Jack London
Action by C. E. Montague

--Interestingly to me, given the title of this ubiquitous anthology from Dell's Laurel Leaf line, ineluctable for a good two decades, at least, that some of the eclectic selections were not only rather straightforward horror fiction (obviously, "August Heat") but in that case a story almost completely lacking in adventure or action, albeit some serious, ugly action was likely to ensue just after the text ended. But this was the book that introduced perhaps millions of young readers in the '60s and '70s to some of the great chestnuts in the suspense-fiction field, notably the Stephenson, the Connell (the most plagiarized story of the last century), the Saki, the Poe and the London (not that the latter three weren't already chestnuts...and the Connell, too, already repeatedly imitated by 1959).

Suddenly
edited by Marvin Allen Karp and Irving Settel
Publisher: Popular Library, New York
Publication Date: 1965
Binding: Paperback
144 pp. PL SP351.
Cover art by A. P. Ryder.

contents:
Heartburn by Hortense Calisher
The Jar by Ray Bradbury
Torch Song by John Cheever
Decadence by Romain Gary
Pillar of Salt by Shirley Jackson
The Final Performance by Robert Bloch
The White Quail by John Steinbeck
The Aftertaste by Peter Ustinov
23 Pat O'Brien Movies by Bruce Jay Friedman

--A far more obscure volume, which I've just purchased, offering an interesting mix of some of the best relevant writing of the previous decade-plus (in 1965), albeit it includes some straightforward horror fiction (the Calisher) and arguably borderline stuff (the Bradbury and the Bloch, and in another direction, the Friedman). I'm wondering about the back-stories of the two editors, whose bylines I don't think I've come across before...Charles Gramlisch, in GoodReads, wasn't too impressed by the volume, but he also mistook the Bradbury for being a much more modern story than the others...I suspect I like more of the stories here I've read (more than half) than Charles did.



The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, edited by Ed Gorman (Black Lizard, 1987)

Table of Contents
The Used / Loren D. Estleman —
Cold foggy day / Bill Pronzini —
Swamp search / Harry Whittington —
Take care of yourself / William Campbell Gault —
A matter of ethics / Robert J. Randisi —
Tough / John Lutz —
This world, then the fireworks / Jim Thompson —
Soft monkey / Harlan Ellison —
Yellow gal / Dennis Lynds —
The Scrap / Max Allan Collins —
Set 'em up, Joe / Barbara Beman —
Shut the final door / Joe L. Hensley —
Death and the dancing shadows / James Reasoner
Killer in the dark / Robert Edmond Alter —
Perchance to dream / Michael Seidman --
Horn man / Clark Howard —
Shooting match / Wayne Dundee —
The Pit / Joe R. Lansdale —
Turn away / Edward Forman -
The second coming / Joe Gores.

The Second Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction, edited by Ed Gorman (Black Lizard, 1988)
Description:xiii, 664 p. ; 22 cm.

Table of Contents
Who lives by the sword / Robert Edmond Alter --
The gun next door / Michael Avallone --
The dreadful lemon pie / Timothy Banse --
Water's edge / Robert Bloch --
Good for the soul / Lawrence Block --
The candy skull / Ray Bradbury --
Streak to death / Jon Breen --
The little woman / Max Allan Collins --
Blood and moonlight / William R. Cox --
A cabin in the woods / John Coyne --
Death of an iron maiden / Wayne D. Dundee --
Free with this box! / Harlan Ellison --
Bad blood / Loren D. Estleman --
The collector comes after payday / Fletcher Flora --
Jode's last hunt / Brian Garfield --
Blood of the innocent / William Campbell Gault --
A long day's night in the naked city / Barry Gifford --
Goodbye, Pops / Joe Gores --
False idols / Ed Gorman --
The home / Joe L. Hensley --
The god of the razor / Joe R. Lansdale --
Eats / Richard Laymon --
High stakes / John Lutz --
Still life / Ed McBain --
Death blues / Steve Mertz --
The girl who jumped the river / Arthur Moore --
Merrill-go-round / Marcia Muller --
The pattern / Bill Pronzini --
Down the long night / William F. Nolan --
Fall guy / Ray Puechner --
Murder me for nickels / Peter Rabe --
The equine theft / Robert Randisi --
Rendezvous / Daniel Ransom --
The affair with the dragon lady / Mickey Spillane --
Horse laugh / Donald Westlake --
The glass alibi / Harry Whittington --
Give the man a cigar / Charles Willeford --
A Christmas story / Will Wyckoff --
Lapses / Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

--The brilliant Ed Gorman anthologies here (and they not alone among brilliant Gorman anthologies) might be the closest among those cited here to what I aim to do with my proposed book, though Ed does include more from the mystery end of crime fiction, or at least its borders, than I intend to. Otherwise, these are monuments to the kind of noir the Black Lizard line wished to publish, and given the megabooks that BL is issuing as edited by Otto Penzler these days, an omnibus reprint is more than called for for these two compilations.

A Century of Great Suspense Stories edited by Jeffery Deaver
(Berkley Prime Crime, 2001)

The Gentleman in the lake / Robert Barnard --
Life in our time / Robert Bloch
Batman's helpers / Lawrence Block
The Girl who married a monster/ Anthony Boucher --
The Wench is dead / Fredric Brown
Cigarette girl / James M. Cain --
A Matter of principal / Max Allan Collins --
The Weekender / Jeffery Deaver --
Reasons unknown / Stanley Ellin --
Killing Bernstein /Harlan Ellison --
Leg man / Erle Stanley Gardner --
One of those days,one of those nights / Ed Gorman --
Missing: Page thirteen / Anna Katharine Green --
Voir Dire / Jeremiah Healy --
Chee's witch/ Tony Hillerman --
Interpol: The case of the modern Medusa / Edward D. Hoch --
Quitters, Inc. / Stephen King --
So young, so fair, so dead / John Lutz --
Nor iron bars / John D. MacDonald --
The Guilt-edged blonde / Ross Macdonald --
Red clay / Michael Malone --
Poetic justice / Steve Martini --
A Very merry Christmas / Ed McBain --
Among my souvenirs / Sharyn McCrumb --
The People across the canyon / Margaret Miller --
Benny's space / Marcia Muller --
Heartbreak house / Sara Paretsky --
Stacked deck / Bill Pronzini --
The Adventure of the dauphin doll / Ellery Queen --
Burning end / Ruth Rendell --
Carrying concealed / Lisa Scottoline --
The Little house at Croix-Rousse / Georges Simeonon --
The Girl behind the hedge / Mickey Spillane --
The Fourth of July picnic / Rex Stout --
Lady Hillary / Janwillem van de Wetering --
This is death / Donald E. Westlake.

--The Deaver isn't a bad anthology, and it would probably take someone of Deaver's or Lawrence Block's commercial clout to get such a book published a decade after this one from a major commercial house, but apparently Berkley wasn't completely behind Deaver on this book, released in that unlucky year 2001...as Otto Penzler noted in his review of the book, Patricia Highsmith's name is on the cover, with no story in the book, and not a few of the most notable writers of suspense fiction are also absent...while a number of fairly recent stories by best-selling "names" are included...many of these not the stories by their authors I would've included (particularly in the cases of Bloch, Block, and Hoch...or "blok""blok" and "hoke" if you were wondering).

The Best American Noir of the Century
edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler (Mariner Books; Oct 4, 2011)
Description: xiv, 731 p. ; 24 cm.

Contents:
Spurs / Tod Robbins --
Pastorale / James M. Cain --
You'll always remember me / Steve Fisher --
Gun crazy / MacKinlay Kantor --
Nothing to worry about / Day Keene --
The homecoming / Dorothy B. Hughes
Man in the dark / Howard Browne --
The lady says die! / Mickey Spillane --
Professional man / David Goodis --
The hunger / Charles Beaumont --
The gesture / Gil Brewer --
The last spin / Evan Hunter --
Forever after / Jim Thompson --
For the rest of her life / Cornell Woolrich --
The dripping / David Morrell --
Slowly, slowly in the wind / Patricia Highsmith --
Iris / Stephen Greenleaf --
A ticket out / Brendan DuBois --
Since I don't have you / James Ellroy --
Texas city / James Lee Burke --
Mefisto in onyx / Harlan Ellison --
Out there in the darkness / Ed Gorman --
Hot spings / James Crumley --
The weekender / Jeffery Deaver --
Faithless / Joyce Carol Oates --
Poachers / Tom Franklin --
Like a bone in the throat / Lawrence Block --
Crack / James W. Hall --
Running out of dog / Dennis Lehane --
The paperhanger / William Gay --
Midnight emissions / F.X. Toole --
When the women come out to dance / Elmore Leonard --
Controlled burn / Scott Wolven --
All through the house / Christopher Coake --
What she offered / Thomas H. Cook --
Her lord and master / Andrew Klavan --
Stab / Chris Adrian --
The hoarder / Bradford Morrow --
Missing the morning bus / Lorenzo Carcaterra.

--this book has a remit that stretches to straightforward horror (the Beaumont and to some extent the Ellison) and some more-mystery fiction, and the story that was adapted for film in a more fantasticated way than the story runs (the Robbins, the basis for the film Freaks)...only three women contributors make the cut, which seems less surprising when we remember that James Ellroy is co-editor. But also a fairly close approximation to what I'm hoping to achieve, though like the Deaver it might err on the side of too much too-recent work, perhaps giving space to talented friends of the editors, but having to leave out some important relevant older material to do so--both books seem better representations of the last two decades of their centuries than the rest, albeit the Deaver is more guilty in that wise.

And then we have, of late, along with the large new organization International Thriller Writers, who among other things produce impressive anthologies of new fiction, the Top Suspense Group, leaning toward ebook productions of some impressive quality (and made up mostly of friendly and fleeting acquaintances of mine)...as soon as I get proficient on my new tablet, and get the Kindle ap up and running, I hope to start reading their ebook productions, and have also just bought the POD hard-copy version of their initial anthology, Top Suspense...a pity, except from the trees' point of view, that this (pictured) and most (all?) of their subsequent releases seem to be unavailable as non-virtual books.



Contents of Favorite Kills:
Archie's Been Framed by Dave Zeltserman
Night Nurse by Harry Shannon
Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine
Number 19 by Naomi Hirahara
Sweet Dreams by Vicki Hendricks
House Rules by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Angie by Ed Gorman
Knife Fight by Joel Goldman
Jack Webb's Star by Lee Goldberg
Restraint by Stephen Gallagher
Top of the World by Bill Crider
A Matter of Principal by Max Allan Collins

--And I can't resist including this:







...the 1959 volume which helped launch the series aimed at adults and running parallel to the Alfred Hitchcock Presents: television series, with the volumes ghost-edited by Robert Arthur till his death, and by Harold Q. Masur after till Hitchcock's death, though this one, with its UK cover given here, was ghost-edited by Paticia O'Connell. And...the Wells, the Finney and at least arguably the du Maurier, Boucher and Sambrot are all fantasticated...unsurprisingly, in the case of all five writers...

Contents:
Alfred Hitchcock - Introduction (ghost-written? possibly not)
Daphne du Maurier - The Birds
Donald Honig - Man With A Problem
Anthony Boucher - They Bite
Charlotte Armstrong - The Enemy
H. G. Wells - The Inexperienced Ghost
Thomas Walsh - Sentence of Death
Dorothy Salisbury Davis - Spring Fever
Matthew Gant - The Crate At Outpost 1
Gay Cullingford - My Unfair Lady
Hilda Lawrence - Composition For Four Hands
Carter Dickson - New Murders For Old
C. B. Gilford - Terrified
Joan Vatsek - The Duel
Price Day - Four O'Clock
Paul Eiden - Too Many Coincidences
Jack Finney - Of Missing Persons
William Sambrot - Island Of Fear
Robert Arthur - Getting Rid Of George
F. Tennyson Jesse - Treasure Trove
Wilbur Daniel Steele - The Body Of The Crime
Mann Rubin - A Nice Touch
Elisabeth Sanxay Holding - The Blank Wall

Monday, October 24, 2011

FFB special: Beyond and Alongside Tolkien: Among His Peers (more or less) completed...

This was meant to be a quick set of pointers for Jackie Kashian, whom I promised some advice as to whose work to look for for non-Tolkien-derivative work in fantasy and related fiction (particularly science fiction by the same people, since often she prefers sf), inasmuch as she (like most of us) never really needs to read FNORD OF THE THINGS and other heavily derivative work again...there's plenty of Tolkien for that purpose...and while she's familiar with a number of impressive writers who've worked in this and similar modes, it's still entirely too easy to miss entirely too much, given the Well-Organized and Thorough Book Publishing and Distribution Industries, etc. I encourage suggestions of what and where I've completely overlooked someone or something major...you can rest assured that Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks have mostly been overlooked on purpose.

Fantasy, as with such arguably later related developments as science fiction and surrealist fiction, of course comes out of mythic traditions, but also requires at least some distance from full immersion in those myths...while there are certainly believers in the supernatural (Tolkien, obviously, was no dithering Christian, and C. S. Lewis even less so; Arthur Conan Doyle is probably only the most famous spiritualist to write a lot of fantasy, even if his most famous character was an utter, if addicted, rationalist) who've written the great works, they almost invariably employ a certain metaphoric distance even in their most blatant allegories and parables (Tolkien doesn't have "traditional" demons running about, but does have at least one hugely famous character who is essentially possessed, among other obvious parallels). So, basically, as fantasy fiction was coalescing as a self-conscious mode of prose fiction, after all the centuries of Homer's and others' poetic epics and folktales of all sorts (including what we often call "fairy tales" and such collections as the Arabian Nights), we see the emergence of satiric fantasy (among the most obvious, Jonathan Swift), and the employment of fantastic tropes as strong vehicles for Transcendence (19th century folks such as William Morris and his literary heirs such as David Lindsay and William Hope Hodgson followed in the paths broken by William Blake, as well as reaching into the folklore of their cultures), for the Decadents (as the knot of folks around Huysmans and Baudelaire in France, and clustering around The Yellow Book and similar productions in England...where, for example, Aubrey Beardsley would publish his illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction)--also children of Blake, in many ways!--and including such fellow-travelers as Oscar Wilde, who preferred the term "Aesthete" for himself, and the continuing tradition of satirists (such as Samuel Butler with Erewhon, or Twain with his Connecticut Yankee and his Adam and Eve) and those who submerged their satiric or similar messages rather more deeply into their texts or were writing at least some of their fantasies rather blatantly for kids, or both, such as Hawthorne and Kipling and, of course, "Lewis Carroll" and the Alice books and more, and L. Frank Baum, of the Oz series. H. G. Wells, like Mary Shelley before him doing pioneering work in no-bones-about-it sf in this (frequently satirical and/or cautionary) mode, was also particularly fond of writing the kind of fantasy where magical things are happening within the context of otherwise everyday reality..."The Man Who Could Work Miracles" being a rather obvious title in this mode...a mode rather akin to horror fiction and to tall-tale traditions and hoax-stories. So, by the early 1900s, one could find the likes of James Branch Cabell, E. R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, Virginia Woolf (even if only occasionally, with the likes of Orlando) and such adventure-fantasists as H. Rider Haggard all drawing on these traditions and more. Among the best and most popular writers of the fantastic popping-up-in-the-everyday mode was Thorne Smith.

And so, H. P. Lovecraft and his friends, who clustered around the magazine Weird Tales and formed an extended correspondence network, "the Lovecraft Circle," featured such influential folks as HPL (who wrote some early fantasies very imitative of Dunsany's work before settling in to write his existential horror and borderline sf in his more typical quasi-1780s prose), Robert Howard (Conan, and much else), and Clark Ashton Smith, perhaps the best of the three in many ways, a visual artist as well as poet and fiction writer very influenced by the Decadents, who is his turn was the great model (though many of the others above were also strong influences on his work) for my first recommendation for a Tolkien peer, Jack Vance.

Jack Vance has written some of the most deft and acerbic of fantasy, science-fantasy and sf (among other work) to be published over the last century; his first great work might be that which is collected into a sort of novel, The Dying Earth, which saw sequels of sorts in The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rhialto the Marvellous. These might be the places to start with Vance, though it's hard to go too wrong with his work, particularly such arguably overlooked sf novels as The Languages of Pao, his massive Lyonesse trilogy, or such award-winning work as "The Dragon Masters" and "The Last Castle."Michael Moorcock's work in the fantasy field draws on many of the same influences, though his early fantasies were too often written hastily and that is sometimes obvious in the result; later fiction he could take more time with, such as Gloriana, gives a better indication of what the admittedly more mature Moorcock could achieve.



Fritz Leiber was both a member of the Lovecraft Circle, joining with his wife Jonquil on her initiative not long before Lovecraft's death (and it's notable that Leiber and the other most junior member of the Circle, Robert Bloch, were the most innovative and important writers to pick up on Lovecraft's development of existential horror fiction, and explore its implications in many ways better than Lovecraft himself could), and an occasional professional actor whose parents owned a touring Shakespearean company; Leiber was thus particularly influenced by such Jacobean playwrights as John Webster as well as the folks already cited. He began publishing in the pages of Unknown Fantasy Fiction (a magazine devoted particularly to the H.G. Wells/Thorne Smith mode of fantasy, but by no means exclusively), Weird Tales, and Astounding Science Fiction, the most influential and sophisticated of fantasticated pulp magazines of their time, and his work from the beginning was challenging, innovative, and influential. His fantasy series, begun as almost a role-playing mail game with his old friend Harry Fischer, the stories of Fafhrd (the Leiber character) and the Gray Mouser (the Fischer), became a consistent thread in his work throughout his long life; some of the F&GM stories are weaker than others, but the three included in the "origin" volume, which verges on a novel, Swords and Deviltry (in its original Ace editions with the Jeff Jones cover; the White Wolf repackage, with the Mike Mignola cover, takes its title from the third story, "Ill Met in Lankhmar"), are among the more brilliant. He wrote three horror novels, one at the beginning of his career (Conjure Wife, 1943, in one issue of Unknown), one a little less than a decade later, when his influence was already being widely felt, You're All Alone (short form in Fantastic Adventures magazine, 1950), and one toward the end of his career, Our Lady of Darkness (a short form, entitled The Pale Brown Thing, was serialized in two issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1977). And he wrote a number of good to brilliant sf novels, though perhaps none of those had quite the impact of such short stories as "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown, 1940) or "Coming Attraction" (Galaxy sf magazine, 1950), which can be reasonably said to have revolutionized their respective fields. His play in prose, The Big Time, might be the best of his science fiction novels.

Avram Davidson began publishing fiction in the Jewish-American magazines in the early '50s, first appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction with the superb "My Boyfriend's Name is Jello" in 1954. He would contribute extensively to the fantasy, sf, and crime-fiction fields, and occasionally to other fictional traditions, as well as becoming one of the premiere writers of true-crime histories in the country, work which garnered him awards and also served as the contemporary setting for his great, very funny early sf novel Masters of the Maze, in which a more typical "men's sweat" writer finds himself responsible, in part, for foiling an invasion of the Earth by a kind of crustacean-like aliens, the Chulpex, who in their turn are very well drawn, as one of a long line guardians of a sort of gateway between worlds, the maze of the title, which has been traditionally been guarded by a sort of Masonic organization throughout history. Davidson thus lightly touches on the kinds of conspiracies of history Robert Anton Wilson, among many others since, have churned out megabookery about. Davidson's most ambitious work, a fantasy sequence about Vergil Magus (the folkloric reimagining of the poet Vergil) that begins with The Phoenix and the Mirror, is sadly less fully-realized than Davidson clearly wanted, though it is magisterial in its own right; far more fully-evocative of what Davidson could do are the series of linked stories collected first as The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, and later, with newer stories (some a bit lesser) added, as The Adventures of Doctor Eszterhazy, which I think will satisfy anyone who tends to prefer novels, even in its necessarily episodic structure. Eszterhazy is a polymathic troubleshooter in a section of what very much resembles the collapsing Austria-Hungary of the turn of the 20th century, who is usually brought in to deal with the fantastic and outre threats and difficulties faced by and within the kingdoms; the stories are so brilliantly witty, erudite and elegant at their best that they almost beggar description. As with Jorge Luis Borges, Davidson relished scholarship for its own sake without stuffiness or any sort of turf protection; he was here to show us all the world's wonders, and those apparently beyond he could find. Further examples of Davidson's work, aside from the brilliant short fiction (including such crime fiction as "The Lord of Central Park" which will nonetheless reward any fantasy reader who seeks it out), that come close to these peaks include his first novel (a collaboration with the undersung Ward Moore), the historically rich fantasy Joyleg; and his last to be published during his lifetime, a collaboration with his ex-wife and executor, Grania Davis (an accomplished fantasist in her own right), Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty, and the collection of fantasticated essays, Adventures in Uhhistory.

Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel, nor as far as I recall attempted to, but his short fiction helped revolutionize world literature at least as much as all the other 20th century folks mentioned so far, and he actually got some credit for that (it perhaps helped that he wrote primarily in Spanish, and while first published in English in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in the 1940s, was more flashily published in bulk by the university and avant-garde presses of the earliest 1960s, which made his excursions into the fantastic "safer" to admire among the literary establishment of the time. And well they might admire the work collected in such volumes as Dreamtigers and particularly Labyrinths, which play with literary form and reintroduce more sophisticated forms of the literary hoax as well as playing with mind-expanding concepts ("The Library of Babel," for obvious example, the infinitely vast library which includes volumes that include all the possible combinations of letters and words, and what the implications of that are...); and, even more than any of the others here save Davidson, Borges was drawn to worldwide traditions to explore, very much including the Arabian Nights and other related material. As with Leiber, Borges also was frequently willing to fantasticate his own life in fruitful and challenging ways; he embarked, as a fluent English speaker, on a program of translation of his own works for Dutton in the late '60s with Norman Thomas DiGiovanni which are, for the most part, the definitive translations of his work, and the best of those volumes is probably the one with the long autobiographical essay, The Aleph, and Other Stories: 1933-1969; unfortunately, some financial shenanigans with the contracts for these translations, giving DiGiovanni a disproportionate share of the revenue, has led to the Borges heirs keeping these out of print in recent decades, and the comparably atrocious current Penguin editions of new translations, in such volumes as Collected Fictions, average much worse than both the Borges versions and the early translations by James Irby and others in the early volumes such as Labyrinths.

Joanna Russ, as I've noted earlier in this blog (in eulogizing herand otherwise), had a career which in many ways paralleled that of her friend Fritz Leiber; they both began their professional writing careers, having had a strong grounding in dramatic arts (Leiber primarily as an actor, Russ primarily as a playwright and scholar of drama at university), as mostly writers of horror fiction, though by no means exclusively; they soon added important science-fictional work to their resumes, often controversial work that, particularly in the case of Russ's best novel, the playful, innovative, yet devastatingly satirical The Female Man, managed to find audiences well beyond frequent sf readers; Leiber was a pacifist and pro-feminist even as his career began, if usually not too stridently so, while Russ became a strong voice for feminist thought from early in her career, becoming perhaps the most prominent voice for such in fantastic fiction, or at least alongside such others as Ursula Le Guin, Angela Carter, Judith Merril and eventually Alice "James Tiptree, Jr." Sheldon, along with such folks at the periphery of fantastic fiction as Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood. And, like Leiber, Russ had among her personal analog figures in her writing a fantasy (near anti-) hero, the thief and troublemaker Alyx, in a series of short fiction and a novel, Picnic on Paradise, which has been collected in the omnibus The Adventures of Alyx, which I can recommend to any fantasy reader...along with such major fantasies as "My Boat" (and such deft horror as "Come Closer" and "There is Another Shore, You Know, On the Other Side") from her three other collections of short stories (Alyx and Fafhrd, the Leiber analog from his series, each appear in one story by the other writer, as well, in their respective series; at least as charming a grace note as when Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft wrote stories in which each had the other killed, many years before, published in issues of Weird Tales magazine.)

Ursula K. Le Guin, of course, is probably the best-selling (at least in English) and the most widely-respected (probably after Borges) of the writers I've chosen to highlight in this post, and probably needs little introduction for almost anyone likely to see this...but (as she notes in the essay included in the Beagle-edited anthology pictured at the head of this post, which I finally got around to reading this morning, or after writing all up through the Leiber passage) she is not above a little irritation at the remarkable notion that a novel aimed at young adult readers and easily readable by adults as well, about a school for young wizards, might be taken for a remarkably new vision when offered by J. K. Rowling when it's also the matter for the first in Le Guin's most famous series of novels, A Wizard of Earthsea. If Russ was perhaps the most devoted feminist among the writers I highlight, Le Guin vies with Atwood as the most famously so in fantastic fiction (setting aside for the moment such foremothers as Mary Shelley and Charlotte Perkins Gilman), as well as the most famous anarchist, which are among the factors which have helped shape the fantasies she has written, relating to Earthsea and otherwise, as well as such major sf novels as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Le Guin, also like Russ (and Leiber, though his work thus remains mostly uncollected, and of course Tolkien and Lovecraft), has also been a major essayist about fantasy fiction, with such collections as The Language of the Night being necessary reading (and it's amusing, as I hope to note further in a future review here, the small degrees to which Le Guin's essay disagrees with the other collected in the Beagle anthology, by David Hartwell, though both are matched in insight by Beagle's own introduction). Such other occasional fantasists as Algis Budrys, Barry Malzberg, Damon Knight and James Blish have published similar collections of reviews and related essays, theirs usually more focused on sf (as their writing careers were, as well). Also worth mentioning in this context is the literary-historical and biographical work of L. Sprague de Camp, as controversial as some of the latter is, which he began in the early 1970s as supplement to his work about folklore and history (such as Lost Continents) and his own fiction, which on his own and in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt is also at least as impressive as that of many of the folks cited so far...though I've enjoyed his posthumous collaborations with Robert Howard less (though he was better at this than such other pickers at the scraps of Howard's work as Lin Carter, with whom De Camp also collaborated thus); Fletcher Pratt on his own also produced notable historical nonfiction (the Civil War history Ordeal by Fire, most obviously) and epic fantasies such The Well of the Unicorn and The Blue Star which can stand alongside such other midcentury work as Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and T. H. White's Arthurian fantasies, collected eventually as The Once and Future King, and that of Tolkien's fellow Inklings C. S. Lewis, Roger Green and Charles Williams--among the work I'm slighting here!

Jane Yolen, more than any of the other folks mentioned so far, has been a serious scholar of folkloric traditions in a way that rivals such folks as Jack Zipes and Italo Calvino; like Calvino, but perhaps to not as wide acclaim, she has also been a first-rate writers of fantastic fiction, often drawing heavily on the folkloric traditions but bringing to them fresh insights and contexts; among her best work at novel length for adults (for she has been one of the most important of children's writers over the last several decades as well, for a while the head of her own imprint) being the jarring, elegant Briar Rose, which takes interesting liberties with story structure (thus not too different thus with Calvino, famous for doing similar things in his more personal work, and like Yolen's often set as if being orally told to the reader) as it mixes the Sleepy Beauty folktale with the experiences of a survivor of the Polish WW2 extermination camps and her family in the present day. Along with her collections and anthologies of folktales, she has also published at least one sf novel, Cards of Grief (which, as she notes, still "feels like fantasy"). The similarly brilliant writer William Kotzwinkle has had a somewhat parallel career, with a large following in children's literature (not least for his antic Walter the Farting Dog books), seemingly straddled borders with his grim animal fantasy Doctor Rat and lighter, satirical The Bear Went Over the Mountain, and work that despite accessibility to younger readers is thoroughly adult, ranging from the grim timeslip fantasy The Exile to the charming, heavily illustrated The Midnight Examiner and such collections as The Hot Jazz Trio.

And then, as I note below, there are such other major creators in the field as Sylvia Townsend Warner (who in addition to her own impressive work in novels starting with Lolly Willowes and in short fiction, notably collected in Kingdoms of Elfin, also wrote a biography of T. H. White),
the foremothers of science fantasy in the pulps, Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore, with Brackett augmenting her basically serious and graceful space opera (such as that collected in Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories) with more soberly extrapolative sf, such as The Long Tomorrow, and several crime fiction novels, the first of which, No Good from a Corpse, led directly to her being hired to adapt Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep for film as part of a team including Jules Furthman and a bitter, drunken William Faulkner), the beginning of screen career that would include the solo adaptation of The Long Goodbye and one of her last works, the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back, the least bad of the Star Wars films. Moore, initially on her own and then in partnership with her writer-husband Henry Kuttner, produced the Jirel of Joiry series of female freebooter science fantasies, and the Northwest Smith series (leaning a bit more, with its male protagonist, into traditional sf adventure), but also such definitive sf work as "No Woman Born" (almost certainly a key influence on Anne McCaffrey's work) and "Vintage Season." Moore and Kuttner were so enmeshed as writing partners that it has become both a parlor game and a scholarly grail to try to tell where one left off and the other began in such major stories under their joint pseudonym "Lewis Padgett" (best known for the classic story "Mismy were the Borogoves"), and even the work each signed just their own name to, that such matters are unlikely to ever be clearly settled. Brackett, too, was married to a major sf/fantasy writer, Edmond Hamilton, but their literary careers were rather more distinct, though they did collaborate on occasion. Gene Wolfe has been one of the most productive of the more complex writers of science-fantasy, since getting his start professionally in fiction in 1966, lavishing his frequently dense and allusive prose on matters of moral ambiguity and the state of humanity, most clangorously in The Book of the New Sun, a novel published in four volumes that has now seen both pendant books and sequelization at nearly as great length. And Peter Beagle was perhaps the "purist" of US fantasists to not be shunted into category publication throughout the first decade of his career, at least, as he began with A Fine and Private Place (1960), and his shorter work was published in The Atlantic Monthly and other relatively, if not actually hostile, than often fantasy-indifferent markets. Perhaps his most famous novel remains his second, The Last Unicorn (1968). His career since has ranged from Star Trek: The Next Generation scripting to Tolkien biography to further award-winning fantasy, though rather as with the adult work of William Kotzwinkle, much if not most of his publications over the last two decades have been tagged and marketed as fantasy fiction. Among other major writers of the era to mostly work in short form, mention must be made of John Collier (Fancies and Goodnights), Roald Dahl (Kiss, Kiss), Joan Aiken (The Green Flash), Harlan Ellison (Deathbird Stories), Ray Bradbury (Dark Carnival), Keith Roberts (Pavane and Anita) and Theodore Sturgeon (E Pluribus Unicorn), all of whom have done brilliant work in fantasy and horror fiction, and all of them have produced novels, though aside from Collier's three fantasticated novels, most of the relevant work by all these writers has been in novels for young readers, crime-fiction novels, or in Roberts and Sturgeon's cases sf novels (with only Sturgeon's last, controversial work, Godbody, being a straightforward fantasy).

And as I noted when I had to break off previously: Wow...this was meant to be a short take, a briefly annotated list, but the work will take over (I'll have to edit it down, eventually!). And I meant to cite some particularly undersung examples by each writer, though that's pretty tough for Leiber...a collection such as Shadows with Eyes or Night Monsters might have to be the example here (though certainly even The Book of Fritz Leiber has been out of print too long...it was notable how Leiber was perhaps the only writer in fantastic fiction to have three, arguably four career retrospectives published in the 1970s with little if any overlap: The Best of FL, The Worlds of FL, The Book of FL and its sequel, The Second Book of FL...and all of these have been out of print for far too long, not quite supplanted by further retrospective volumes since.

This will have to be continued, with the following writers to be particularly highlighted:

Joanna Russ
Ursula K. Le Guin
Avram Davidson
Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Yolen, with many others cited...
...or, at least, that's my plan...



Here's what I ended up posting on Friday over at Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest, in response to Maria Bamford's interview of Jackie (the second of two turnabout episodes):
At my blog, I finally tried to get down today the Quick and Dirty list of fantasy (and at least some sf) from people who were comparable to, and not imitative of, Tolkien, only to find myself beginning to write a long essay...but the writers I chose to suggest boil down to:
FRITZ LEIBER...book to start with, SWORDS AND DEVILTRY (or ILL MET IN LANKHMAR, in its revised edition); alternate/sf novel to start with: THE BIG TIME (borderline horror/fantasy to start with, in the Kafka/Philip Dick mode, only before Dick started publishing: YOU'RE ALL ALONE).
JOANNA RUSS...book to start with: THE ADVENTURES OF ALYX; alternate/sf novel to start with: THE FEMALE MAN.
AVRAM DAVIDSON...book to start with: THE ENQUIRIES OF DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY (or THE ADVENTURES OF DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY, in its expanded edition). Alternate/sf novel to start with: MASTERS OF THE MAZE. Alternate historical fantasy, written with his ex-wife Grania Davis, MARCO POLO AND THE SLEEPING BEAUTY.
JANE YOLEN...novel to start with: BRIAR ROSE. Alternates to start with...nearly any of her collections (she does tend to excel in short forms).
JACK VANCE...book to start with: THE DYING EARTH and its three loose sequels, starting with THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; alternate sf novel to start with: among so many, THE LANGUAGES OF PAO. The LYONESSE trilogy is definitely worth looking into.
URSULA K. LE GUIN (seems particularly unlikely you haven't given her a spin, but just in case)...book to start with: A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA. Alternate sf to start with: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. Alternate science-fantasy border straddler: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN.
JORGE LUIS BORGES...book to start with: well, the closest things to novels this extraordinarily influential writer offered were the collections of linked stories in THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY and, with Adolfo Bioy-Casares, SIX CASES FOR DON ISIDRO PARODI (the latter parodic, slightly fantasticated crime fiction). But the stories in such collections as LABYRINTHS and THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES: 1933-69 are often mindblowing.
I should at least add Leigh Brackett and Gene Wolfe...(Ms.) C. L. Moore and Peter Beagle...Sylvia Townsend Warner and Italo Calvino...you know how it goes.



For more conventional book-recommendation essays, please see the links and examples at Patti Abbott's blog

Thanks for all the continued support, and no calls to the carpet...this has been a week or so full of fun busy-ness, fighting the change of seasons colds and or allergic fun, and less pleasant surprises, capped yesterday by a compact fluorescent bulb popping open and vaporizing its mercury and other content into the breathing parts of my face...I chose to see it as metaphor. Unlike, say, Bruce/David Banner or Peter Parker, this quick adventure with the elements has given me no notable advantages, but does remind me that there are things that need to be attended to...

Anne Billson: Female Ghosts

Bill Crider: Trouble in Paradise[trailer]; Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the film)[trailer];Tales of the Gold Monkey [opening montage]

Brian Arnold: ABC-TV fall preview promotions from the early 1980s; Tales of Terror (1962 film)

BV Lawson: Media Murder; and another; and another

Dan Stumpf: Ouanga 

David Vineyard: Because of the Cats; Street of Chance

Ed Lynskey: Two O'Clock Courage; The Mob; The Seven-Ups

Elizabeth Foxwell: Candleshoe; The Emperor's Candlesticks; "The Law in Postcards"; Gideon's Way (television); "The Pulps"

Evan Lewis: The Outlaws is Coming; Where the Pulps Had Been Published; Philip Marlowe, Private Eye:"Finger Man"; Return of the Lash

George Kelley: The Far Pavilions (television); The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby; The Rockford Files Season 2; What If?; Babette's Feast

Jonathan Lewis: Cheyenne (the film); The Juggler; The Stranger Wore a Gun; Teenage Caveman; Ride Clear of Diablo; Charlie Chan in Paris; Trail Street; Wichita Town (television)

Michael Shonk: Blue Thunder (television series)

Steve Lewis: Horror Island; Woman in the Dark

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for this week's list of links to others' reviews!

FFB: THE STORY OF STORY MAGAZINE by Martha Foley (assembled and notes added in part by Jay Neugeboren), W.W. Norton 1980

Jay Neugeboren, in his introduction to the published form of Foley's memoirs in progress at the time of her death, notes the dire state she found herself in, barely getting by on her royalties from editing Best American Short Stories (after four decades at that desk, she had taken over from the founding editor, her friend, after he was killed in England by Nazi bombing from the air), mourning the death of her son (who had been a drug addict, apparently a heroin junkie), isolated and ailing. Which seems very strange indeed, given the breadth of her early career, before and during founding and editing Story (or, as she always refers to it, STORY...all caps and in italics), and leaving Story to take on the BASSpositionand divorcing Whit Burnett, who kept the magazine they had co-founded (and ran it into the ground, though also saw it revived fleetingly twice before his death and the eventual revival of the title for a decade by the Writer's Digest people).


Incomplete as the account is, Foley had packed a lot of living into her first decades, beginning her memoirs with a reminiscence of lonely and abused childhood after her parents became seriously ill and had to place Foley and siblings with resentful relatives (or other surrogates), but loving the legacy of the library her parents had assembled, which traveled with the younger Foleys. Not long after high school, Alice Paul finds Foley doing some small tasks at the Socialist Party hq in New York, when coming over with other Women's Party activists looking for reinforcements to protest that antifeminist crusader, Woodrow Wilson, returning from Europe (particularly amusing when we consider how famously his wife would be the voice of the, and probably the acting, President in his ill last years (he is easily among our most overrated Presidents); Foley, Paul and the other protestors were jailed but not processed, and Foley's firsthand career investigating the corruption of the larger society had begun. She would be drawn into journalism, working with Cornelius Vanderbilt in Los Angeles (and serving as one of the key editors on CV's paper there), meeting Whit Burnett and moving with him to New York and then onto foreign correspondence for major papers in Paris and Vienna, and beginning to publish Story in the face of the early 1930s narrowing of the short-fiction markets, particularly among the more intellectual and arty generalist magazines (Mencken and Nathan's move from the fiction-heavy The Smart Set to the essay-oriented The American Mercury being a key impetus, another being the closure of the key experimental little magazine transition to fiction, rather than poetry, just before Foley and Burnett took the plunge). Meanwhile, Story would publish the first stories, and later work, of folks ranging from John D. MacDonald to J. D. Salinger, Zora Neale Hurston to William Saroyan, (almost) Ernest Hemingway and his inspiration, Gertrude Stein (neither of whom Foley was ever terribly impressed with as people) to (definitely) Nelson Algren (whom she liked enormously till his public rudeness about his affair with Simone de Beauvoir), Carson McCullers to John Cheever, Kay Boyle to Erskine Caldwell, Peter de Vries to Norman Mailer. While building this legacy, she developed long friendships the likes of fellow reporter and historian William Shirer and a banker turned writer/publisher who was going by Rex Stout (and introduced him to the model

note Foley credits her son with co-editing

for Nero Wolfe...Foley suspects Stout modeled Archie Goodwin on himself). 

And as incomplete as this review is under the current circumstances, most of this book is written in great good humor (with the necessary seriousness brought to many issues of the times, and nostalgia never allowed to go unchecked) and touches on the careers and Foley's interactions with many more folks than I cite here (hell, Neugeboren, in going through the notes and the completed majority of the manuscript, finds himself wondering what happened to such Foley discoveries as A. I. Bezzerides--apparently no film buff, Jay). Eminently rewarding, as well as sobering as one considers how Foley's late life was spent.

 

 

FFM: some first issues of fantasy magazines

Actually, the second issue, 1950, w/expanded title... Cover by George Salter

This week, the "forgotten" books links are being compiled by Evan Lewis (who goes by Dave Lewis in some circumstances) at his blog, Davy Crockett's Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West. I'll be hosting the links the following Friday, and then Evan, and then me, and one more pass before founder Patti Abbott can regain access to reliable blog-propagation

Meanwhile, I hope I shall be able to put my mind back together for next week's links, but it's currently blown by the ease with which I was able to find information on three or four books online which had been eluding me for years, when I cast about for substitutes for the book I intended to do this week, which I haven't had time to finish, much less think about even long enough for a slapdash entry. Managing to dig out information on such somewhat enigmatic and/or influential books on my young reading as Eric Berger's anthology For Boys Only or Emile Schurmacher's Strange Unsolved Mysteries (and further discovering that this journeyman writer had a diverse if obscure career, writing paperback originals, men's sweat magazine articles and, earlier, for Collier's, as well as for the tv series Coronado 9--and, apparently, his daughter became a sort of small-time newspaper magnate) or Nancy Faulkner's Witches Brew could've made for a decent entry...if any of these books but the Berger were actually good...and remarkable the paths this kind of engine-searching can take one down, so that coming across a Reader's Digest imitation called This Month led indirectly to Pacific, a literary magazine at Mills College, indexed by Dennis Lien at the FictionMags Index pages, that published such diversely influential people on my life as Charles Neider (he of the large Mark Twain collections from Doubleday that I plunged through when about 10), Woody Guthrie, George P. Elliott and a slew of major poets, and Iola Brubeck, already married to husband Dave who was just starting to catch fire in the SF Bay area as a jazz musician and composer. Perhaps it's notable that Fantasy Records, formed to offer recordings of Brubeck's bands, stole its first label logo from the Salter-designed title logotype of F&SF.

But, for now, what I'm going to do is steal an excellent notion Evan has been engaging in at his blog, in showing early issue covers (in all their often off-point glory) of such important magazines as Weird Tales (a magazine that in its first year was only a very poor representative of how great and important it would become--not altogether unlike Black Mask in its first year), and run some of the covers from the subsequent first issues I have read...with some bare-bones comments I hope to augment later. 

Thanks to Evan for the inspiration...and apologies for any encroachment!  One thing I note in looking at the issues below, is how often some of the same bylines appear in various first issues  (and, with some stretching, including the second for F&SF)...Manly Wade Wellman, H. L. Gold,  Kris Neville, Theodore Sturgeon, Damon Knight...of course, all were either major writers, even if at the time up and comers, or in Gold's case, and perhaps in Neville's as well, examples of people who could've done even better as writers if they'd allowed themselves, or if life had allowed them, to do so...

1949; cover by Bill Stone

F&SF began life with a slightly goofy-looking photo cover (stablemate EQMM's photo covers were a mixed bag as well), and an issue that featured Theodore Sturgeon's charming, funny sf story "The Hurkle is a Happy Beast" (so the immediate expansion of the title wasn't too taxing) and a slew of reprints...Perceval Landon's "Thurnley Abbey" being the one which resonated enough with Ramsey Campbell to make his Fine Frights rarities anthology...though I remember enjoying that story, I can't for the life of me remember details.

The second issue includes Ray Bradbury's revised "The Exiles" (which had in an earlier form, "The Mad Wizards of Mars," appeared in the Canadian magazine Maclean's) and Damon Knight's first story he was proud to claim, "Not with a Bang," a solid, grim joke story in the mode of his "To Serve Man"...and a more distinctively F&SF cover, by the staff genius, George Salter. (And...the first Gavagan's Bar story by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp...and a fine Robert Arthur, in his "Murchison Morks" series...and the first and best of the Papa Schimmelhorn stories by R. Bretnor...all firmly establishing a fine tall-tale tradition of fantasy and borderline sf in the magazine. Interesting how much of the horror fiction in the first two issues comes from reprints...but there was so much more good horror fiction to reprint than either gentler fantasies or sf.)


The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949
Publisher: Mystery House, Inc. (The American Mercury, essentially, and Mercury Mystery, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and offshoots)

• 3 • Introduction (The Magazine of Fantasy, Fall 1949) • essay by Lawrence E. Spivak
• 6 • Bells on His Toes • short story by Cleve Cartmill
• 18 • Thurnley Abbey • (1908) • short story by Perceval Landon
• 32 • Private - Keep Out! • short story by Philip MacDonald
• 47 • The Lost Room • (1858) • short story by Fitz-James O'Brien
• 62 • The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast • short story by Theodore Sturgeon
• 70 • Review Copy • short story by Anthony Boucher [as by H. H. Holmes ]
• 80 • Men of Iron • (1940) • short story by Guy Endore
• 87 • A Bride for the Devil • short story by Stuart Palmer (1905-1968)
• 95 • Rooum • (1910) • short story by Oliver Onions
• 108 • Perseus Had a Helmet • [Captain McGrail] • (1938) • shor tstory by Richard Sale
• 122 • Cartoon: "On the way home from school I noticed a small speck in the sky .. ". • (0000) • interior artwork by David Pascal
• 123 • In the Days of Our Fathers • short story by Winona McClintic

• 3 • The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out • [Schimmelhorn] • shortstory by Reginald Bretnor [as by R. Bretnor ]
• 17 • The Return of the Gods • (1948) • short story by Robert M. Coates
• 29 • Every Work Into Judgment • short story by Kris Neville
• 36 • Time, Real and Imaginary • (1803) • poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• 37 • A Rope for Lucifer • short story by Walt Sheldon
• 50 • The Last Generation? • (1946) • short story by Miriam Allen deFord
• 61 • Postpaid to Paradise • [Murchison Morks] • (1940) • short story by Robert Arthur
• 74 • The Exiles • (1949) • short story by Ray Bradbury
• 89 • My Astral Body • (1895) • short story by Anthony Hope
• 95 • Gavagan's Bar • [Gavagan's Bar] • shor tstory by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
• 105 • Recommended Reading (F&SF, Winter-Spring 1950) • [Recommended Reading] • essay by The Editors
• 105 •   Review: What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown • review by The Editors
• 106 •   Review: The World Below by S. Fowler Wright • review by The Editors
• 106 •   Review: Without Sorcery by Theodore Sturgeon • review by The Editors
• 106 •   Review: The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1949 by T. E. Dikty and Everett F. Bleiler • review by The Editors
• 106 •   Review: The Conquest of Space by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley • review by The Editors
• 106 •   Review: Honey for the Ghost by Louis Golding • review by The Editors
• 107 •   Review: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg • review by The Editors
• 107 •   Review: The Ghostly Tales of Henry James by Henry James • review by The Editors
• 107 •   Review: Gallery of Ghosts by James Reynolds • review by The Editors
• 108 • World of Arlesia • short story by Margaret St. Clair
• 115 • The Volcanic Valve • [Van Wagener] • (1897) • short story by W. L. Alden (variant of A Volcanic Valve)
• 123 • Not With a Bang • short story by Damon Knight

1939; cover by H.W. Scott

The first issue has the cover novel by Russell, and, perhaps even more brilliant, "Trouble with Water" by H. L. Gold and "Where Angels Fear..." by Manly Wade Wellman. Unz.org lets you read this issue. John W. Campbell, already well on his way to revolutionizing the sf field with his work as editor of Astounding Science Fiction, reportedly in his heart of hearts preferred fantasy fiction, or at least seized upon the excuse of the relatively paranoid premise of Russell's novel (which is sf by any reasonable measure) to launch a magazine that would specialize in the kind of one-fantasticated-element fantasy that H. G. Wells and , latterly, Thorne Smith had specialized in (Smith being a consistent bestseller before his rather early death, in the years just before this magazine's founding). Despite encouraging better-written and, famously, more realistically extrapolated (or "hard") sf in his sf magazine, JWC was also a lifelong fan of fringe science, and would also push that in both fiction and nonfictional work in the magazine...with some not altogether healthy effects, eventually. His colleague, Ray Palmer, at Ziff-Davis's fiction magazines, tended to push rather more adventure-oriented and stereotypically "pulpy" fiction, but also had some interest in fringe science and mysticism that would eventually make its mark in his magazines, and beyond...Palmer was one of the great early advocates of UFOs as alien visitors, for example. Palmer would eventually leave fiction-magazine publishing (per se) in favor of such titles as Fate, and turn his last sf magazine, Other Worlds, into Flying Saucers from Other Worlds for its last issues.

Feature Novel 
Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell, pp. 9-94 - PDF

Short Stories 
Who Wants Power? by Mona Farnsworth, pp. 95-106 - PDF
Dark Vision by Frank Belknap Long, pp. 107-116 - PDF
Trouble With Water by H.L. Gold, pp. 117-130 - PDF
"Where Angels Fear---" by Manly Wade Wellman, pp. 131-136 - PDF
Closed Doors by A.B.L. Macfadyen, Jr., pp. 137-150 - PDF
Death Sentence by Robert Moore Williams, pp. 151-164 - PDF 

Cover by H.W. Scott, - PDF

1939; cover by Rudolph Belarski

Strange Stories is my entry for this title at the PulpWiki; as noted there, it was founded in 1939, a very good year for fantasy-fiction pulp titles in the US (Unknown, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, and the originally sf-oriented Fantastic Adventures were all launched that year, as well, as was Startling Stories at the same house as Strange, though Startling would last much longer and only very occasionally mix in anything more fantasy than sf). The Thrilling Group didn't seem to have much faith in this title...Mort Weisinger's editorial byline was nowhere in evidence  (and they folded the magazine as soon as he left to edit DC Comics), it didn't get house ads with the sf title Thrilling Wonder Stories nor its other stablemates, and while it wasn't a first-rate magazine to judge by the first issue, the only one I've read, it was certainly on par with their other titles under Weisinger. Even the cover of this issue is more suggestive, to me at least, of the "shudder" pulps, which emphasized fake-supernatural villains often torturing (with graphic description) their victims--S&M Scooby-Doo fiction, as it's often been referred to (and it has had some continuing influence and heirs). The Manly Wade Wellman story is the best here (and the best-remembered work the magazine would publish), though the pair each from Bloch and Kuttner are certainly pleasant enough, though not by any means either writer at the top of his game.

From ISFDb: Contents:

• 15 • The Singing Shadows • novelette by Vincent Cornier
• 41 • The Curse of the House • short story by Robert Bloch
• 52 • Eyes of the Serpent • short story by August Derleth and Mark Schorer [as by Mark Schorer and August W. Derleth ]
• 69 • The Invaders • short story by Henry Kuttner [as by Keith Hammond ]
• 80 • Changeling • short story by Manly Wade Wellman
• 87 • The Sorcerer's Jewel • short story by Robert Bloch [as by Tarleton Fiske ]
• 97 • Major McCrary's Vision • short story by Ralph Milne Farley
• 102 • The Frog • short story by Henry Kuttner
• 112 • Servant of Satan • novella by Otis Adelbert Kline

1952; cover by Barye Phillips and Leo Summers

Fantastic, of course, would end up serving as one of the most durable of fantasy-fiction magazines in the US, and two years after its founding in 1952 was merged with Fantastic Adventures, giving it roots going back, as noted above, to 1939. But it was launched as a departure by publishers Ziff-Davis and editor Howard Browne (also a writer who a bit of a Raymond Chandler disciple), who had been noting the falling fortunes of their pulp line (by 1952, they had folded all but FA and their sf title Amazing Stories; such once-profitable items as Mammoth Mystery and Mammoth Adventure were long gone), and they were well on their way to becoming what Ziff-Davis/ZD has been over the decades since, a publisher of large-format specialized nonfiction magazines (and their offshoots on cable television and the web)...but B.G. Davis, particularly, had an affection for fiction magazines, and Browne, who had succeeded Ray Palmer as fiction magazine editor for ZD, was never a great fan of sf, and particularly pulp sf, and more than game to attempt a semi-slick new fantasy/sf magazine that might feature crime-fiction crossover appeal...Ziff-Davis had even had aborted plans to remake Amazing thus in 1950, going as far as to produce an "ashcan" (non-distributed dummy) issue of what that might look like, but they waited till launching Fantastic to remake Amazing as its slightly less-interesting twin (Amazing's first semi-slick issue had as a cover story a sfnal joke, theoretically written by then-hot gossip-mongers Lait and Mortimer, called "Mars Confidential!"...in the manner of their bestselling books such as New York Confidential! and such, which presumably lent their name to the hugely successful Confidential! magazine soon thereafter). Fantastic got the big prize in its first year, a story from Mickey Spillane (easily the bestselling fiction writer in the world at the time) which had been mentioned in a Life magazine profile of Spillane...and there was part of the rub, the story Spillane submitted was apparently 1) completely "spoiled" in the Life article and 2) extremely awful, by Browne's lights, so he ghosted another (much to Spillane's apparent eventual irritation), "The Veiled Woman," and the third issue of Fantastic reportedly sold over 300,000 copies (an enormous amount for a fiction magazine at any time). The Browne is a good pastiche that only rarely ventures over into parody. But, for this first issue, Browne's relatively nonchalant attitude toward sf and perhaps editing generally was still on display...for the fiction, while paid for at a then impressive 5c/word (the other US fiction magazines in sf and fantasy were then able to pay 3c/word as their regular top rate, and most didn't pay that well), was a very mixed bag:

Contents (from ISFDb)("fep" is front endpaper, or inside the front cover..."They Write" being author blurbs attributed to the writers themselves; a reproduction of Pierre Roy's painting "Danger on the Stairs" is on the back cover, an odd attempt at "class"):

• fep • They Write . . . • essay by Raymond Chandler
• fep • They Write . . . • essay by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• fep • They Write . . . • essay by Paul W. Fairman
• 4 • Six and Ten Are Johnny • novelette by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
• 4 • Six and Ten Are Johnny • interior artwork by Virgil Finlay
• 40 • For Heaven's Sake • short story by Sam Martinez
• 40 • For Heaven's Sake • interior artwork by David Stone
• 53 • Cartoon: "Young man, this is not the smoking compartment" • interior artwork by uncredited
• 54 • "Someday They'll Give Us Guns" • short story by Paul W. Fairman
• 54 • "Someday They'll Give Us Guns" • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Ed Emsler ]
• 59 • Cartoon: "Has anyone reported a missing link?" • interior artwork by Germanetti
• 62 • Full Circle • shortstory by H. B. Hickey
• 62 • Full Circle • interior artwork by Ed Valigursky
• 64 • The Runaway • short story by Louise Lee Outlaw
• 64 • The Runaway • interior artwork by Robert Kay
• 76 • The Opal Necklace • short story by Kris Neville
• 76 • The Opal Necklace • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by L. R. Summers ]
• 87 • Cartoon: "Yes?" • interior artwork by Frank Adams
• 90 • The Smile • short story by Ray Bradbury
• 90 • The Smile • interior artwork by Lawrence [as by L. Sterne Stevens ]
• 96 • And Three to Get Ready... • short story by H. L. Gold
• 96 • And Three to Get Ready... • interior artwork by David Stone
• 106 • What If • shortstory by Isaac Asimov (variant of What If . . .)
• 119 • Professor Bingo's Snuff • novella by Raymond Chandler
• 119 • Professor Bingo's Snuff • (1951) • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Leo Ramon Summers ]
• bc • "Danger on the Stairs" • artwork by Pierre Roy

1953; cover by Richard Powers

Of course, one of the inspirations to Ziff-Davis in attempting a "slicker" set of fiction magazines was the breakout commercial as well as artistic success of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, launched 1950, with H. L. Gold as editor. Magazines which are in the black financially within the first several issues were as rare then as they are now, and Galaxy had made every effort to have a sophisticated package of design and content, though being published on relatively lesser-grade paper hampered that a bit. Gold, like Browne, only less casually so, (and like Campbell, probably) preferred good fantasy even to good sf, and a few years into Galaxy's run was secure enough to attempt an Unknown-like companion to the sf title...the then-smashing success of Fantastic for ZD probably didn't hinder the timing of Beyond's release, in 1953, with a cover format that aped that of Galaxy (only with a black half-border around the cover illustration rather than a white one), and a first cover from Richard Powers, in his Surrealist (particurlarly Tanguy)-influenced mode. 

Contents (from ISFDb):

 

FFB: THE AVON BOOK OF MODERN WRITING (1953) and No. 2 (1954) ed. William Phillips & Philip Rahv, among other "paperback magazines"/periodical books

In 1953, Avon Books decided to join in on the "literary magazine of original content in paperback format" fun already in progress at least at New American Library's Mentor line, with their New World Writing, and at Pocket Books, with their slightly younger series of anthologies, Discovery, edited or co-edited for six volumes/issues by Vance Bourjaily. Avon more than most publishers played both the digest-sized magazine and paperback book sides of the fence simultaneously in the 1940s and into the 1950s...along with Murder Mystery Monthly and Donald Wollheim's Avon Fantasy Reader and Avon Science Fiction Reader (later merged as Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader in a fit of creative energy), Avon both assembled, and reprinted others', anthologies and collections of contemporary mimetic fiction, and published them both in and out of the Modern Short Story Monthly sequence of arguably books, arguably magazine issues, including publications collecting short stories of authors such as Louis Bromfield and Somerset Maugham, and anthologies such as the one edited anonymously for (UK) Faber hardcover publication in 1929 as My Best Story and reissued by Avon in 1942 as The Avon Book of Modern Short Stories.
But, by 1953, with "mass market"-format paperbacks clearly making greater inroads in the market (this was the format favored by such industry leaders as Bantam and Pocket, after all), and the Mentor and Pocket "prestige" anthology series noted above already launched, Avon recruited Partisan Review editors Phillips and Rahv to select a mix of fiction, essays and criticism, and poetry for Avon's own entry into this sweepstakes; the first volume was highlighted by first publication of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find", along with critical material by Diana Trilling and Irving Howe, other fiction by Robert Musil and Robie Macauley and others, an excerpt from Colette's memoirs, and Lysander Kemp and Barbara Howes as two of "Six Poets" featured. The packaging fell somewhere between the ugly but functional early New World Writing covers, which would list their volume's entire contents, and the somewhat Mondrian-influenced covers favored by the Pocket Books series (please see below). Mentor's self-congratulatory tags--"Good reading for the millions"--were not as much in evidence on the Avon volumes, perhaps in part because Avon was never as invested as NAL in snob appeal, even with this project, seeming as it did like a beefier and much better-distributed version of the editors' typical issues of Partisan Review.


The second volume/issue of the Avon, despite apparently selling a decent but unspectacular (by early '50s paperback standards) half-million copies between them, would be the last for Avon, and featured an even more impressive lineup of fiction, including first English translation (by Anthony Kerrigan) of Jorge Luis Borges's fantasy "Funes the Memorious", an excerpt from Mary McCarthy's The Group, and work by Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Alberto Moravia and Elizabeth Hardwick (and a memoir by Herman Hesse, and critical writing by rightwing icon Hilton Kramer) among many others. (As noted, Pocket had pulled the plug on Discovery after the sixth issue/volume, in 1955, after two years; New World Writing would continue to appear from Mentor till 1960, with an improving set of covers eventually, then from 1960 through 1964, beginning with the 16th issue/volume and ending with the 22nd, NWW would be published in a paperback line J.B. Lippincott might have created for that purpose.) Aside from such smaller publishers' periodical books such as New Directions, from the imprint of the same name, or such no-bones-about-it magazines as Evergreen Review, the paperback publishers would limit themselves to one-shot original anthologies in contemporary-mimetic fiction (such as Lion Books had done in the early '50s) till the latter '60s, and NAL, this time through the Signet imprint, getting back into the market with New American Review (and competitors of sorts such as the Book of the Month Club's Works in Progress--and it's notable that NAL would let New American Review go, as well, to be published first by Simon and Schuster [though not as a Pocket Book, amusingly, Pocket having been an offshoot of S&S and reunited as its primary paperback line in 1966, but as an S&S Touchstone imprint offer], and then, after several years, by Bantam as American Review).

Not yet seen by me (but now on order) was the third volume, which in the frequent tradition of such things skipped houses on over to Berkley, to become The Berkley Book of Modern Writing, for its last issue/volume.

So, it's probably a pity that no more Avon (or Berkley)/Moderns were issued, but anything slated for a fourth volume presumably appeared in Partisan Review instead...and at least these, and their Pocket and NAL counterparts, were reaching for a period in the early '50s an audience at least fifty times greater than those of such little magazines as Partisan or Hudson Review or The Paris Review (founded at about the same time)...while Ballantine Books did something similar with Frederik Pohl's Star Science Fiction series, and a very few others flourished (I'm not aware of any similar western series, for example, and such British annuals as Winter's Tales and Winter's Crimes, beginning in the latter 1950s, had rather haphazard penetration of the US market....)

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


#7 was the most legendary of issues/volumes of NWW, featuring working-title excerpts of Catch-22 and, as by "Jean-Louis", of On the Road.






***It's also notable, to me at least, how much scrambled information there is online and in print about these series, with at least one source insisting that New American Library/Mentor published New World Writing through 1964, another that NWW folded in 1959 (Mentor's last volume, and Lippincott's first, appeared in 1960); information on Discovery and the Avon/Berkley Book of Modern Writing trio might be less inaccurate, but that's mostly because there's even less of it...




















At bottom, Partisan Review and Avon books from PR from 1953-54; then, two of the four volumes of Story magazine's early 1950s parallel adventure in book publishing, apparently, much as with Whispers magazine and anthology series in the '70s and '80s, the Story volumes might've mixed new fiction with selections from the magazine issues...and they were published by Ace Books owner A. A. Wyn, possibly in tandem with David McKay for the first volume...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FFB (or magazine in book format): NEW WORLD WRITING 16: Tillie Olsen, Thomas Pynchon, Anne Sexton, Kingsley Amis, et alia...edited by Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith (LIppincott Keystone 1960)

New World Writinghad been the New American Library's pioneering literary magazine in mass-market paperback book format for fifteen Mentor-imprint (smugly branded "good reading for the millions") volumes beginning in 1951, and then decamped for seven volumes to Lippincott and their somewhat more expensive paperback line, starting with this issue (and its amateurish cover) and folding in 1964.  And while the Mentor editions usually had longer tables of contents than the Lippincott anthologies, this first issue for the new decade has what could be fairly called a rather impressive line-up:

from WorldCat, augmented:
5 * Editor's Note / Richardson & Smith
11 * Tell me a riddle / Tillie Olsen --
58 * Lolita Lepidoptera / Diana Butler --
85 * Low-lands / Thomas Pynchon --
109 * Five poems / Irving Feldman --
115 * Three lonely men / Leslie Garrett (excerpt from The Faces of Hatred and Love...probably that which was published, with serious revision, as The Beasts)
135 * You that love England / Kingsley Amis --
146 * Dancing the jig / Anne Sexton --
154 * Martin the fisherman / John Knowles --
163 * A penny for the ferryman / John F. Gilgun --
188 * A season in paradise / E.N. Sargent --
223 * You have to draw a line somewhere / Judson Jerome --
231 * The law and Lady Chatterly / Harriet F. Pilpel and Nancy F. Wechsler --
241 * The credence table / Jack Richardson --
278 * Two poems / Jack Marshall --
282 * The listener / John Berry

...which thus includes, in their first publication, Olsen's most famous work of fiction, Butler's first published essay (a well-made case that Nabokov's most famous work of fiction is quite intentionally as much about his passion for butterflies as it is a study of pedophilia or a travelogue of the US), Pynchon's second published short story, Sexton's first published short story, and so on through Berry's brief recounting of a charming anecdote remade into not quite a fable.

I've not yet had the opportunity to read most of the second half of this issue yet, though am amused to see, for example, that John Knowles (best remembered for the novel A Separate Peace) was an editor at Holiday magazine, and wonder how well he got on with staff writer Alfred Bester (they might've even dated, for what little I know, if one dated per se in those still unfriendly times). The Olsen was a remarkable and for me rather painful read (as it's about a married couple, parents of adult children, facing their last years with little hope for happiness for either, and the protagonist being a woman who had never managed to live the life she had expected to, after early political adventure and imprisonment, only to find herself limited to a life in service to a husband she's not completely bitterly estranged from, though habituated to, and children she could never find complete fulfillment in raising nor feel comfortable actually interacting with as adults)(this is rather close to my own family situation in several ways at the moment)...it's told also in a rather discursive and personalized style that has not been too widely imitated since, distinctive even in comparison to those other writers who've taken a similar tack with the form of their narrative.

The Pynchon is very funny, and if rather indicative of a young man's attempt to take in the estate of a middle-aged married couple, is still energetic and charming in a way that, say, John Kennedy Toole's rather contemporaneous A Confederacy of Dunces is usually credited with...this is how to do antic for adults correctly...Pynchon's affinity with another, somewhat older contemporary, R. A. Lafferty, becomes somewhat clearer than I've recalled previously, and there's yet another reason to be sorry it took Lafferty till middle-age to begin writing for the likes of New Mexico Quarterly and Science Fiction (the magazine of that title, also an important early market for the likes of Carol Emshwiller and peripherally for Edward Hoch)...

The Sexton is unsurprisingly almost a prose-poem, and Poetry magazine or American Poetry Review today might be willing to publish it as a poem in prose format...the unnamed protagonist is dancing at an otherwise dull dinner party, and a chair catches her eye, manages to remind her of her tense childhood and particularly of one dinner among many with a controlling mother and a distant, alcoholic father. (As Philip Larkin noted at about this time, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do....")

And in the course of calling Brit expatriate writers (and presumably other artists) back home to fight the Gray Tories and other similar things, Kingsley Amis notes that he finds the totality of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One false, even if every detail is true.  Well, it won't be the last time Amis is wrong, if he is.

I'll be finishing this and reporting on the balance. For more prompt and complete reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Related posts:
FFB: THE AVON BOOK OF MODERN WRITING (1953) and No. 2 (1954) ed. William Phillips & Philip Rahv, among other "paperback magazines"/periodical books

 

fantasy magazines, late March, 1965

The first set is comprised of what could've been found on a theoretical Very well-stocked newsstand (as some were) in late March, 1965...the English-language professional magazines specializing in publishing fantasy fiction (though all of the science fiction and mystery magazines were not averse to publishing some fantasy or horror or at least material running up to the very edges, nor the eclectic fiction magazines, of which there were a few non-littles still extant at that time...). For some reason, the March issues, or the earlier issues in each case, have somewhat better covers...either better-executed, or better subjects, or perhaps just a touch less blatantly sleazy in Gamma's case. Some of he second set might just have been on the stands instead, given the vagaries of magazine distribution...and certainly the undercapitalized Gamma (which folded with the issued dated September) and the microbudgeted Magazine of Horror had erratic schedules (Gamma had announced a stablemate, crime-fiction magazine Chase, which was published by MOH's publisher instead...and was much less handsome for it).

Cover by Agosta Morol

Cover by Fred Wolters

Cover by Edmund Emshwiller("Emsh")

Cover by Gray Morrow

Cover by John Healey

Cover by Bert Tanner

The notable facts of these issues are several, not least that John Brunner appears in the April issue of the Magazine of Horror, and any number of other fantastic-fiction issues at about this time (as the always-prolific Brunner was working up to some of the best work in his career); the March F&SF features one of Roger Zelazny's most important early stories, while the April issue is perhaps most significant as the first issue that Edward Ferman edited on his own (even though his father, publisher Joseph Ferman, still had the formal title of "editor" as he had since Davidson's resignation the previous year), not "using up" the inventory that Avram Davidson had purchased for the magazine, and introducing Gahan Wilson's first monthly cartoon (Wilson had contributed cartoons to Fantastic in the 1950s, as well as having already made a career for himself in Playboy, The New Yorker and other slick magazines by 1965)...Southern Illinois University Press published a facsimile of this issue in hardcover, with added memoirs by several of the contributors including Ferman, in 1981. Meanwhile, these were almost the last issues edited by the similarly important Cele Lalli, who had begun editorship of Fantastic and its stablemate Amazing as Cele Goldsmith; when the magazines were sold at mid-year to independent publisher Sol Cohen, as Cele G. Lalli she would stay with Ziff-Davis as a notable editor of bridal magazines. Here's a decent appreciation for some of the early issues of the Magazine of Horror, which Robert A. W. Lowndes was able to keep afloat from 1963-1971, and a more comprehensive one here...and not long after these issues, edited by Kyril Bonfiglioli with the help of fellow writer and artist Keith Roberts, the British institution Science Fantasy would change title to SF Impulse...while its elder sibling, New Worlds, underwent similar changes and eventually even greater ones...
Indices courtesy ISFDb:

Science Fantasy, March 1965 

• Editor:Kyril Bonfiglioli
• Year: 1965-03-00
• Publisher:Roberts & Vinter Ltd.
• Price: 2/6
• Pages: 128
• Binding: mass-market paperback
• Type: MAGAZINE
• Contents
• 2 • Editorial (Science Fantasy, March 1965)• essay by Kyril Bonfiglioli
• 3 • The Outcast• novelette by Harry Harrison
• 31 • Song of the Syren• novelette by Robert Wells
• 61 • Moriarty• shortstory by Philip Wordley
• 73 • Bring Back a Life• novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham]
• 97 • The Jennifer• [Anita] • shortstory by Keith Roberts
• 97 •  The Jennifer• interior artwork by Keith Roberts [as by K. Roberts]
• 109 • A Cave in the Hills• shortstory by R. W. Mackelworth
• 122 • Hunt a Wild Dream (Part 1 of 2)• serial by D. R. Heywood 

• Title:  Science Fantasy, April 1965
• Editor:Kyril Bonfiglioli
• Year: 1965-04-00 
•  Contents
• 2 • Editorial (Science Fantasy, April 1965)• essay by Kyril Bonfiglioli
• 5 • Man in His Time• shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Brian Aldiss]
• 33 • The War at Foxhanger• [Anita] • shortstory by Keith Roberts
• 44 • The Chicken Switch• shortstory by Elleston Trevor
• 62 • Susan• shortstory by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan]
• 76 • The Excursion• novelette by Brian N. Ball [as by B. N. Ball]
• 117 • Over and Out• shortstory by George Hay
• 119 • Hunt a Wild Dream (Part 2 of 2)• serial by D. R. Heywood

  
Magazine of Horror, April 1965 

• Editor:Robert A. W. Lowndes
• Year: 1965-04-00
• Publisher:Health Knowledge, Inc. 
• Price: $0.50 
• Pages: 132 
• Binding: Digest  
• Contents
• The Garrison• (1965) • shortstory by Donald A. Wollheim [as by David Grinnell]
• Orpheus's Brother• (1965) • shortstory by John Brunner
• The Lady of the Velvet Collar• (1824) • shortstory by Washington Irving (variant of The Adventure of the German Student)
• Passeur• (1897) • shortstory by Robert W. Chambers
• The Dead Who Walk• (1931) • novella by Ray Cummings
• The Burglar-Proof Vault• (1965) • shortstory by Oliver Taylor
• Jack• (1965) • shortstory by Reynold Junker
• The Black Laugh• (1932) • shortstory by William J. Makin
• Cassilda's Song• (1895) • poem by Robert W. Chambers
• The Hand of Glory• (0000) • poem by Richard Harris Barham [as by Thomas Ingoldsby] 

• Title:  Magazine of Horror, June 1965 
• Editor:Robert A. W. Lowndes
• Year: 1965-06-00 
• Contents 
• 5 • The Night Wire• (1926) • shortstory by H. F. Arnold
• 12 • Sacrilege• (1965) • shortstory by Wallace West
• 27 • All the Stain of Long Delight• (1965) • shortstory by Jerome Clark
• 28 • Skulls in the Stars• [Solomon Kane] • (1929) • shortstory by Robert E. Howard
• 38 • The Photographs• (1900) • novelette by Richard Marsh
• 64 • The Distortion Out of Space• (1934) • shortstory by Francis Flagg
• 75 • Guarantee Period• (1965) • shortstory by William M. Danner
• 81 • The Door in the Wall• (1906) • shortstory by H. G. Wells
• 97 • The Three Low Masses• (1869) • shortstory by Alphonse Daudet (trans. of Les trois messes basses)
• 105 • The Whistling Room• [Carnacki (William Hope Hodgson)] • (1910) • shortstory by William Hope Hodgson

• Editors:Joseph W. Ferman (actually Edward Ferman)
• Year: 1965-03-00
• Publisher:Mercury Press, Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 132
• Binding: Digest 
• Contents
• 4 • The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth• novelette by Roger Zelazny
• 31 • Final Appeal• shortstory by Herbie Brennan [as by J. H. Brennan]
• 39 • Low-Level Weather• [The Science Springboard] • essay by Theodore L. Thomas
• 40 • Essentials Only• shortstory by Jack Sharkey
• 53 • Books (F&SF, March 1965)• [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Judith Merril
• 54 •   Review: The Rest of the Robots by Isaac Asimov• review by Judith Merril
• 54 •   Review: Sturgeon in Orbit by Theodore Sturgeon• review by Judith Merril
• 55 •   Review: Doctor to the Stars by Murray Leinster• review by Judith Merril
• 55 •   Review: Shock II by Richard Matheson• review by Judith Merril
• 56 •   Review: A Pail of Air by Fritz Leiber• review by Judith Merril
• 57 •   Review: The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith• review by Judith Merril
• 57 •   Review: Regan's Planet by Robert Silverberg• review by Judith Merril
• 57 •   Review: The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer• review by Judith Merril
• 58 •   Review: ESP, A Personal Memoir by Rosalind Heywood• review by Judith Merril
• 60 • The End of Eternity• shortstory by Ernesto Gastaldi
• 65 • Tripsych• shortstory by Ron Smith
• 70 • Illusion• poem by Walter H. Kerr
• 71 • Better Than Ever• shortstory by Alex Kirs
• 80 • Oh, East Is West and West Is East -• [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
• 90 • Ado About Nothing• shortstory by Robert K. Ottum [as by Bob Ottum, Jr.]
• 93 • Uncollected Works• shortstory by Lin Carter
• 103 • Maiden Voyage• novelette by J. W. Schutz
• 128 • The Dramatic Ray Bradbury• essay by uncredited

• Title:  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1965 
• Editor:Edward Ferman
• Year: 1965-04-00 
• Contents
• 5 • Arsenal Port• [Gunnar Heim] • novella by Poul Anderson
• 59 •  Cartoon: "This is Willy, and this is Willy's imaginary playmate."• interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
• 60 • Keep Them Happy• shortstory by Robert Rohrer
• 67 • Imaginary Numbers in a Real Garden• poem by Gerald Jonas
• 68 • Books (F&SF, April 1965)• [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Judith Merril
• 69 •   Review: The Day New York Went Dry by Charles Einstein• review by Judith Merril
• 70 •   Review: Sweeney's Island by John Christopher• review by Judith Merril
• 70 •   Review: The Mind Benders by James Kennaway• review by Judith Merril
• 71 •   Review: The Worlds of Robert F. Young by Robert F. Young• review by Judith Merril
• 71 •   Review: Short Friday and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer• review by Judith Merril
• 72 •   Review: The Spire by William Golding• review by Judith Merril
• 72 •   Review: The Ambidextrous Universe by Martin Gardner• review by Judith Merril
• 72 •   Review: The Fair by Robert Nathan• review by Judith Merril
• 73 •   Review: The 9th Annual of the Year's Best S-F by Judith Merril• review by Basil Davenport
• 75 • Blind Date• shortstory by T. P. Caravan [as by TP Caravan]
• 81 • The Ice Ages• [The Science Springboard] • essay by Theodore L. Thomas
• 82 • The History of Doctor Frost• shortstory by Roderic C. Hodgins
• 95 • Lord Moon• [Lord Moon] • shortstory by M. J. Engh [as by Jane Beauclerk]
• 104 • The Certainty of Uncertainty• [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
• 115 • Eyes Do More Than See• shortstory by Isaac Asimov
• 118 • Aunt Millicent at the Races• shortstory by Len Guttridge 

  
Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, March 1965

• Editor:Cele G. Lalli
• Year: 1965-03-00 
• Contents  
• 5 • Guest Editorial: Monsters & Monster-Lovers• essay by Fritz Leiber
• 6 • The Pillars of Chambalor• [Brak] • shortstory by John Jakes
• 7 •  The Pillars of Chambalor• interior artwork by Gray Morrow
• 22 • Mary, Mary• shortstory by John Baldwinson
• 31 • 102 H-Bombs• novelette by Thomas M. Disch
• 57 • Look Out Below• shortstory by Jack Sharkey
• 63 • The Headsman• novelette by Irvin Ashkenazy
• 98 • The Man Who Painted Tomorrow• shortstory by Kate Wilhelm
• 114 •   Review: Almuric by Robert E. Howard• review by Robert Silverberg
• 114 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, March 1965)• [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by Robert Silverberg
• 115 •   Review: The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson• review by Robert Silverberg
• 115 •   Review: The Day the World Ended by Sax Rohmer• review by Robert Silverberg
• 116 •   Review: Who Fears the Devil? by Manly Wade Wellman• review by Robert Silverberg
• 116 •   Review: Valley of the Flame by Henry Kuttner• review by Robert Silverberg

• Title: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, April 1965 
• Editor:Cele G. Lalli
• Year: 1965-04-00 
• Contents
• 6 • Editorial (Fantastic, April 1965)• essay by uncredited (presumably Norman Lobsenz)
• 7 • Bright Eyes• shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• 9 •  Bright Eyes• interior artwork by Dennis Smith
• 19 • The Purpose of Merlin• shortstory by Colin R. Fry
• 32 • The Other Side of Time (Part 1 of 3)• [Imperium• 2] • serial by Keith Laumer
• 89 • The Dreamer• shortstory by Walter F. Moudy
• 98 • Trouble with Hyperspace• shortstory by Jack Sharkey
• 101 • The Silk of Shaitan• [Brak] • shortstory by John Jakes
• 117 • Predator• shortstory by Robert Rohrer
• 125 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, April 1965)• [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by Robert Silverberg
• 125 •   Review: The Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu• review by Robert Silverberg
• 126 •   Review: The Radio Beasts by Ralph Milne Farley• review by Robert Silverberg
• 126 •   Review: The Blind Spot by Austin HallandHomer Eon Flint• review by Robert Silverberg
• 127 •   Review: Atlantida by Pierre Benoit• review by Robert Silverberg

Gamma,  February 1965 

• Editors:Charles E. Fritch, Jack Matcha
• Year: 1965-02-00
• Publisher:Star Press, Inc.
• Price: $0.50
• Pages: 132
• Binding: Digest 
• Contents
• 2 • Remember . . . .• essay by uncredited
• 3 • The Clutches of Ruin• novelette by H. B. Fyfe
• 38 • The Towers of Kagasi• shortstory by William P. Miller
• 55 • Food• shortstory by Ray Nelson
• 63 • Hans Off in Free Pfall to the Moon (abridged)• shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe (variant of Hans Phaall — A Tale 1835) [as by Edgar Allan Poeandunknown]
• 77 • The Gamma Interview: Forrest J. Ackerman• interview of Forrest J. Ackerman• interview by uncredited
• 84 • Open Season• shortstory by Jack Matcha [as by John Tanner]
• 96 • The Woman Astronaut• play by Robert Katz
• 101 • Happily Ever After• shortstory by William F. Nolan
• 106 • Don't Touch Me I'm Sensitive• shortstory by James Stamers
• 121 • The Hand of Dr. Insidious• shortstory by Ron Goulart

• Title:  Gamma,  September 1965 
• Editors:Charles E. Fritch, Jack Matcha
• Year: 1965-09-00
• Contents
• fep •  untitled• interior artwork by William F. Nolan
• 2 • Across the Editor's Desk• essay by uncredited
• 3 • Nesbit• novella by Ron Goulart
• 67 • Policy Conference• shortstory by Sylvia DeesandTed White
• 69 •  untitled• interior artwork by Luan Meatheringham
• 80 • Auto Suggestion• shortstory by Charles Beaumont
• 82 • Welcome to Procyon IV• shortstory by Charles E. Fritch [as by Chester H. Carlfi]
• 86 • Interest• shortstory by Richard Matheson
• 96 •  untitled• interior artwork by Bernie Zuber [as by Bernard Zuber]
• 97 • Lullaby and Goodnight• shortstory by George Clayton Johnson
• 102 • A Careful Man Dies• (1946) • shortstory by Ray Bradbury
• 115 • The Late Mr. Adams• (1955) • shortstory by Steve Allen
• 118 • Wet Season• shortstory by Dennis Etchison
• bep •  untitled• interior artwork by Burt Shonberg

Cover by Gray Morrow

Cover by Fred Wolters

Cover uncredited (perhaps a rush job by Keith Roberts)

Cover by John Healey,  which would be recycled much later by Mike Shayne  Mystery Magazine, then also under the editorship of Charles Fritch

FFB : Firsts: NEW BLACK MASK, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S ANTHOLOGY, NEW WORLD WRITING, TRIQUARTERLY, WORKS IN PROGRESS and other periodical books and littles

The last major subsets of "firsts" among the fiction magazines that got me hooked were arguably books, most of them...Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine for January, 1978 was the first adult fiction magazine purchased for me new, 75c and the best bargain in fiction magazines at the time. And, unusually for AHMM covers of the time, it was competently composed...and there were memorable stories from Lawrence Block and Jack Ritchie, particularly. Inasmuch as I'd already collected some mid-'60s back issues, and read a few more borrowed from the Enfield Central Library, I was given the funds to buy a subscription...and not too long after, I was able to procure a copy of the first Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, which many reference sources would prefer not to call a magazine, despite being issued periodically to newsstands by magazine publisher Davis Publications (who also issued Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and the Ellery Queen's Anthologies, which the Hitchcock item imitated), although a Dial Press hardcover edition was also published which tried to disguise the all-AHMM selections as one of the eclectic anthologies Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur would ghost for Hitchcock and Random House. These, instead, were edited by the magazine's editors...in the manner of the many previous Dell paperbacks taking their contents from AHMM. The early AHA issues/volumes had a Very rich backfile to draw on, so you can see how addictive they could be, as well...at about the same time, I was not only also picking up new issues of EQMM and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but was always happy to stumble over such treasures of the recent past as The Saint Mystery Magazine,,,and, several years later, in 1985, a clangourous new porject popped up, the New Black Mask, even as MSMM was beginning to go into its final tailspin, Each issue of New Black Mask, all published as books by HBJ, which would also sell you a subcription to the series just like a magazine, featured a remarkable mix of writers spanning the range of hardboiled and noir ficton and bit beyond. I actually picked up the last volum as NBM to keep first, then collected most of the rest as I catch could, and also the successor series, A Matter of Crime (after the trademark holders of Black Mask challenged NBM's right to use the title).

I started reading the eclectic little magazines (as distinct from fantasy-fiction littles such as Whispers), aside from arguably Short Story International (which was a nonprofit that used good paper and charged twices as much for itself per issue than most of the other fiction digests...but it was on newsstands, unlike most littles), with TriQuarterly, which in its first decade particularly was offering one great issue after another, particularly when Robert Onopa was associated with the magazine, in the latter '70s. A snobbish backlash over the SF issue (Algis Budrys, Ursula Le Guin, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany) severed most of the staff, including Onopa, from the magazine, which has yet to fully recover its quality of those years...the subscribers, I guess, had been pushed to their limits by the previous western (Dorothy Johnson, Cormac McCarthy, et al.), "Love and Hate," and other theme issues, including "Prose for Borges"and more. (TriQuarterly has gone web-only just recently.) Of course, even before I began reading the little magazines that were no-bones-about-it magazines (such as also The Paris Review and Antaeus...it took me a while to find The Ontario Review and Boulevard and the comparitively dull Story revival), I had found some of the periodical book/magazine projects that had begun in the 1950s, such as New World Writing (the 6th volume/issue featured a long excerpt from Louis Armstrong's memoirs, contemporary Japanese haiku in translation, and more),
and their modern descendents, such as the Doubleday Literary Guild loss-leader Works in Progress (which in the first issue I had offered the best chunk of Alix Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen). I tumbled to New Directions and New American Review (later simply American Review) and Evergreen Review (in those largely post-censorial times) not long after.
...come to think of it, mentioning Evergreen reminds me of two other categories of fiction magazine that I haven't quite yet nostalgically surveyed...the humorous and the erotic (the latter had quite a vogue in the '80s and '90s, ranging from Yellow Silk to Paramour, from Future Sex to Blue Blood).

Anne Bilson:  Preposterous thrillers

Bill Crider: What's Up, Tiger Lily?[trailer]; The Hospital [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Night of the Demons; Grave of the Vampire ...Countdown to Halloween

Apple products make working with Blogspot/Blogger a true misery. More on a PC soonly.

.

I picked up (either purchased or found in libraries) all these volumes (with the exception of the Pushcart item) 
back when, and I was fascinated not only by the contents in themselves but also by the choices made among the short fiction published in 1978, a good chunk of which I'd read. Looking at their contents now, I'm impressed, if not universally, any more than I was back then, by the contents. It's rather telling that the fantasy (and horror) volumes have no overlap or shared stories, and neither do the eclectic/contemporary mimetic volumes, but the sf volumes certainly do. Also notable to me, as it was then, how certain books demonstrate, if not the desire to include Names at the cost of quality, then at least a certain kindness or nostalgia toward some of the writers...certainly Terry Carr, in the first two volumes of his fantasy annual, included two of the worst Stephen King stories I've read...at least Gerald Page and Ed Hoch selected rather better, though not Year's Best, stories from King for their books. The Stephen Donaldson story was also not up to most of the rest of the Carr fantasy selections. Lin Carter likewise could let nostalgia and desire to play up Conan and such overwhelm his annual, but Arthur Saha, who would inherit the volume on his own after Carter's death, probably was already being felt in this volume in some of the more innovative choices.

Multiple appearances across several volumes include those of John Varley, with four appearances of two different stories (three reprints of "The Persistence of Vision"), three appearances with three different stories for Michael Bishop and Thomas Disch (the O. Henry volume was indexed for WorldCat by a proud fellow Minnesotan), three inclusions of two stories by Gregory Benford, likewise three inclusions for two stories by Joan D. Vinge, and, as noted, three appearances with three different stories by Stephen King. It really was a very good year for Disch and Bishop.

Among the particularly brilliant stories (among many) I remember are Dennis Etchison's "The Pitch" (Horror), Bill Pronzini's "In the Fog" (Detective),  Janet Fox's "Demon and Demoiselle" (Carter/Saha Fantasy), and Gregory Benford's squicky "In Alien Flesh" (several). John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision" certainly blew me (and the award voters) away in 1978 and into the next year, though even from the first reading it struck me as more fantasy than sf, and perhaps in more than one way (though Varley's sexual libertinism certainly struck a chord with 13yo me, and I'm somewhat in sympathy with that attitude still, with certain reservations).  Look at all that established and emerging talent in the Pushcart...and all the others...

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII ed. Gerald W. Page (DAW 0-87997-476-1, Jul ’79, $1.95, 221pp, pb)

• 7 · Introduction · Gerald W. Page· in
• 11 · The Pitch · Dennis Etchison· ss Whispers Oct ’78
• 20 · The Night of the Tiger · Stephen King· ss F&SF Feb ’78
• 34 · Amma · Charles R. Saunders· ss Beyond the Fields We Know Fll ’78
• 54 · Chastel [Lee Cobbett; Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant] · Manly Wade Wellman· nv *
• 78 · Sleeping Tiger · Tanith Lee· ss Dragonbane Spr ’78
• 87 · Intimately, with Rain · Janet Fox· ss Collage Nov ’78
• 94 · The Secret · Jack Vance· ss Impulse Mar ’66
• 103 · Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose · Charles L. Grant· ss F&SF Mar ’78
• 118 · Divers Hands [Julian] · Darrell Schweitzer· nv *
• 144 · Heading Home · Ramsey Campbell· ss Whispers Oct ’78
• 149 · In the Arcade · Lisa Tuttle· ss Amazing May ’78
• 159 · Nemesis Place [Dama (& Vettius)] · David Drake· ss Fantastic Apr ’78
• 173 · Collaborating · Michael Bishop· ss Rooms of Paradise, ed. Lee Harding, South Yarra, Victoria, Australia: Quartet Books, 1978
• 192 · Marriage · Robert Aickman· nv Tales of Love and Death, Gollancz, 1977; F&SF Apr ’78

The Year’s Finest Fantasy Volume 2 ed. Terry Carr (Berkley 0-425-04155-7, Jul ’79, $1.95, 311pp, pb); Series continued with Fantasy Annual III.

• 1 · Introduction · Terry Carr· in
• 3 · Gotcha! · Ray Bradbury· ss Redbook Aug ’78
• 11 · The Lady in White · Stephen R. Donaldson· nv F&SF Feb ’78
• 43 · Within the Walls of Tyre · Michael Bishop· nv Weirdbook #13 ’78
• 75 · The Man Who Was Heavily into Revenge · Harlan Ellison· ss Analog Aug ’78
• 91 · The Gunslinger [Roland (Gunslinger)] · Stephen King· nv F&SF Oct ’78
• 141 · A Certain Slant of Light · Raylyn Moore· ss Shadows #1, ed. Charles L. Grant, Doubleday, 1978
• 155 · Sleep Well of Nights [“A Good Night’s Sleep”; Jack Limekiller] · Avram Davidson· na F&SF Aug ’78
• 209 · Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies · R. A. Lafferty· nv Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
• 241 · The Treasure of Odirex [Erasmus Darwin] · Charles Sheffield· na Fantastic Jul ’78
• 299 · Recommended Reading—1978 · Misc.· bi
• 301 · The Year in Fantasy: 1978 · Susan Wood· ar

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 5ed. Lin Carter  and Arthur W. Saha (DAW 0-87997-510-5, Jan ’80, $1.95, 204pp, pb)

• 11 · The Year in Fantasy · Lin Carter· in
• 15 · The Troll · T. H. White· ss Gone to Ground, 1935
• 28 · In the Balance · Tanith Lee· ss Swords Against Darkness #3, ed. Andrew J. Offutt, Zebra, 1978
• 34 · The Gem in the Tower [Conan] · L. Sprague de Camp& Lin Carter· nv Conan the Swordsman, ed. L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter & Bjorn Nyberg, Bantam, 1978
• 58 · Above Ker-Is · Evangeline Walton· ss The Fantastic Imagination II, ed. Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, Avon, 1978
• 70 · Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin · Marvin Kaye· ss Fantastic Oct ’78
• 77 · Rhian and Garanhir · Grail Undwin· ss *
• 83 · Lord of the Dead [Steve Harrison] · Robert E. Howard· nv, 1978
• 118 · Child of Air · Pat McIntosh· ss *
• 136 · A Malady of Magicks [Ebenezum] · Craig Shaw Gardner· ss Fantastic Oct ’78
• 153 · St. George · David Mallory· ss, 1978
• 158 · Astral Stray [Voidal] · Adrian Cole· nv Heroic Fantasy, ed. Gerald W. Page & Hank Reinhardt, DAW, 1979
• 180 · Demon and Demoiselle [Arcana] · Janet Fox· nv Fantastic Oct ’78
• 201 · The Year’s Best Fantasy Books · Lin Carter· bi

The 1979 Annual World’s Best SF ed. Donald A. Wollheim& Arthur W. Saha (DAW 0-87997-459-1, May ’79, $2.25, 268pp, pb)

• 7 · Introduction · Donald A. Wollheim· in
• 11 · Come to the Party · Frank Herbert& F. M. Busby· ss Analog Dec ’78
• 37 · Creator · David Lake· nv Envisaged Worlds, ed. Paul Collins, Void, 1978
• 64 · Dance Band on the Titanic· Jack L. Chalker· nv IASFM Jul/Aug ’78
• 87 · Cassandra · C. J. Cherryh· ss F&SF Oct ’78
• 96 · In Alien Flesh · Gregory Benford· nv F&SF Sep ’78
• 122 · SQ · Ursula K. Le Guin· ss Cassandra Rising, ed. Alice Laurance, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978
• 133 · The Persistence of Vision · John Varley· na F&SF Mar ’78
• 181 · We Who Stole the Dream · James Tiptree, Jr.· nv Stellar #4, ed. Judy-Lynn del Rey, Ballantine, 1978
• 206 · Scattershot · Greg Bear· nv Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
• 239 · Carruthers’ Last Stand · Dan Henderson· nv Analog Jun ’78

The Best Science Fiction of the Year # 8 ed. Terry Carr (Ballantine 0-345-28083-0, Jul ’79, $2.25, 372pp, pb)

• ix · Introduction · Terry Carr· in
• 1 · The Barbie Murders [Anna-Louise Bach] · John Varley· nv IASFM Jan/Feb ’78
• 35 · A Hiss of Dragon · Gregory Benford& Marc Laidlaw· nv Omni Dec ’78
• 56 · Black Glass · Fritz Leiber· nv Andromeda 3, ed. Peter Weston, London: Futura, 1978
• 89 · To Bring in the Steel · Donald Kingsbury· nv Analog Jul ’78
• 136 · The Very Slow Time Machine · Ian Watson· nv Anticipations, ed. Christopher Priest, Scribner’s, 1978
• 159 · Devil You Don’t Know [Val Clarke] · Dean Ing· nv Analog Jan ’78
• 207 · Count the Clock That Tells the Time · Harlan Ellison· ss Omni Dec ’78
• 228 · View from a Height · Joan D. Vinge· ss Analog Jun ’78
• 246 · The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck · Hilbert Schenck· nv F&SF Sep ’78
• 281 · Vermeer’s Window · Gordon Eklund· ss Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
• 298 · The Man Who Had No Idea · Thomas M. Disch· nv F&SF Oct ’78
• 336 · Death Therapy · James Patrick Kelly· nv F&SF Jul ’78
• 364 · Recommended Reading—1978 · Terry Carr· bi
• 366 · The Science Fiction Year · Charles N. Brown· ar

The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1 ed. Terry Carr (Ballantine, Sep ’79, 328pp, pb)

• vii · Introduction · Terry Carr· in
• 1 · The Persistence of Vision · John Varley· na F&SF Mar ’78
• 54 · Old Folks at Home · Michael Bishop· na Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
• 110 · Shipwright · Donald Kingsbury· na Analog Apr ’78
• 153 · Seven American Nights · Gene Wolfe· na Orbit 20, ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1978
• 211 · Fireship · Joan D. Vinge· na Analog Dec ’78
• 274 · The Watched [Dream Archipelago] · Christopher Priest· na F&SF Apr ’78

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (1978) ed. Gardner R. Dozois (Elsvier-Dutton, 1979, hc); Also in pb (Dell Aug ’80).

• · Introduction- Summation: 1978 · Gardner R. Dozois· in
• · The Persistence of Vision · John Varley· na F&SF Mar ’78
• · Found! · Isaac Asimov· ss Omni Oct ’78
• · Whores [Dream Archipelago] · Christopher Priest· ss New Dimensions 8, ed. Robert Silverberg, Harper & Row, 1978
• · Cousins · Bernard Deitchman· nv Analog Aug ’78
• · View from a Height · Joan D. Vinge· ss Analog Jun ’78
• · Mutability · Thomas M. Disch· ss Anticipations, ed. Christopher Priest, Scribner’s, 1978
• · Lost and Found · Phyllis Eisenstein· ss Analog Oct ’78
• · Old Folks at Home · Michael Bishop· na Universe 8, ed. Terry Carr, Doubleday, 1978
• · September Song · James P. Girard· ss Penthouse Sep ’78
• · In Alien Flesh · Gregory Benford· nv F&SF Sep ’78
• · Seven American Nights · Gene Wolfe· na Orbit 20, ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row, 1978
• · Honorable Mentions- 1978 · Misc.· bi

courtesy WorldCat: 

Best detective stories of the year, 1979 ; 33rd annual collection 
edited by Edward D. Hoch. 
New York : E.P. Dutton, 1979. 209 pages

Quitters, Inc. / Stephen King --
Little paradise / Zena Collier --
The man in the lake / Ernest Savage --
Strangers in the fog / Bill Pronzini --
Delayed mail / Jack Ritchie --
Filmflam / Francis M. Nevins --
The fire man / Elizabeth A. Lynn --
The adventure of the blind alley / Edward Wellen --
The cloud beneath the eaves / Barbara Owens --
The closed door / Thomas Walsh --
Truth will out / Ruth Rendell --
Checkpoint Charlie / Brian Garfield --
Rite of Spring / Jerry Jacobson --
The golden circle / Patricia L. Schulze --
Captain Leopold Incognito / Edward D. Hoch --
The leech / Frank Sisk.

courtesy Contento/Stephensen-Payne Miscellaneous Anthologies:

The Best American Short Stories 1979 

ed. Joyce Carol Oates& Shannon Ravenel (Houghton Mifflin, 1979, tp)

• xi · Introduction · Joyce Carol Oates· in
• 1 · A Silver Dish · Saul Bellow· nv New Yorker Sep 25 ’78
• 28 · An Exile in the East · Flannery O’Connor· ss South Carolina Review Nov ’78
• 39 · Home and Native Land · Seán Virgo· ss Malahat Review, 1978
• 44 · A Short Walk into Afternoon · Kaatje Hurlbut· ss The Southwest Review, 1978
• 56 · Shadrach · William Styron· nv Esquire Nov 21 ’78
• 79 · The Wedding Week · Rosellen Brown· ss Boston University Journal, 1978
• 84 · A Party in Miami Beach · Isaac Bashevis Singer· ss Playboy Jun ’78
• 97 · The Quail · Rolf Yngve· ss Quarterly West, 1978
• 102 · Some Manhattan in New England · Peter LaSalle· ss Georgia Review, 1978
• 115 · Plaisir d’Amour · Lynne Sharon Schwartz· ss The Ontario Review, 1978
• 131 · Falling Off the Scaffold · Lyn Coffin· ss Michigan Quarterly Review Win ’78
• 150 · Spelling · Alice Munro· ss Weekend Magazine, 1978
• 157 · Seasons · Ruth McLaughlin· ss California Quarterly, 1978
• 167 · Living Alone · Robley Wilson, Jr.· ss Fiction International, 1978
• 172 · The Middle Place · Mary Hedin· ss The Southwest Review, 1978
• 184 · The Quarterback Speaks to His God · Herbert Wilner· nv Esquire, 1978
• 206 · Trip in a Summer Dress · Annette Sanford· ss Prairie Schooner, 1978
• 214 · The Eye · Paul Bowles· ss The Missouri Review, 1978
• 222 · Paper Covers Rock · Jean Thompson· ss Mademoiselle, 1978
• 234 · The Missing Person · Maxine Kumin· ss TriQuarterly, 1978
• 243 · Finisterre · Louis D. Rubin, Jr.· nv The Southern Review, 1978
• 270 · A Lingering Death · Silvia Tennenbaum· ss Massachusetts Review, 1978
• 284 · Home Is the Hero · Bernard Malamud· nv Atlantic Monthly, 1978
• 312 · The New Music · Donald Barthelme· ss New Yorker Jun 19 ’78
• 324 · Something That Happened · Jayne Anne Phillips· ss Gallimaufry, 1978 

[This citation in WorldCat is annoyingly shorthanded...particularly where the writer's name isn't so obvious as with Herbert Gold or Alice Adams.]
 
Prize stories 1979 : the O. Henry Awards edited and with an introduction by William Abrahams. 

"Includes story by Minnesota author Thomas M. Disch."

Weaver, G. Getting serious.--
Bromell, H. Travel stories.--
Hecht, J.I want you, I need you, I love you.--
Goldberg, L. Shy bearers.--
Heller, S. The summer game.--
Pfeil, F. The quality of light in Maine.--
Leaton, A. The passion of Marco Z--.--
Thomas, A. Coon hunt.--
Molyneux, T.W. Visiting the point.--
Oates, J.C. In the autumn of the year.--
Baumbach, J. Passion?--
Zelver, P. My father's jokes.--
Gold, H. The smallest part.--
Van Dyke, H. Du Côté de Chez Britz.--
Smith, L. Mrs. Darcy meets the blue-eyed stranger at the beach.--
Caputi, A. The derby hopeful.--
Schwartz, L.S. Rough strife.--
Yates, R. Oh, Joseph, I'm so tired.--
Peterson, M. Travelling.--
Disch, T.M. Xmas.--
Adams, A. The girl across the room.  

 The Pushcart prize, IV : best of the small presses  
edited by Bill Henderson.   591 pages

		Introduction : about Pushcart Prize, IV -- Home / by Jayne Anne Phillips -- From laughing with one eye / by Gjertrud Schnackenberg Smyth -- A renewal of the word / by Barbara Myerhoff -- Ice / by AI -- In another country / by James Laughlin -- The daisy dolls / by Felisberto Hernández -- Snow owl / by Dave Smith -- Lot's wife / by Kristine Batey -- The stone crab : a love poem / by Robert Phillips -- Night flight to Stockholm / by Dallas Wiebe -- Literature and ecology: an experiment in ecocriticism / by William Rueckert -- Ghosts like them / by Shirley Ann Taggart -- Elegy / by David St. John -- The ritual of memories / by Tess Gallagher -- Plowing with elephants / by Lon Otto -- Meeting Mescalito at Oak Hill Cemetery / by Lorna Dee Cervantes -- A Jean-Marie cookbook / by Jeff Weinstein -- dg The politics of anti-realism / by Gerald Graff -- Winter sleep / by Mary Oliver -- Wildflower / by Stanley Plumly -- Letters from a father / by Mona Van Duyn -- Early winter / by Max Schott -- My work in California / by James B. Hall -- The ownership of the night / by Larry Levis -- The Spanish image of death / by César Vallejo -- For Papa (and Marcus Garvey) / by Thadious M. Davis -- A vision expressed by a series of false statements / by John Love -- Jeffrey, believe me / by Jane Smiley -- Sweetness, a thinking machine / by Joe Ashby Porter -- To Ed Sissman / by John Updike -- The man whose blood tilted the earth / by M.R. Doty -- Lawrence at Taos / by Shirley Kaufman -- Contemporary poetry and the metaphors for the poem / by Charles Molesworth -- Another Margot chapter / by R.C. Day -- Sitting up, standing, taking steps / by Ron Silliman -- Made connections / by Michael Harper -- Anonymous courtesan in a jade shroud / by Brenda Hillman - A woman in love with a bottle / by Barbara Lovell --- Proteus / by Judith Hoover -- Quinnapoxet / by Stanley Kunitz -- Things that happen where there aren't any people / by William Stafford -- Lechery / by Jayne Anne Phillips -- Civilization and isolation / by Vine Deloria -- from Kiss of the spider woman / by Manual Puig -- Running away from home / by Carolyn Kizer -- The biography man / by Gary Reilly -- The nerves of a midwife: contemporary American women's poetry / by Alicia Ostriker -- Forgive us / by George Venn -- The hat in the swamp / by Paul Metcalf -- These women / by Christine Schutt -- Johnny Appleseed / by Susan Schaefer Neville -- Some carry around this / by Susan Strayer Deal -- The stonecutter's horses / by Robert Bringhurst -- Grandmother (1895-1928) / by Cleopatra Mathis -- Rich / by Ellen Gilchrist -- Pig 311 / by Margaret Ryan -- American poetry: looking for a center / by Ishmael Reed- I show the daffodils to the retarded kids / by Constance Sharp -- Dream / by John Willson -- Living with animals / by Margaret Kent -- The trial of Rozhdestvov / by Russian Samizdat -- Contributors notes -- Outstanding writers -- Outstanding small presses. For more of this week's books,  please see Patti Abbott's blog...

 

This can be considered cheating, as it's an answer to a Facebook meme that came at me from at least two directions, from FFB founder and mainspring Patti Abbott, and from comedian and voracious reader Jackie Kashian, but nonetheless, here 'tis (with the links back to previous citations in the blog and elsewhere)...


Grimm's Fairy Tales To Read Aloud, a beginning reader's edition...along with Dr. Seuss and some Golden Books, the texts my parents taught me to read with, and the most elaborate and text-heavy (and even more fantasticated than Green Eggs and Ham and the Cat in the Hat books).

Children's Digestmagazine, the first fiction/essay-heavy magazine I read, and another bounty of short fiction, comics (Tintin and others), etc. Set me on a path to being one of the rare sorts these days who still loves fiction magazines. Highlights for Children and Humpty Dumpty(the latter then CD's slightly younger-skewing stablemate) didn't hurt, but weren't as good to 5yo me.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Door Locked, ghost-edited by Harold Q. Masur. Might not be the first of the anthologies edited by Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur in the various "Hitchcock" lines that I read, but it might be, and it was the first I owned a copy of. Eclectic and sophisticated range of all sorts of "dark" (including darkly comic) fiction, one of many volumes aimed at adults and a companion series aimed at YA readers...I inhaled them from about age 9 till I'd read them all...while also reading the series of anthologies taken from and associated with Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which always had other editors. AHMM, for its part, was the first adult fiction magazine I read regularly.

Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media, by Les Daniels...the mass media very much including literature...the first critical/historical pop-culture work I devoured, and assuredly not the last. Along with the pointers, as valuable as those on the Newbery Award shortlists to my young reading, it was also a fine anthology of short stories, alternating with the chapters of Daniels's text.

The better Time-Life Books, Science Service Books, and a galumphing big coffee-table book full of essays and great photography, Our Amazing World of Nature, definitely nudged me into a lifelong interest in the natural sciences...various encyclopedias and other multivolume sets didn't hurt. 


The American Heritage multi-volume set on the US presidents (and Famous Americans), for example, among other things helped fuel an early fascination with election statistics and related matters...

The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series 5, edited by Gerald W. Page. The first evidence I had that the horror fiction anthologies I'd been finding in libraries (and from Scholastic and similar book sales in and through the schools) were part of a continuing tradition. Other best of the year annuals were also fascinating. 

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (to which I've contributed in the most slight way) and Fantastic Stories and Whispers, perhaps the most beloved by me of the first wave of adult fiction magazines I started buying and reading in earnest in 1978. These three were the best and most popular fantasy fiction magazines I'd find, all eclectic in their remit (they'd even run the occasional story that was fantasy only by association, presumably because the editors thought they had a good story by a writer who usually wrote fantasy)...while I'd read the likes of Short Story Internationaland Galaxy and Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazineassiduously as well. I transitioned in my periodicals consumption from reading comics and Mad (and any National Lampoons I could obtain...and Boy's Life and Dynamite) to reading fiction magazines over the years from ages 10 to 13...and discovered that magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly still carried short stories, as well as sometimes fascinating articles. I'd been reading the short stories in Playboy for a while...while not letting the rest of the magazine alone, of course...

Dissent magazine was my first regular leftist read, soon joined by others ranging from The Nation to Rolling Stone's relevant material, and so on to such books as Vivian Gornick's Essays in Feminism (and Women in Science), Emma Goldman's Living My Life, and the notable anthology The Essential Works of Anarchism.. But I think Joanna Russ's essays, and her novel The Female Man, were among the biggest even earlier nudges I had in that direction. I certainly didn't like the antifeminist flavor of the writing of R. Bretnor nor (Miss rather than Ms.?) Raylyn Moore from early on...Our Generation magazine probably spoke to me most directly, along with Social Anarchism (to which I would eventually contribute) and, in a more broadly focused way, Harper's Magazine in the 1980s...

The Futurians by Damon Knight convinced me that I wanted to be an editor even more than I did a writer. And the critical writing of Knight, Russ, Gornick, John Simon, Harlan Ellison, Algis Budrys, James Blish, Anthony Burgess, bell hooks, Avram Davidson, Fritz Leiber, and others spoke to me profoundly.

And if I have to make a default choice as to my favorite book so far...well, I couldn't. But Avram Davidson's magisterial The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazymight be it. Or Jorge Luis Borges's The Aleph, and Other Stories 1933-1969, or toomanyothers...


Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books. I believe I'm set to host next week's selections...

The US reader (of English) is this year offered essentially four Best of the Year volumes collecting horror and related material...I have yet to crack my copies, but I have all four...

• Editor:Ellen Datlow
• Year: 2014-06-03
• ISBN: 978-1-59780-503-2 [1-59780-503-3]
• Publisher:Night Shade Books
• Price: $15.99
• Pages: 396 
• Apports• (2013) • shortstory by Stephen Bacon
• Mr. Splitfoot• (2013) • shortfiction by Dale Bailey
• The Good Husband• (2013) • novelette by Nathan Ballingrud
• The Tiger• (2013) • shortfiction by Nina Allan
• The House on Cobb Street• (2013) • shortstory by Lynda E. Rucker
• The Soul in the Bell Jar• (2013) • novelette by K. J. Kabza
• Call Out• (2013) • shortstory by Steve Toase
• That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love• (2013) • shortfiction by Robert Shearman
• Bones of Crow• (2013) • shortfiction by Ray Cluley
• Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales• (2013) • shortfiction by Jeannine Hall Gailey
• The Tin House• (2013) • shortfiction by Simon Clark
• The Fox• (2013) • shortfiction by Conrad Williams
• Stemming the Tide• (2013) • shortfiction by Simon Strantzas
• The Anatomist's Mnemonic• (2013) • shortfiction by Priya Sharma
• The Monster Makers• (2013) • shortfiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
• The Only Ending We Have• (2013) • shortfiction by Kim Newman
• The Dog's Paw• (2013) • shortfiction by Derek Künsken
• Fine in the Fire• (2013) • shortfiction by Lee Thomas
• Majorlena• (2013) • shortfiction by Jane Jakeman
• The Withering• (2013) • shortfiction by Tim Casson
• Down to a Sunless Sea• (2013) • shortfiction by Neil Gaiman
• Jaws of Saturn• (2013) • shortfiction by Laird Barron
• Halfway Home• (2013) • shortstory by Linda Nagata
• The Same Deep Waters as You• (2013) • novelette by Brian Hodge
• Summation 2013• (2013) • essay by Ellen Datlow

The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2014 

• Editor:Paula Guran
• Year: 2014-06-17
• ISBN: 978-1-60701-431-7 [1-60701-431-9]
• Publisher:Prime Books
• Price: $19.95
• Pages: 569 
• Postcards from Abroad• (2013) • shortfiction by Peter Atkins
• The Creature Recants• (2013) • shortstory by Dale Bailey
• The Good Husband• (2013) • novelette by Nathan Ballingrud
• Termination Dust• (2013) • novelette by Laird Barron
• The Ghost Makers• [The Eternal Sky] • (2013) • shortfiction by Elizabeth Bear
• The Marginals• (2013) • shortfiction by Steve Duffy
• A Collapse of Horses• (2013) • shortfiction by Brian Evenson
• A Lunar Labyrinth• (2013) • shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• Pride• (2013) • shortfiction by Glen Hirshberg
• Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella• (2013) • shortfiction by Brian Hodge
• The Soul in the Bell Jar• (2013) • novelette by K. J. Kabza
• The Prayer of Ninety Cats• (2013) • novelette by Caitlín R. Kiernan
• Dark Gardens• (2013) • shortfiction by Greg Kurzawa
• A Little of the Night• (2013) • shortfiction by Tanith Lee
• The Gruesome Affair of the Electric Blue Lightning• (2013) • novelette by Joe R. Lansdale
• Iseul's Lexicon• (2013) • shortfiction by Yoon Ha Lee
• The Plague• (2013) • shortstory by Ken Liu
• The Slipway Gray• (2013) • shortfiction by Helen Marshall (variant of The Slipway Grey)
• To Die for Moonlight• (2013) • novelette by Sarah Monette
• Event Horizon• (2013) • shortstory by Sunny Moraine
• The Legend of Troop 13• (2013) • novelette by Kit Reed
• Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell• [Cosmere] • (2013) • shortfiction by Brandon Sanderson
• Phosphorous• (2013) • shortfiction by Veronica Schanoes
• Blue Amber• (2013) • shortfiction by David J. Schow
• Rag and Bone• (2013) • novelette by Priya Sharma
• Our Lady of Ruins• (2013) • shortfiction by Sarah Singleton
• Cuckoo• (2013) • shortfiction by Angela Slatter
• Wheatfield with Crows• (2013) • shortfiction by Steve Rasnic Tem
• Moonstruck• (2013) • shortstory by Karin Tidbeck
• The Dream Detective• (2013) • shortstory by Lisa Tuttle
• Fishwife• (2013) • shortstory by Carrie Vaughn
• Air, Water and the Grove• (2013) • shortstory by Kaaron Warron

Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1 

• Editors:Laird Barron, Michael Kelly
• Year: 2014-10-00
• ISBN: 978-0-9813177-5-5 [0-9813177-5-8]
• Publisher:ChiZine Publications
• Price: $17.99
• Pages: 332 
• 7 • Foreword (Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 1)• essay by Michael Kelly
• 11 • We Are For the Weird• essay by Laird Barron
• 16 • The Nineteenth Step• (2013) • shortstory by Simon Strantzas
• 23 • Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks• (2013) • shortstory by Paul G. Tremblay [as by Paul Tremblay]
• 36 • Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron• (2013) • shortstory by A. C. Wise
• 43 • The Year of the Rat• (2013) • novelette by Chen Qiufan
• 67 • Olimpia's Ghost• (2013) • shortstory by Sofia Samatar
• 78 • Furnace• (2013) • shortstory by Livia Llewellyn
• 91 • Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?• (2013) • shortstory by Damien Walters Grintalis [as by Damien Angelica Walters]
• 99 • Bor Urus• (2013) • shortstory by John Langan
• 123 • A Quest of Dream• (2013) • shortstory by W. H. Pugmire
• 136 • The Krakatoan• (2013) • shortstory by Maria Dahvana Headley
• 148 • The Girl in the Blue Coat• (2013) • shortstory by Anna Taborska
• 164 • (he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror• (2013) • shortstory by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
• 167 • In Limbo• (2013) • shortstory by Jeffrey Thomas
• 182 • A Cavern of Redbrick• (2013) • shortstory by Richard Gavin
• 194 • Eyes Exchange Bank• (2013) • novelette by Scott Nicolay
• 216 • Fox Into Lady• (2013) • shortstory by Anne-Sylvie Salzman
• 223 • Like Feather, Like Bone• (2013) • shortstory by Kristi DeMeester
• 226 • A Terror• (2013) • novelette by Jeffrey Ford
• 249 • Success• (2013) • novella by Michael Blumlein
• 296 • Moonstruck• (2013) • shortstory by Karin Tidbeck
• 307 • The Key to Your Heart is Made of Brass• (2013) • shortstory by John R. Fultz
• 323 • No Breather in the World But Thee• (2013) • shortstory by Jeff VanderMeer 

Best New Horror: 25th Anniversary Edition 

• Editor:Stephen Jones
• Year: 2014-11-11
• ISBN: 978-1-62873-818-6 [1-62873-818-9]
• Publisher:Skyhorse Publishing
• Price: $15.95 
• Pages: 608 
• 
  
• INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2013 The Editor 
• WHO DARES WINS: ANNO DRACULA 1980 Kim Newman 
• CLICK-CLACK THE RATTLEBAG Neil Gaiman 
• DEAD END Nicholas Royle 
• ISAAC'S ROOM Daniel Mills 
• THE BURNING CIRCUS Angela Slatter 
• HOLES FOR FACES Ramsey Campbell 
• BY NIGHT HE COULD NOT SEE Joel Lane 
• COME INTO MY PARLOUR Reggie Oliver 
• THE MIDDLE PARK Michael Chislett 
• INTO THE WATER Simon Kurt Unsworth 
• THE BURNED HOUSE Lynda E. Rucker 
• WHAT DO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT Z— Lavie Tidhar 
• FISHFLY SEASON Halli Villegas 
• DOLL RE MI Tanith Lee 
• A NIGHT'S WORK Clive Barker 
• THE SIXTEENTH STEP Robert Shearman 
• STEMMING THE TIDE Simon Strantzas 
• THE GIST Michael Marshall Smith 
• GUINEA PIG GIRL Thana Niveau 
• MISS BALTIMORE CRABS: ANNO DRACULA 1990 Kim Newman 
• WHITSTABLE Stephen Volk 
• NECROLOGY: 2013 Stephen Jones & Kim Newman
• USEFUL ADRESSES 

And...recently, I was seeking a pair of short novels for a new friend, a native speaker of Spanish who loves horror and wanted preferably short novels in English she could practice her Anglophone reading with...since she's a lover of horror film, as well, my favorite duo from 1959 came to mind first, even if one is a suspense novel rather than horror (and the other is arguably so as well, with difficulty):

























...and two more became pretty obvious next choices (in rather battered first editions pictured below):











Further suggestions?

("Impure" horror collections that also came to mind:
All The Stories of Muriel Spark and 
E Pluribus Unicorn by Theodore Sturgeon)

(...and...and...)

La ragazza che sapeva troppo

Below, the links to this week's reviews and citations As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

Anne Billson: La ragazza che sapeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much)

Bill Crider: Hardcore [trailer]

Brian Arnold: back to school: "Charlie Brown and the Spelling Bee"

Hardcore

BV Lawson: Media Murder;Murder and Mayhem Milwaukee

Dan Stumpf: Two Days in the Valley

Ed Lynskey: The Turning Point (1952 film)

Elizabeth Foxwell: Man in the Vault;"Exile Noir" at UCLA

Evan Lewis: Disney Family Album: Fess Parker and Buddy Ebsen

George Kelley: Babette's Feast

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "The Opportunity"

How Did This Get Made?: Stayin' Alive

Iba Dawson: The Best Man Holiday

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Parachute Jumper; Ex-Lady

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents:"The Opportunity"

Jackie Kashian: Nic Dressel on multimedia fantasy franchises

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Ann Blyth, Hollywood Teenager

Jake Hinkson: Bogart and Bacall 1: To Have and Have Not

James Reasoner: Need for Speed

Jeff Gemmill: Robin Williams 

Jerry House: Vaudeville Acts 1898 to 1910

John Charles: Vengeance (aka Joko invoca Dio...e muori aka Joko's Vengeance)

John Grant: The Ringer (1952 film);The Scarlet Web

Jonathan Lewis: The Tall Target; West of Shanghai; Confessions of a Nazi Spy

Kate Laity: LonCon and ShamroKon

Kelly Robinson: Carmen with Theda Bara

Kliph Nesteroff: Broadside:"Follow the Pigeon";The Sandy Duncan Show

Laura: Wonder Man; Out of the Past; 10 favored films of the last 25 years

Lucy Brown: The Greatest Show on Earth

Martin Edwards: Crimes of Passion (BBC package of Scandinavian tv);The Tourist (2010 film)

Marty McKee: Five Fingers of Death (aka King Boxer)

Michael Shonk: The Whistler (the television series)

Mystery Dave: Old Yeller

Patti Abbott: Trouble in Paradise

Prashant Trikannad: Everybody Loves Raymond: "The Thought that Counts"

Randy Johnson: She (1935 film); Mallory Must Not Die...(aka Il mio nome e Mallory...'M' come 'morte'--literally, My Name is Mallory...That's "M" as in "Death") 

Rick: Veronica Carlson, Hammer star; Mid-Atlantic Nostalgia Convention

Ron Scheer: 3 Bad Men

Sergio Angelini: The Anderson Tapes

Stacia Jones: The Winning of Barbara Worth

Stephen Bowie: traces of New Wave film in 1960s US television

Todd Mason: a pointer for viewing tonight (for those in the US with "faithful" PBS affiliates handy), and will be repeated on the affiliated World network over the next week: I don't know how good this docudrama is, but the subject seems to me to be pretty remarkable (and PBS will be feeding their Robin Williams tribute afterward):

ENEMY OF THE REICH: NOOR INAYAT KHAN STORY

Yvette Banek: Hold That Ghost!; Anatomy of a Murder; Manhattan Murder Mystery

Steve Lewis: A Dangerous Profession; A Yank in Libya

Stephen Gallagher: "Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination"

Stephen Bowie: Bad TV criticism in the NYT and Shonda Rhimes; Jerry McNeely; Stanley Chase

Stacia Jones: Stonehearst Asylum; The Lusty Men; Force Majeure 

Sergio Angelini: The Return of the Thin Man; The Dragon Murder Case; Lone Star and Elizabeth Peña; The Empty Beach; Partners in Crime

Ron Scheer: Mystery Road; Wanted: Dead or Alive; Gunsmoke (radio); The Legend of the Reno Brothers

Rick: House of Dark Shadows; The Mummy (1959 film); The Atomic City; Smoke Signal; 1950s: Cinema's Most Important Decade

Randy Johnson: The Amazing Transparent Man; Kill or Be Killed, aka Uccidi o muori; Arizona Colt Returns, aka Arizona si scatenò... e li fece fuori tutti!; Arizona Colt; Two Pistols and a Coward, aka Il pistolero segnato da Dio; Made for Each Other; The Relentless Four, aka I 4 inesorabil

Prashant Trikannad: Morgan Freeman; Diwali; The Claim (2000 film); The Quick and the Dead

Patti Abbott: Clean and Sober; movies you've been meaning to see; The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour; A Member of the Wedding; In the Mood for Love

Mystery Dave: Dracula Untold

Marty McKee: My Blood Runs Cold; The Beasts Are on the Streets

Martin Edwards: The Missing (BBC-TV); The Intruders (BBC-TV); Woman of Straw

Lucy Brown: The Lady Vanishes (1938 film); Swing Time

Laura: Boy Meets Girl; Outlaw Gold; Return of the Gunfighter; Rustlers; The Saint's Double Trouble

Kliph Nesteroff: Mason Williams on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour days

Jose Cruz: Dark Fantasy (radio): four episodes

Jonathan Lewis: Waterfront; Drum Beat

John Grant: Down Three Dark Streets; Den Som Frykter Ulven, aka Cry in the Woods

Jerry House: The Stranger (1946 film); The Eddie Arnold Show (radio)

James Reasoner: Don't Open the Door!; Breakfast at Tiffany's

Jake Hinkson: The Shootist; Gun Street

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Quincy, M.E.: "Murder on Ice"

Jackie Kashian: Debra DiGiovanni

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Hollywood Time Machine; Betrayed (1944 film); Glorifying the American Girl; Dixiana

Iba Dawson: Maps to the Stars; friends and family pick scary films; Life of Riley (2014 film) 

George Kelley: Universal Classic Monsters (dvd box set)

Evan Lewis: Tricky Dicks

Elizabeth Foxwell: Shadows on the Stairs

Ed Lynskey: Blood on the Moon

Ed Gorman: Act of Violence

David Vineyard: The Ghost Breakers

Dan Stumpf: Outlaw

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Brian Arnold: The Haunted Castle (1896 film); "If a Body Meets a Body";BJ and the Bear: "BJ and the Witch"

Bill Crider: Family Business [trailer]

Anne Billson: My top ten zombie moves; female buddy-cop movies: Rare Birds

Note that "Bill Crider: Texas Vigilante" is not the title of this book...

Below, the links to this week's selections of insufficiently appreciated and overlooked books (with a few warnings mixed in), with the reviews and citations at the links below. Primary host Patti Abbott will be back to the task next week, if I'm not mistaken. And if I've missed your or someone else's item for this week, please let me know in comments. Thanks very much!

Sergio Angelini: Some Must Watch by Ethel Lina White

Yvette Banek: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James 

Joe Barone: To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

aka Some Must Watch

Leigh Buchanan: Cemetery Dance  (courtesy Ed Gorman)

Brian Busby: Harlequins and the Current Canadian Crises: The Corpse Came Back by Amelia Long; Firebrand by Rosemary Aubert

Bill Crider: A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny

Martin Edwards: Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne

Curt Evans: Suffer a Witch by Nigel Fitzgerald

Ray Garraty: Anarchaos by "Curt Clark" (Donald Westlake)

Ed Gorman: Patricia Highsmith writing for Fawcett Comics 

Rich Horton: Random Harvest by James Hilton

Jerry House: The Goddess of Ganymede by Mike Resnick

Randy Johnson: Blood Kin by Hank J. Kirby

Nick Jones: The Green Man and The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis

George Kelley: The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries edited by Otto Penzler

Margot Kinberg: The Dying Light by Alison Joseph

Rob Kitchin: Night Soldiers by Alan Furst

Kate Laity: Meaningful Conversations by Richard Godwin 

B.V. Lawson: Murder Intercontinental edited by Cynthia Manson and Kathleen Halligan

November,. 1956

Evan Lewis: Wyatt Earp by Davis Lott (a Big Little Book television tie-in)

Steve Lewis: The Deadly Welcome by Ken Rothrock; Death Walks in Scarlet by Hugh Desmond

Barry Malzberg and Richard Moore: The Getaway Car by Donald Westlake

Neer: Books for Halloween;books about Indian royalty

John F. Norris: The Mask of Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer

John O'Neill: Science Fiction magazine edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes (John isn't aware of the Charles Hornig issues)


James Reasoner: The Essential The Tomb of Dracula, Volume 1 by Marv Wolfman, Gene Colan et al.

Karyn Reeves: Essays and Poems by G. K. Chesterton

Kelly Robinson: Books for Halloween

Richard Robinson: The Dragon of Lung Wang by "Marion Harvey" (Edward J. Clode)

Gerard Saylor: Eight Black Horses by "Ed McBain";Rogue Officer by Garry Kilworth

April 1956

Ron Scheer: The Spinners' Book of Fiction, assembled by the Spinners Club (an impressive lot; see below) 

Dan Stumpf: Night of Black Horror by Victor Norwood;  Warlock by Oakley Hall

Kevin Tipple: Texas Vigilante by Bill Crider

"TomCat": The Forest Spirit by Jakob van Schevichaven   

Prashant Trikannad: "The Day Time Stopped Moving" by "Bradner Bruckner" (Ed Earl Repp), Amazing Stories, October 1940

Tracy K: Death is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury 

David Vineyard: Courier to Marrakesh by Valentine Williams

 

 

 

 

THE

SPINNERS' BOOK OF FICTION

PAUL ELDER AND COMPANY
SAN FRANCISCO AND NEW YORK

Below, the first set of links to this week's reviews and citations As always, please let me know in comments when I've missed yours or someone else's (more will be added over the course of the day)...and, as always, thanks to all our contributors and to you readers...

Anne Billson: How to Film a Ghost Story

Bill Crider: The Phantom [trailer]

Brian Arnold: Thursday's Game, Jaws 2, Standing in the Shadows of Motown et al.

B.V. Lawson: Media Murder

Comedy Film Nerds: Jackie Kashian and Jimmy Pardo

David Vineyard: The Uninvited (1944 film)

Ed Gorman and Vince Keenan: The Money Trap

Ed Lynskey: Shock Corridor

Elizabeth Foxwell: A Life at Stake (1954 film);The Holmes Service and the gothic on BBC Radio 4

Evan Lewis: Mike Hammer: "The High Cost of Dying" (1950s tv pilot)

George Kelley: Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks

How Did This Get Made?: Monkey Shines

Iba Dawson: While We're Young; Mr. Turner

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Best and Worst of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear; the Inner Sanctum film series; The Freshman

Jack Seabrook: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "House Guest" (and Moment of Fear: "The Golden Deed")

Jackie Kashian: Jesse Case

Jacqueline T. Lynch: The Twilight Zone: "The Queen of the Nile"

James Reasoner: Veronica Mars (the film)

Jerry House: The Haunted Bedroom

John Grant: The Hideout; Femme Fatale (2013 film); Who Killed Aunt Maggie?; The Girl Who Dared

Jonathan Lewis: Flame of Araby; Dr. Renault's Secret; The Master Plan of Dr. Fu Manchu 

Juri Nummelin:Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla

Patti Abbott: Night Nurse

Peter Rosovsky: NoirCon;and here and here

Prashant Trikkanad: The Reader (2008 film)

Randy Johnson: Beyond the Time Barrier; $1000 on the Black aka 1000 dollars sui negro

Sergio Angelini: Magic;  The Spiral Staircase

Steve Lewis (et al.): Pulp AdventureCon

• xi · Robert Bloch: The Man Who Wrote Psycho · Lester del Rey · in
• 1 · Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper · ss Weird Tales Jul ’43
• 21 · Enoch · ss Weird Tales Sep ’46
• 39 · Catnip · ss Weird Tales Mar ’48
• 55 · The Hungry House · ss Imagination Apr ’51
• 79 · The Man Who Collected Poe · ss Famous Fantastic Mysteries Oct ’51
• 97 · Mr. Steinway · ss Fantastic Apr ’54
• 113 · The Past Master · nv Bluebook Jan ’55
• 141 · I Like Blondes · ss Playboy Jan ’56
• 153 · All on a Golden Afternoon · nv F&SF Jun ’56
• 185 · Broomstick Ride · ss Super Science Fiction Dec ’57
• 197 · Daybroke · ss Star Science Fiction Magazine Jan ’58
• 209 · Sleeping Beauty [“The Sleeping Redheads”] · ss Swank Mar ’58
• 225 · Word of Honor · ss Playboy Aug ’58
• 237 · The World-Timer · nv Fantastic Aug ’60
• 271 · That Hell-Bound Train · ss F&SF Sep ’58
• 289 · The Funnel of God · nv Fantastic Jan ’60
• 319 · Beelzebub · ss Playboy Dec ’63
• 329 · The Plot Is the Thing · ss F&SF Jul ’66
• 337 · How Like a God · ss Galaxy Apr ’69
• 355 · The Movie People · ss F&SF Oct ’69
• 269 · The Oracle · ss Penthouse May ’71
• 377 · The Learning Maze · ss The Learning Maze, ed. Roger Elwood, Messner, 1974
• 393 · Author’s Afterword: “Will the Real Robert Bloch Please Stand Up?” · aw

The attempts to produce a literate erotica magazine in the US in the latter 1950s and early 1960s were met with considerable resistance at times (Ralph Ginzburg, the editor and publisher of Eros, courted trouble; Samuel Roth and company, of the earlier American Aphrodite, seemed to fly a little more under the radar). And, of course, while they were aimed at being liberatory and intelligently bohemian, featuring imagery of bare backsides didn't keep them from feeling a bit half-assed.

While the likes of Esquire, Playboy and Evergreen Review had all been lightning rods for scrutiny and condemnation (and their imitators as well), none of them (certainly not even Playboy) was solely about sex...even if aids to masturbation (for the audience that enjoyed women's aspect) were the most obvious selling point of a given issue. And, certainly, the majority of women and not a few men were left out of the target-audience equation for these magazines, and the less ambitious skin-magazine digests that flourished at mid-century.  Even if Evergreen Review didn't promote itself (overtly) as a men's stroke-book, the mix certainly leaned that way...these two publications were making, to what degree of success is another matter, an effort to reach out simultaneously to those of several persuasions, at a time when the presumed default assumptions ran to the sickness of all homosexuality, the baseness of male heterosexual lust, the odd mix of dainty and guilty that was assumed to be female heterosexuality. 

So, the advent of the occasional attempt such as these book-a-zines...and it's probably notable that both of these were published in hardcover format even though they were periodicals, and could be sold either way...with a mix of materials new and old, the old having the advantages of usually being out of copyright protection as well as giving a certain classic or at least (very) arguably tony flavor to the enterprise in question.

Among the more interesting new items in either issue here is the Ray Bradbury story "The Long After Midnight Girl", which deals in part with homophobia and sexual violence in a fairly straightforward way, if going about it somewhat cutely (Bradbury could preach). It's notable (to me, at least) that Anthony Boucher makes a point of mentioning how unsettling he found the story, in not including it but shortlisting it in the appropriate volume of The Year's Best Detective Stories.

These remain interesting for what they suggest about the times, what was and wasn't possible in this kind of publishing, and how they are and are not too much different from similar attempts today, and in recent years. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books (and perhaps a few other magazines...).

Eros #4:
Contents: 
Love in the Bible / Rufus Mott -- 
The Jewel Box Revue : A Photographic Essay / Raymond Jacobs -- 
A Letter From Allan Ginsberg -- 
Was Shakespeare a Homosexual? / John Erno Russell -- 
I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl -- 
The Long After Midnight Girl : A Short, Short Story / Ray Bradbury -- 
The Sexual Side of Anti-Semitism / Shepherd Raymond -- 
My Life and Loves / Frank Harris, introduction by Warren Boroson -- 
New Twists on 3 Great Trysts / Dan Greenburg -- 
President Harding's Second Lady / John Hejno -- 
Bawdy Limericks : The Folklore of the Intellectual -- 
The Natural Superiority of Women as Eroticists / Eberhard W and Phyllis C Kronhausen -- 
Memoirs of a Male Chaperon / John Sack -- 
Black and White in Color : A Photographic Tone Poem / Ralph M Hattersley Jr. -- 
Lysistrata / Aristophanes, a free adaptation by Ivan Grazni; 
artwork, Albrecht Durer, Rembrandt, Heindrik Goltzius, Jost De Negker, Geller, Jerome Snyder, John Alcom, Charles B Slackman, Milton Glaser; Norman Lindsay, photos, C. White, Raymond Jacobs 


American Aphrodite: A Quarterly for the Fancy Free [v 5 #19, 1955] ed. Samuel Roth & Hal Zucker ( )
Details supplied by Ned Brooks.
• 3 · Why Celine · Hal Zucker · es
• 5 · Hobohemians · Philip Owens · nv
• 43 · The Tongue of Spring and other poems · Beatrice Baron · pm; illus. Picasso
• 56 · Five Poems · Shearman Ray · pm
• 59 · The Labyrinth · Anais Nin · ss
• 63 · Was It Will Be · John Lee Weldon · pl
• 74 · Tennis Anyone? · Anon. · pt; [photographic study]
• 81 · Married Misery · Harry Roskolenko · ss
• 88 · Edge of the Nest · Eugene Armfield · ss Pagany Apr-Jun 1931; illus. Roy Krenkel
• 97 · London Aphrodite · Denys Val Baker, ed. · mg; [separate pagination, 1-160]
• 7 · Introduction · Denys Val Baker · ed
• 9 · The Wanderers · Alun Lewis · ss The Welsh Review Oct 1939
• 25 · The Kimono · H. E. Bates · nv Missing from Their Homes, ed. Anon., Hutchinson 1936
• 43 · A Pearl of Great Price · Rhys Davies · ss
• 53 · The Bridal Night · Frank O’Connor · ss Magpie Nov 1951
• 61 · The Lady and the Tramp · L. J. Daventry · ss
• 80 · The Trap · Dorothy K. Haynes · ss Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch, London: Methuen 1949
• 86 · The Touch · Liam O’Flaherty · ss
• 95 · The Bishop Who Was Never Lonely · Norman Nicholson · ss
• 104 · The Saviour · Glyn Jones · ss
• 116 · The Girl at the Fair · Denys Val Baker · ss
• 126 · A Prospect of the Sea · Dylan Thomas · ss
• 134 · The Vindication · James Thurlby · ss The Face in the Mirror, ed. Anon., London: Opus Press 1946
• 141 · The Imprisoned · Rearden Conner · ss
• 149 · Lost · Patrick Shone · ss

This (inadvertently) biweekly (so far this month) roundup will be in place today, if at all possible.

Sorry for the delays, folks...life is utterly uncooperative of late.

Forty-five years ago, more or less...The Saturday Evening Post hadn't quite collapsed, though it would soon (to be reborn as an infrequent nostalgia magazine, rather than the Last truly general-interest magazine that wasn't a collection of reprints). Over at Paperback Library, not the most prominent house in the well-established field, a young married couple who had already made serious literary reputations for themselves (and who were utterly open about being bisexual well before the Bowies were to make it futuristically chic for masses a half-decade later) were preparing the first volume of a new anthology series devoted to speculative fiction, mostly sf and fantasy but in the same wheelhouse as such avant garde publications as Evergreen Review, New Directions Quarterly and, in fantastic fiction, New Worlds, Orbit, and Dangerous Visions.  Quark would produce four volumes in two years.  This last is led off by a brief, interesting editorial, and one of the more free-form, quasi-autobiographical (writer in Greenwich Village) stories that Avram Davidson was writing in those years, such as "Selectra Six-Ten" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1970) and, toward the end of this run, "Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?" (Fantastic, December 1977), discursive asides and wordplay run rampant (a minor if notable example is that a James Baldwin analog becomes Jacobo Gaintestes here)...this particular story is more pleasant than major, and has yet to be reprinted (unlike those better examples), but is more than enough to compell me to read this part of the book first, even given all the tumult in progress around me at the moment.  The Charles Platt choose your own adventures in the counterculture cartoon is amusing enough, as well...I will return to this book for the other work soon.

Quark/4 ed. Samuel R. Delany & Marilyn Hacker (Paperback Library 66-658, Aug ’71, $1.25, 240pp, pb, cover by Martin Last)

• 7 · On Speculative Fiction · Samuel R. Delany & Marilyn Hacker · in
• 11 · Basileikon: Summer · Avram Davidson · ss *
• 20 · Voortrekker [Jerry Cornelius] · Michael Moorcock · nv Frendz #3 ’71 (+2)
• 49 · Brass and Gold, or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills · Philip José Farmer · ss *
• 63 · The Song of Passing · Marco Cacchioni · pm *
• 65 · Norman Vs. America · Charles Platt · ct *
• 86 · The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel · Helen Adam · nv *
• 110 · Acid Soap Opera · Gail Madonia · ss *
• 121 · Bodies · Thomas M. Disch · nv *
• 162 · Nightsong · Marilyn Hacker · pm *
• 163 · Cages · Vonda N. McIntyre · ss *
• 175 · A Man of Letters · Marek Obtulowicz · ss *
• 186 · The Fourth Profession · Larry Niven · nv *
• · Twelve Drawings · Olivier Olivier · il *
• · from The Day · Stan Persky · ex *

Evan Lewis has the reviews links this week...I hope all the readers here have had a good Thanksgiving, and sparing a thought for those who have not.

As I've noted elsewhere, yesterday:

***Todd Mason:--from the FictionMags discussion list, 14 May 2000:


STREET & SMITH'S DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, September 1946 (Volume 172, Number 5). Legendary editor: Daisy Bacon. Monthly. 15c ($1.50/year in US/$1.75 Pan American Union/$2.25 elsewhere; no Canadian subscriptions accepted [Can edition?]). 

Ads for Calvert Whiskey, Listerine Antiseptic mouthwash, Pepsi-Cola, Ray-o-Vac batteries, Olin Bond flashlights and batteries, Gillette razor blades, Ballco Vacutex blackhead extractor. 

Digest, 130 pp. Cover photograph by Ardean Miller, III.

from one of my contributions to the FictionMags Index, or FMI:

Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine [v172 #5, September 1946] ed. Daisy Bacon (Street & Smith, 15¢, 130pp, digest, cover by Ardean Miller, III, photo) [TM] They’d Die for Linda · William Campbell Gault · ss You’ll Be the Death of Me · Roy Lopez · na The Screaming Rock · John H. Knox · ss Murder Is Where You Dig It · William Honest · ss A Photo Finish · Dorothy Dunn · ss; cover story. Oswald Has His Night · Ronald Henderson · ss Blood Red Rubies · Roland Phillips · ss

ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, September 1945 (Volume 6, issue number 24). Legendary editor: Frederic Dannay; Mildred Falk, Mng. Ed.; Charlotte Spivak, Ass. Ed. Bimonthly. 25c ($1.50/year US and Pan American Union/$1.75 Canada/$2 elsewhere).


Ads for the Detective Book Club and an Inner Sanctum Mystery/Simon & Schuster (LAY THAT PISTOL DOWN by Richard Powell). 

Digest, 128 pp. Cover painting by George Salter.

one of Douglas Greene's FMI contributions:  

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [v 6 #24, September 1945] ed. Ellery Queen (American Mercury, 25¢, 128pp, digest s/s, cover by George Salter)  managing editor Mildred Falk. [DG] 4 · The White Pillars Murder · G. K. Chesterton · ss English Life Jan 1925, as “Dr. Hyde, Detective, and the White Pillars Murder” 17 · Pastorale · James M. Cain · ss The American Mercury Mar 1928 24 · The Labors of Hercules: The Stymphalian Birds, or The Cases of the Vulture Women [Hercule Poirot] · Agatha Christie · ss This Week Sep 17 1939, as “The Vulture Women”; The title on the cover is “The Vulture Women” and on the TOC “The Case of the Vulture Women”. 36 · The Wax-Work Cadaver [Dr. Sam: Johnson] · Lillian de la Torre · ss 50 · Two Sharp Knives · Dashiell Hammett · ss Collier’s Jan 13 1934 74 · What, No Butler? · Damon Runyon · ss Collier’s Aug 5 1933; in collection Blue Plate Special, 1944. 84 · The Whistling Corpse · Ben Hecht · ss 88 · The Problem of the Emperor’s Mushrooms [Paul Dawn] · James Yaffe · ss 98 · The Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist [Mr. Mycroft] · H. F. Heard · nv 115 · Perkins’ “First Case” [Willis Perkins] · Philip Wylie · ss

While published about a year apart, unlike the last two fiction-magazine issues I've
reviewed here [on the discussion list], a few of my beloved parallels obtain, even when
in reverse. Aside from both issues being very pleasant reading
experiences overall (and neither being much sought after on the
collectors market--purchase of the DETECTIVE STORY cost me more in
postage than in eBay bid price of $2, the EQMM was a buck in a comics
store; while both are no better than good reading copies, try getting
a merely complete PLANET STORIES for that price), one of the most
striking things about them was how forgotten the DSM writers mostly
are, and how many familiar names (perhaps some more remembered than
read) are in the EQ. The only definitely familiar name to me in the
S&S item is William Campbell Gault, and perhaps unsurprisingly his
"They'd Die for Linda" is the best story in that issue; possibly I'd
heard of Roy Lopez before, whose "You'll Be the Death of Me" is, like
most of the other DETECTIVE stories, what could be called "fake
hardboiled": wisecracking 'tecs of various sorts in stories with
the trappings of classic BLACK MASK and post-diaspora DIME DETECTIVE
fiction, without the bracing sense of hard living or worldly
cynicism of Hammett or Chandler. Odder is the issue's 33-page
"complete novel,""The Screaming Rock" by John H. Knox (whether a
close relation to Calvin M. Knox [Robert Silverberg's most famous pseudonym]
 in spirit, I'm not sure), which is nothing so much as a weird-menace/shudder pulp story with most of the torture taken out, more wisecracks and politics inserted. The McGuffin
is a series of experiments in cryogenics, not so named, that serve as 
obfuscation for murders at a remote psychiatric clinic, one not too
different from the one in FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. William Honest (good
old Honest Bill?) offers a reasonably affecting frame for his
impossible murder story, "Murder Is Where You Dig It"; Dorothy Dunn's
"A Photo Finish" (the cover story) reads like a slightly more
wholesome and ultimately upbeat version of a Jim Thompson desperate
loser story (before Thompson, at least, was publishing them); "Oswald
Has His Night" by Ronald Henderson is an interesting twist on a theme
AHMM (to say nothing of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS the tv series) would
eventually beat to death; in this case the henpecked husband is
framed for a murder he didn't commit by a third party and has to solve the
mystery before his wife returns from a visit as well as before being
collared by the police; "Blood Red Rubies" by Roland Phillips is
imitation THE THIN MAN, but not too shabby an example. What the
magazine reads like, in its mostly noirish feel but not quite
full-fledged hopeless existentialism (or MANHUNT brutality), is AHMM
in its first decades, even down to the mediocre uncredited line-drawing illustrations.
Gault's use of multiple viewpoints/narrators is the major deviation
from basically serious plain tales wisecrackingly told, and his and
perhaps Dunn's are the stories that most deserve to survive this
issue's shelf life, but one common feature here is in fine pulp
tradition: attention-getting, even when cliched, opening lines:

Lopez: "He was a little guy, wearing a checked suit. He was
bald-headed. And he was scared green."

Honest: "You felt like front table at El Morocco when Marie came in.
Nobody expected her to sing, but it wouldn't have been surprising.
Tycoons like Roger Tillman could afford such a wife."

Dunn: "Tommy Murphy tore up his losing ticket after the eighth race
and left the grandstand. His hopes fluttered down to the cold cement
flooring with the pieces of cardboard. And he felt cold and grey
inside, drained of his laughter and his luck."

Knox: "Plain Sid Wilson felt the sickening pause as the wheels of
his coupe lost their grip on the icy slope."

Unlike [fellow Street & Smith fiction magazines] ASTOUNDING or UNKNOWN, but like WILD WEST, DETECTIVE STORY here restricts Ms. Bacon's editorial comment to teaser blurbs, and offers a couple of examples of rather sentimental doggerel as space-filling
tags (the better one by Edgar Daniel Kramer, the other by L[ight?]. Breeze).

No such restriction applies to Fred Dannay, of course, whose
introductory essays several times threaten to exceed the length of
the stories blurbed. Fully half the contributions to this issue of EQMM
are reprints, and only one of the originals is bylined unfamiliarly
(as far as I can recall): James Yaffe's "The Problem of the
Emperor's Mushrooms," aside from being a short, decent alternate-to-Graves
modern retelling of the intrigues in the Roman court of Claudius, is
a piss-poor example of a crime story, albeit with another draft it
could've been a better one; Dannay flagellates himself in the intro
over Yaffe's previous EQMM story, because it never occurred to either
author nor editor that a toy balloon blown up by a person wouldn't
levitate in normal atmosphere, apparently a crucial plot point (the
flaw in the story at hand is more in telegraphing and awkwardness in
dialog, but, as Dannay notes, it was rushed into print to prove Yaffe
not an idiot).

More experienced hands than Yaffe's are tapping in Morse in this
issue. Agatha Christie's "The Case of the Vulture Women" (a reprint
from a 1939 THIS WEEK magazine [wasn't this a PARADE-like newspaper
insert?][yes, it was--the later me]), is a Hercule Poirot puzzle that probably could've been
solved in a few minutes cogitation by Dr. Watson or even Mike Hammer;
it was certainly pretty obvious to me, albeit AC's digs at the
English's depredations upon other languages ring true with anyone
who's ever heard what too many Britons do to Spanish words. The other puzzle
stories in this issue are less straightforward, if too often too
easily soluble: John Dickson Carr's quasi-impossible crime tale,
"Will You Walk into My Parlor?", is actually a radio script, previously
broadcast as part of the SUSPENSE series; G. K. Chesterton's "Dr.
Hyde, Detective, and The White Pillars Murder" (ENGLISH LIFE, January
1925) is not atypically as much philosophical rumination as puzzle,
and somewhat guessable in its "surprise"; Lillian de la Torre's
original Samuel Johnson/James Boswell historical mystery, "The
Wax-Work Cadaver," gets only slightly bogged in its attempts at
period color. James M. Cain's non-puzzle, "Pastorale" (AMERICAN MERCURY,
1928), is a minor murder tale with a not particularly deft use of
vaudeville "countrified" dialect (but a cheap inhouse reprint from a
name, and certainly hardboiled enough; inadvertantly Tuckerizing
opening lines: "Well, it looks like Burbie was going to get hung.
And if he does, what he can lay it on is, he always figured he was so dam
smart."). Things look up with Ben Hecht's brief parody, "The
Whistling Corpse," an original (intentionally) as turgid as the "had I but
known" (as Dannay calls them) once and future Gothics (as I tag them)
within the cf tradition, and worth a chuckle; far funnier and more
devastating is H. F. Heard's original Mr. Mycroft (as in Holmes
pastiche) tale, "Adventure of Mr. Montalba, Obsequist," which, in
addition to goosing Doyle a bit, prefigures Waugh's THE LOVED ONE in
most of the latter's best dimensions (this one's use of cutting-edge taxidermy/undertaking
practices and arguable positing of long-term self-induced suspended
animation sparks an argument--fantasy or no?--between Heard and
Dannay which is dutifully detailed in an endnote, and makes for a weak
parallel with Knox's proto-cryogenics story in DSM). Philip Wylie's
original "Perkins''First Case'" is an amiable mix of NYC
slice-of-life and offbeat detection, far less sententious (as I guess
it would have to be) than what SF by him I've tried (WHEN WORLDS
COLLIDE with Balmer and THE DISAPPEARANCE); anyone read his Crunch
and Des stories? Vying with the Heard for second-best in the issue is
Damon Runyon's "What, No Butler?" (from COLLIER'S in 1933 and  the 1944 collection BLUE
PLATE SPECIAL), like most of theDETECTIVE STORY offerings a basically serious story dressed up with humor, this time from the master of present-tense slang. The best story is unsurprisingly Dashiell Hammett's "Two Sharp Knives" (COLLIER'S MAGAZINE, 1942), which more
than any of the other stories in either issue (the Gault and the
Runyon come the closest, but it's not that close) gives the sense of life as it is actually lived by adults. And tells a fine, understated story.

(And one wonders if Daisy Bacon and Dannay, both on his own ticket and because he seemed to frequently work with women editors, had for obvious reasons less truck with the misogyny several here have mentioned as impediments to reprinting MANHUNT and at least some BLACK MASK stories....)