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Tuesday's Overlooked A/V: films, television and more...

April 12, 2017, 6:01 am
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La ragazza che sapeva troppo
The weekly assembly of links to blogposts, reviews, essays, podcasts and other items of interest about audio/visual work, usually first-rate and deserving of one's attention but sometimes less so and sometimes deserving of obscurity, up to and including opera, stage drama, conventions, museum exhibits, videogames (and boardgames), and more. Thanks to all who have produced the items linked to below! And please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's.  

A useful resource I stumbled across the other week, but forgot to mention to those who might also be interested, Paul Di Filippo mentioned on a discussion list, an online archive of Broadcasting magazine, 1931-2002.  Todd Mason

A. J. Wright:  Boots Mallory

Alice Chang: consoles

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

The Big Broadcast: 9 April 2017

Bill Crider: Blood Father [trailer]

Bob Freelander: Never Too Young to Die

Brian Arnold: Don Rickles

Brian Keene/The Horror Show: Remembering Robert Bloch, with Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, F. Paul Wilson, David J. Schow, John Skipp, Tom Monteleone, Wayne Allen Sallee, Chet Williamson, Cathy Gonzalez, and Del Howison 

Brian Lindenmuth: "Times Like Dying"

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Classic Movie Salon: (Sunday after next, discussing) All the Presidents Men

Colin McGulgan: Springfield Rifle

Comedy Filn Nerds: Dino Stamatopoulos & Leah Tiscione; Ramon Rivas II

Cult TV: The Avengers (starring Diana Rigg):"Return to Castle De'Ath"

The.Avengers.1965.S04E05.Castle.De'ath.by superannuatedlps

Cynthia Fuchs: Colossal; The Bye Bye Man

Dan Stumpf: These Thousand Hills

Dave Wain: Underrated '87 films

David Cramner: The Salvation

David James Keaton: men out of prison films

Elgin Bleecker: It Always Rains on Sundays
Rita Moreno in The Fat Man

Elizabeth Foxwell: The Fat Man: "The Thirty-Two Friends of Gina Lardelli" (tv pilot); Robert Bloch centennial

Eric Hillis: Caltiki: The Immortal Monster

The Faculty of Horror: Calvaire and Martyrs (2008 film)

Gary Deane: Rural noir films

George Kelley: The Flash: "Duet"

"Gilligan Newton-John": 3-4 January 1981 primetime US broadcast network tv

How Did This Get Made?: xXx: Return of Alexander Cage

Iba Dawson: Kicks

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Accidents Will Happen; Beverly Hills Vamp; Crime Does Not Pay:"Buried Loot"; Crime Does Not Pay the series;  You'd Be Surprised

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Whodunnit?"

Jackie Kashian/The Dork Forest: Hal Lublin on Saturday Night Live (and The Great American Bake-Off)
Thrilling Adventure Hour cast featuring Hal Lublin
Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin: The Jackie and Laurie Show  

Jacqueline T. Lynch: I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now

Jake Hinkson: After Dark, My Sweet

James Clark: Paterson

James Reasoner: Flashback (1990 film)

Janet Varney/The JV Club: Linda Park

J. D. Lafrance: Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Jerry House: TED Talks: Ze Frank on Nerdcore Comedy; Baywatch Nights

John Grant: The Naked Edge; Der Verdacht

John Scoleri: Dark Shadows Before I Die: the episodes reviewed

John Varley: Stagecoach (1939 film);The Girl in the Park

Jonathan Lewis: Gambling Lady

Juri Nummelin: The Glass House

Karen Hannsberry: Hope Emerson

Ken Levine: diagnosing problem scripts;WGA strike potential

Kim Newman: Secrets in the Walls; Pulgasari

Kliph Nesteroff: The Joe Franklin Show: David Frye, Jay Leno (1982)

Kristina Dijan: The Dark Tower; The Hook; Love Me Tonight; Canadian trivia; more Canadian trivia

Laura G: I Was a Shoplifter; Jamaica Inn; Infernal Machine

Leo Doroschenko/Andrew Porter: Alcoa Premiere (aka Fred Astaire's Premiere Theatre): "Mr. Lucifer" written by Alfred Bester

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

Lindsay D: Midnight (1939 film)

Maltin on Movies: Hayley Mills

Martin Edwards: Blind Date (aka Chance Encounter; 1959 film); The Witness for the Prosecution (BBC TV 2016)

Marty McKee: The Mask of Fu Manchu;Ocean's 11 (1960 film)

Mildred Perkins: Home (2016 stage musical by Christy Hall and Scot Alan)

Mitchell Hadley: Cleveland/Youngstown TV listings, 10 April 1971; TV Guide 10 April 1971


Movie Sign with the Mads: The African Queen

Noel Vera: The Devils

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Avanti!

Patti Abbott: The Innocents

Paul D. Brazill: Tony Hancock

The Projection Booth: They Live

Raquel Stecher: Griffith Observatory;TCM Film Festival

Rick: For Love or Money; Le Mans

Rod Lott: Eliminators; Aftermath (2017 film); Minutes Past Midnight

Ruth Kerr: Gary Cooper

Salome Wilde: River (tv series)

Sergio Angelini: The House of Fear

Stacia Kissick Jones: Loophole (1981 film); The Internecine Project



Stacie Ponder: Mystics in Bali

Stephen Bowie: David Kelley

Stephen Gallagher: FantasyCon 2016

Steve Lewis: South Sea Woman; Frontier Circus: "Depths of Fear" (pilot)

Todd Mason: Robert Bloch: conventions and drama

TV Obscurities: March Home Media releases

Tynan: Starter for 10; Sing Street

Vienna: Tall, Dark and Handsome
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FFS: Small-Town Law Week: Bill Pronzini: "The Hanging Man"; Howard Rigsby: "Dead Man's Story"; James Shaffer, "The Long Arm of the Law"

April 14, 2017, 4:41 am
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Howard Rigsby: "Dead Man’s Story", (ss) Argosy Aug 27 1938, as “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead”; The Mysterious Traveler Magazine Nov 1951

James Shaffer: "The Long Arm of the Law" [probably] New Western Magazine [v12 #1, August 1946]; Pocket Reader Series [#124, Western Stories, 1950] UK

Bill Pronzini: "The Hanging Man", (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 12 1981

Patti Abbott wanted a special emphasis this week on small-town sheriffs and police, which I suspect is going to lean heavily toward Bill Crider fiction, and well it might. I might just add a fourth story to this post of just that sort myself, but until that time, I took a bit of a different tack, and picked out three stories, one I'd loved when I first read it forty years ago, one which I'd not yet read by one of my favorite crime and western fiction writers, and one which was as new to me as its author. And none is precisely about either a sheriff or a police officer, though all of them involve one degree or another of men of those professions; no women in the jobs, since one is a contemporary story (for the time it was written and published) set in Florida in the 1930s, one is a California historical set in the time of the fading of the "traditional" west, in the first decade of the 1900s, and one is apparently set in what was still Wyoming Territory, sometime I'd guess in the 1880s. 

"Dead Man's Story" (apparently Rigsby's preferred title) is an utterly engaging dialect story, told from the point of view of Panama City, Florida-area Game Warden Joe Root, a native of the area and a tough man with a strong sense of duty, who knows and loves his job. In fact, his sense of duty is so strong that when he finds a wealthy tourist from Up North poaching deer out of season, neither bribery nor being shot multiple times will deter him from getting his man, eventually with an assist from another Warden and the County Sheriff of both their acquaintance. It's a borderline horror story that Manly Wade Wellman could've written about as well, but probably not much better, either. Robert Arthur reprinted it in his The Mysterious Traveler Magazine (a literary spin-off from his Mutual Radio anthology series) and later in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Month of Mystery (Random House, 1969), which has the slightly macabre distinction in relation to the story of being the last AHP: volume Arthur would edit before his death. I first read it in '76 or '77 in my new copy of the Dell second edition, published in '76 as AHP: Dates with Death...it seems a bit odd to be able to page through this paperback, in reasonably good shape, that has traveled with me for forty years. 

James Shaffer was a very prolific writer of western fiction in the 1940s, with a thick population of stories cited in the FictionMags Index from 1942-52, whose work I've not read before, as far as I know (he shouldn't be confused with the author of Shane, Jack Schaeffer).  I know nothing more about him, but he wrote at least this rather clever story, involving one Johnny Mason (not the reason I selected this one, but mildly amusing to me), a somewhat reluctant 27yo retiree from being a range detective for the quasi-private Western Cattlemen's Protective Association's Cheyenne office; he's also an extremely skilled and/or fortunate gambler, who's won enough recently at poker to allow him to put in his notice, but his old boss manages to rope him into taking a new assignment, by letting him know that the game's afoot out along one of the rail lines, where a rancher has died...possibly by accident, at least apparently so...and yet the beneficiary of his sizable insurance policy has refused to accept the check, and two letters had been sent
to the Association's office, apparently written by the decedent: one on the day before his death, asking for assistance with criminal activity against him, and one reversing that request...sent the day after his death. Mason comes to town and investigates, brushing up against the kind of corruption you might expect in a railroad cattle town in the 1880s, with a fixed trial among other adventures awaiting several of the characters, including Mason; Elmore Leonard could've written this one better, and did in various ways (notably in the source story for the television series Justified), but Shaffer's work here is fine and almost completely fair-play detection (he withholds one crucial fact till he's ready to have Mason lay it out). There's a very good chance this one first appeared in the Popular Publications/ Fictioneers pulp New Western for August 1946, but the FMI folks haven't been able to confirm that; the story is in the index by name because of its reprint  in a British magazine that ran various sorts of theme issues, and apparently was no more explicit in citing its source than the book I've read this in, Damon Knight's Westerns of the '40s: Classics from the Great Pulps, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1977, an anthology comprised of stories Knight remembered fondly from his years of working on Fictioneers pulps as one of the staff editors. 

Bill Pronzini's story is typically understated, and deals (as will surprise none of his readers) with a mysterious murder in a small Northern California town, Tule River, at the turn of the 20th century when the community hasn't yet gained its first automobile. For a police force Tule River has two volunteer sheriff's deputies in Carl Miller and Ed Bozeman, who theoretically work under the anti-professional riding sheriff, a fellow who drops in occasionally from the county seat to have the era-appropriate version of too many donuts at the local eatery. A drifter, who it turns out had been soliciting work around town, is found hanged early one morning. Carl and Ed cautiously put matters together, and find things are a bit more disturbing than they feared. Had Bill Pronzini started his career a decade or so earlier, the Gunsmoke producers, at least for the radio series if not for the tv version as well, would've been wise to have him on staff.  I read this one in the unabridged 1989 Reader's Digest Association reprint of The Arbor House Treasury of Great Western Stories (1982), edited by Pronzini and Martin Harry Greenberg, who was known to insist that his writer co-editors include one of their own works. Unlike most instant remainders, which (as a remainder, rather than though possibly from a library sale) I suspect is how I acquired this one, the RD folks published theirs on acid-free paper...I'm noting how my copy of a more typical instant remainder, published in its only edition, I believe, by Random House subsidiary Gramercy in 1995, John Tuska's fat best-of-the-magazine anthology Star Western, is showing clear signs of not being able to last forty years as anything but a pile of acidic dust.  Ah, the life of books...off to look at everyone else's choices for this week. 







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Overlooked A/V: films, television and much more: new links to the reviews, discussions and more

April 20, 2017, 6:50 am
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Go for Sisters
The weekly assembly of links to blogposts, reviews, essays, podcasts and other items of interest about audio/visual work, usually first-rate and deserving of one's attention but sometimes less so and sometimes deserving of obscurity, up to and including opera, stage drama, conventions, museum exhibits, videogames (and boardgames), and more. Thanks to all who have produced the items linked to below! And please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's.  
Todd Mason, with apologies for a day's delay this week

A. J. Wright: Alabama Jones

Alice Chang: Gravity Rush 2

Anne Billson: Night on the Galactic Railroad

The Big Broadcast: 16 April 2017 archived
  • 7 p.m. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
    “The Cui Bono Matter” Part 5 (CBS, Original air date February 17, 1956)(Running time 14:45)
  • 7:15 p.m. Treasury Star Parade
    “An Easter Story” (US Treasury, Original recording date 1942)(Running time 14:31)
  • 7:30 p.m. The Jack Benny Show
    “Walking in the Easter Parade” (CBS, Original air date April 17, 1949)(Running time 26:06)
  • 8:00 p.m. Gunsmoke
    “The Correspondent” (CBS, AFRTS rebroadcast, Original air date November 23, 1958)(Running time 18:28)
  • 8:20 p.m. NBC Live Report
    “FDR Greets Easter Egg Rollers” (NBC, Original broadcast date March 29, 1937)(Running time 6:55)
  • 8:30 p.m. Dragnet 
    Program #60 “The Big Dare” (NBC, Original air date August 3, 1950)(Running time 26:52)
  • 9:00 p.m. The Six Shooter
    “The Crisis at Easter Creek” (NBC, Original air date April 15, 1954)(Running time 29:49)
  • 9:30 p.m. Our Miss Brooks
    “New Egg Dye” (CBS, Original air date April 9, 1950)(Running time 29:36)
  • 10:00 p.m. Marian Anderson Concert
    “Live at the Lincoln Memorial” (Original broadcast date April 9, 1939)(Running time 29:02)
  • 10:30 p.m. Lights Out!
    “The Flame” (CBS, Original air date March 23, 1943)(Running time 23:19)















Graham Chapman
Eric Idle and John Cleese

























Emma Thompson's 1988 BBC sketch comedy series Thompson, episode 4










Movie Sign with the Mads: Valley of the Dolls

Natalie Morales and Andrew Bird:





















Thompson (BBC 1988) episode 1 part 1



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FFB: 100 Best Books books (and lists and such)

April 21, 2017, 4:37 am
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The other day, FFB founder and usual gatherer Patti Abbott was asking her social-media correspondents what she should look into for key works of fantasy fiction, since she felt that she hadn't done enough reading in that area. She received a lot of mostly good suggestions, in the way such things go, and I was reminded of all the works that exist, as books of recommendations and online lists of varying degrees of institutional and demotic weight, that try to scratch the same itch...and the books, certainly, are there to make a few bucks while serving their argumentation and illumination purposes as well.

I'm also surprised, given that I'm a sucker for such volumes, that I've only "formally" addressed two of the (primarily) crime fiction volumes of this sort in FFB entries, H.R. F. Keating's Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books and David Morrell and Hank Wagner 's anthology Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, while mentioning others from time to time, such as Anthony Burgess's Ninety-Nine Novels and particularly Stephen Jones and Kim Newman's Horror: 100 Best Books, which, like the Morrell & Wagner is one of those which taps a hundred or so other writers to chose a single volume they'd like to highlight as one of a hundred that deserve inclusion. Sentiment plays a role at times, as does a certain desire on the part of some contributors to challenge the assumptions of the reader (Robert Bloch, for example, cited a now rather obscure book by a now rather overlooked writer, Alexander Laing's 1935 novel The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck; Robert McCammon brings in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's brilliant and harrowing western The Track of the Cat). The Newman and Jones book was eventually followed by Horror: Another 100 Best
Books, which as a second bite is if anything more interesting than the first, as most of the low-hanging classics were already dealt with in the first volume...allowing for the argument, in all senses, to move onto not only those inexcusably missing from the first volume but also more works that are more usually thought of as Not Horror, but fantasy, suspense fiction, science fiction, absurdist fiction and the like to be proposed in the horror context. 

Seemingly, Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn's Fantasy: The 100 Best Bookswould be the title we all should collectively have handed to Patti, along with the more narrowly-focused David Pringle volume, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. The Moorcock and Cawthorn is a better selection of titles, in part due to the wider range of dates and not restricting itself to novels (though it does overrepresent novels), and including fewer items (while still including some) that are more historically important or interesting (and usually both) than remotely good by any stretch of critical consideration: several relatively minor writers get two selections in the Moorcock/Cawthorn while others are missing altogether, while Pringle, while including such worthies as R. A. Lafferty and William Kotzwinkle (and more Angela Carter than the other guys did), also finds room for the execrable work of  Stephen Donaldson and Robert Heinlein's at best half-assed Glory Road. M&C inexcusably leave out Borges; neither book includes any Italo Calvino or Jane Yolen or...

But since these are all matters of taste, tempered by genuine desire (usually, at very least) to soberly assess the quality of the given work, and none can be considered a True Writ From On High except by the dullest among us (and, yet, sadly, too often they are treated thus, by the most institutional among us), as is clear when one also considers the similarly intended Modern Library rankings, between their editorial panel's choices of the 100 best fiction books  (with mostly selections that are hard to argue with, except in the rankings, and a few that are ludicrous or nearly so) and the popularity poll the Modern Library gathered votes for at the same time (many ludicrous choices, and some merely obviously the result of fannish enthusiasm game-rigging the votes, and a few choices that are notable for being rather better than some on the panel's list).  Flannery O'Connor and Thomas Pynchon made the Vox Pop list, along with trash from Rand, Hubbard and Bach, but didn't make the Expert List, which instead assures us that Winesburg, Ohio (interesting, but more groundbreaking than immortal) and Tropic of Cancer were more worthy than anything by any number of other, better writers, including O'Connor and Pynchon. Larry McCaffery and Radcliffe students were among those who came up with widely-circulated lists in response...McCaffery's was (mostly) better than the Expert list, the Radcliffe list slightly better on women writers but worse overall. 

And, always, this is an ongoing discussion...and all cited are valuable reminders that one needs to know of, at least, all the items in each collection to have a true grounding in each field. For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog. Next week, I'll be hosting, while Patti and Megan Abbott wonder if they'll be walking away with with odd little Edgar Allan Poe busts, from the Mystery Writers of America annual convention. 




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A Whole Lot of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross (and LH & Bavan): Saturday Music Club

April 21, 2017, 11:09 pm
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The two versions of the trio that were the greatest US exponents of jazz vocalese...the first episode of the third season of Fargo features their recording of "Moanin'" prominently...the first album stack features that recording, from LH&R's fist CBS LP:


Jumping back a year or so, to their first album:
















And a collection that includes the second album, from Pacific Jazz, The Swingers!, and other sessions:


And then their third album, with Joe Williams, Sing Along with Basie:


Live video tracks and fellow travelers:








The second album with CBS: LH&R Sing Ellington (and it continues to include the third CBS album High Flying, which begins with "Come on Home" and ends with "Mr. PC", and a few other tracks--which will follow, though you might have to hit the "Watch on YouTube" button when and if it pops up below):

The post-High Flying tracks are 
"Walkin'"
"This Here" aka "Dis Hyuh"
"Swingin' Till the Girls Come Home"
"Twist City"
"Just a Little Bit of Twist"
"A Night in Tunisia"
and an alternate take of "A Night in Tunisia"









The Real Ambassadors (with the Brubeck Trio, Carmen McRae and Louis Armstrong):


Ross leaves, and Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan go forward; 
Live At Newport '63:


LH&B's second album, Basin Street East:


And their third and last...they break up, and in 1966, Lambert killed by a truck while fixing someone's tire for them on a roadside:


And a stack of video recordings, led off by a 1975 Soundstage episode featuring Ross and Hendricks:
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Courtesy "Alt National Park Service" on FaceBook (and Chris Ehrich):

April 24, 2017, 6:34 am
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Overlooked A/V: films, television and more; links to reviews, essays, podcasts and more

April 26, 2017, 8:02 am
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The weekly assembly of links to blogposts, reviews, essays, podcasts and other items of interest about audio/visual work, usually first-rate and deserving of one's attention but sometimes less so and sometimes deserving of obscurity, up to and including opera, stage drama, conventions, museum exhibits, videogames (and boardgames), and more. This week we have some braiding, in large part thanks to the Great Villains Blogathan, now in its fourth year, but not to that fine project of Kristina Dijan, Ruth Kerr and Karen Hannsberry exclusively. Thanks to all who have produced the items linked to below! And please let me know if I've missed yours or someone else's.  
Legend (1985) written by William Hjortsberg

Sparing a thought on the occasion of the deaths of writer/professor William Hjortsberg (a friend of writer and blogger Richard Wheeler) and Jonathan Demme. 
Todd Mason, with apologies for a day's delay this week, as well

A. J. Wright: Alabama actresses before 1960

Alice Chang: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Anne Billson: The Life of Oharu

The Big Broadcast: 23 April 2017

Bill Crider: Beau Brummell (1954 film)[trailer]

Bob Freedlander: The Big Heat; Experiment in Terror

Brian Busby: Tour de Force

Brian Lindenmuth: films based on the fiction of Lewis  B. Patten

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Colin McGulgan: Money, Women and Guns

Comedy Film Nerds: Faith Choyce

Cult TV: George and the Dragon

Cynthia Fuchs: Headshot; Queen of Katwe

Dan Stumpf: Big House, U.S.A.

The Dana Gould Hour: Kliph Nesteroff, Drew Friedman; Pete Aronson

Not solely how it should've ended, but also how it wasn't remotely well-written at any point.

Courtesy Lee Goldberg

Elgin Bleecker: Charade

Elizabeth Foxwell: First Edition:"Elmore Leonard" (1984 long interview)

Eric Hillis: Hard Times; The Entity

The Faculty of Horror: 2016 in review

George Kelley: Dead Again;Teen Titans: The Judas Contract

How Did This Get Made?: Escape from LA  (see Movie Sign with the Mads)

Iba Dawson: Feud: Bette and Joan

International Waters: Andy Kindler; Scott Thompson; Sara Morgan; Chris Morgan

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Ducks and Drakes; Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?; Fast Break; Crime Does Not Pay: "Desert Death"

Jack Seabrook, John Scoleri, Jose Cruz, Gilbert and Peter Enfantino: 2016 film, tv and more highlights (and less so)

Jackie Kashian/The Dork Forest: Rebecca Sugar on musicals

Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin: The Jackie and Laurie Show  

Jacqueline T. Lynch: Night and Day; De-Lovely

Jake Hinkson: Chicago Film Society

James Reasoner: Lady on a Train

Janet Varney/The J. V. Club: Amy Shira Teitel

J. D. Lafrance: Glengarry Glen Ross (film)

Jedidiah Ayres: On the Job

Jerry House: "Max, the Heartbreaker"; 1960?? Jimmy Cricket! (ABC Radio 1947 documentary of sorts featuring Disney voice actors)

John Grant: The Medusa Touch; La Foire aux Chimères; Flesh and the Spur

John Scoleri: Dark Shadows Before I Die

John Varley: Poltergeist (1982 film); The Night Manager

Jonathan Lewis: The Funhouse (1981 film)

Judy Gold/Kill Me Now: Cathy Ladman & Leslie Popkin;Laurie Kilmartin/Part 2

Karen Hannsberry: Great Villains Blogathon, Day 1


Kate Laity: She's Beautiful When She's Angry

Ken Levine: belaboring the joke;WGA labor action

Kim Newman: Mindhorn; I Start Counting; Drive, He Said

Kliph Nesteroff: Here Come the Stars (1968 television); The Phyllis Diller  Show

Kristina Dijan: Children of Paradise; The Dark Tower (1943 film)

Laura G.: The Richest Girl in the World; Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival; Other Men's Women; Wanted! Jane Turner; Ladies of the Jury

Lindsey D.: Broadway Babies; Rome Adventure

The Long Shot: Betsy Sodaro

Maltin on Movies: festivals

Martin Edwards: CWA Annual Conference

Marty McKee: Superman and the Mole Men; The Golden Gate Murders

Mildred Perkins: Dracula's Daughter

Mitchell Hadley: Atlanta television, 27 April 1977; TV Guide, 23 April 1977

Movie Sign with the Mads: Escape from New York;The African Queen

Noel Vera: Hell or High Water

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Speedy; Hammett's Casper Gutman in film

Paul D. Brazill: The Bed-Sitting Room

The Projection Booth: The Red Shows;eXistenZ

Phil Nobile, Jr.: Roger Moore on Live and Let Die (courtesy Paul Brazill)

Raquel Stecher: Panique; The Graduate at 50

Rick: The Fortune Cookie; Detectorists

Rod Lott: Attack of the Morningside Monster; Beware! The Blob

Ruth Kerr: Great Villains Blogathon

Salome Wilde: The Scarlet Hour v. Pushover

Scott A. Cupp: Night of the Lepus

Serena Bramble: The Light Between Oceans

Sergio Angelini: Inspector Morse: "The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn" (Sergio points us to Chris Sullivan's post on this episode.)

Stacia Kissick Jones: Macbeth (1948 film); Daisy Kenyon

Stacie Ponder: The Haunting


Steve Lewis: Desire and Hell at the Sunset Motel; Nine Lives are Not Enough; The Black Tent

Stephen Bowie: UK television: The Man in Room 17; It's Dark Outside; The Plane Makers; Public Eye

Stephen Gallagher: The Beast of Hollow Mountain

Television Obscurities: Your Television Babysitter (Dumont Network, 1948-51)

Todd Mason: Soundstage, Jazz Casual, Playboy's Penthouse and other jazz television and film footage featuring Lambert, Hendricks and Ross or Bavan

Tynan: The 400 Blows; Divorce, Italian Style

Vienna: That's Entertainment!

Walker Martin: Windy City Pulp Convention 2017

Yvette Banek: The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books (and stories and magazines): The Links to the Reviews: 28 April 2017 (new links added)

April 29, 2017, 1:00 am
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Patti Abbott will be gathering of links again next Friday, after returning from the MWA convention in NYC, and has an interview with Dana King posted on her blog this morning.  As always it's a pleasure to put these lists together; please let me know in comments if I've missed yours or someone else's.  
Todd Mason

William Hjortsberg, 1941-2017
Edgar Awards:
Sergio Angelini: Big Bad City by "Ed McBain' (Evan Hunter); The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn by Colin Dexter

Frank Babics: The Fiction Desk: issue 9 "Grey Beard and Glittering Eye" edited by Robert Redman

Mark Baker: St. Mark's Place by Victoria Thompson

Joe Barone: Iron Lake by William Kent Krueger (after Patti Abbott)

Les Blatt: The Father Hunt by Rex Stout

John Boston: Amazing Stories: Fact and Science Fiction, May 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Alice Chang: Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Colman: "Wee Danny" by Gerard Brennan

David Cramner: Backgammon: “The Cruelest Game” in Film and Literature

Bill Crider: Norstrillia by "Cordwainer Smith" (Paul Linebarger); The Golden Spiders by Rex Stout

Scott A. Cupp: Stop This Man! by Peter Rabe 

William F. Deeck: Treasure by Post and Planning for Murder by David Williams

Martin Edwards: The Dead Man's Knock by John Dickson Carr

Will Errickson: Women of Darkness edited by Kathryn Ptacek

Jeff Flugel: The Hanging Stones by Manly Wade Wellman

Elizabeth Foxwell: reviewing

Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1976, edited by Edward Ferman

Barry Gardner: Big Town by Doug J. Swanson; Criminal Conversations by Evan Hunter

John Grant: The A26 by Pascal Garnier (translated by Melanie Florence)

Rich Horton: Big Planet and Slaves of the Klau by Jack Vance; The Reign of Wizardry by Jack Williamson

Jerry House: Mary Worth by Allen Saunders and Ken Ernst; Astro Boy, Book 2 by Osamu Tezuka

Tracy K: Wall of Glass by Walter Satterthwait

George Kelley: Just the Way It Is and Blonde's Requiem by "James Hadley Chase" (Rene Lodge Brabazon Raymond)

Joe Kenney: The Lady Lost Her Head by Manning Lee Stokes

Margot Kinberg: Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey

Rob Kitchin: Whiskey River by Loren D. Estleman

Richard Krauss: "The Nightmare Face" by Walter Snow

B. V. Lawson: The Edgar Winners edited by Bill Pronzini

Evan Lewis: For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming

Steve Lewis: Honey in His Mouth by Lester Dent; The Universe Against Her by James H. Schmitz; Rio Desperado and Voice of the Gun by Gordon D. Shirreffs;  "A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime" by Charlie Jane Anders

Brian Lindenmuth: Comanche Vengeance by Richard Jessup

Todd Mason: Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird and Wondrous edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Patrick L. Price; The Best Fantasy Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Edward L. Ferman;  Tales of Terror edited by Eleanor Sullivan (ghost-edited for Alfred Hitchcock),among other fiction-magazine best-ofs (redux)

BareBones Melvins: EC Comics, January 1953

Neer: A Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey 

John ONeill: Famous Fantastic Mysteries edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg 

Matt Paust: The Company You Keep by Neil Gordon

Mildred Perkins: The Keeper by Sarah Langan

Bill Pronzini: The Tiger Among Us by Leigh Brackett

James Reasoner: "Horde of Hated Men" by Phil Richards

Richard Robinson: Deadly Nightshade by Cynthia Riggs

Gerard Saylor: Little Heaven by "Nick Cutter" (Craig Davidson)

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic, May 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Kevin Tipple: A Time for Hanging by Bill Crider

"TomKat": Except for One Thing by John Russell Fearn (as by Hugo Blayn)

"Samuel Wilson": Barbed Wire by Elmer Kelton














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Stoker Awards; Agatha Awards

April 29, 2017, 10:58 pm
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April's Underappreciated Music: the links

May 1, 2017, 3:07 am
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Overlooked A/V: the links to the reviews, discussions and more: film, television, radio, podcasts and more: new links added

May 4, 2017, 3:45 am
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A. J. Wright: Whispering City

Alice Chang: PlayStation 4

Anne Billson: Diamonds Are Forever (Cat of the Day)

The Big Broadcast:  30 April 2017
  • 7 p.m. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
    “The Bennett Matter” Part 3 (CBS, Original air date February 22, 1956)(Running time 14:45)
  • 7:15 p.m. Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
    “The Bennett Matter” Part 4 (CBS, Original air date February 23, 1956)(Running time 14:45)
  • 7:30 p.m. My Favorite Husband
    “Liz Writes a Song” (CBS, Original air date January 27, 1950)(Running time 29:25)
  • 8:00 p.m. Gunsmoke
    “The Grass Asp” (CBS, AFRTS rebroadcast, Original air date December 7, 1958, 1958)(Running time 19:24)
  • 8:20 p.m. Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands
    “Duke Ellington” (Original recording date November 27, 1943)(Running time 15:11)
  • 8:30 p.m. Dragnet 
    Program #62 “The Big Youngster” (NBC, Original air date August 19, 1950)(Running time 26:48)
  • 9:00 p.m. The CBS Radio Workshop
    “The Green Hills of Earth” (Heinlein) (CBS, Original air date July 21, 1957)(Running time 23:55)
  • 9:30 p.m. This Is Your FBI
    “The Three Fathom Frame-up” (ABC, Original air date February 18, 1949)(Running time 28:47)
  • 10:00 p.m. The CBS Radio Workshop
    “Epitaphs” (CBS, Original broadcast date June 2, 1957)(Running time 25:00)
  • 10:30 p.m. Anthology
    “Carl Sandburg Reads His Poetry” special guest Ogden Nash (WNBC, Original air date August 1, 1954)(Running time 24:10)








Dan Stumpf: Return to Warbow: Sing and Like It

David Cramner: backgammon in film and literature

Earl Green: Trying Times (courtesy Brian Arnold)

Elizabeth Foxwell: Shield for Murder

The Faculty of Horror: The Descent

George Kelley: Cabaret (current stage production)

How Did This Get Made?: Stealth

Iba Dawson: The Get-Down

International Waters: Graham Elwood; Guy Branum; Caroline Mabey; Lucy Pearman; Dave Holmes 

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Spotlight Scandals; the color episodes of The Andy Griffith Show

Jack Seabrook: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: "The Gentleman Caller"





...more to come...
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Grania Davis, RIP: FFB: THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff (St Martin's Press, 1999)

May 5, 2017, 2:28 am
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I've had the good fortune to correspond with Grania Davis over the last year
or so, mostly over FaceBook but also directly, and (as most people who've had an opportunity to correspond or speak with her will also tell you) she was an utterly graceful and kind person to have conversation with. I started reading her work in 1978, with a fine short story called "David's Friend, the Hole" in the first new issue of Fantastic I bought and read, dated July 1978, and the first novel of hers I've read, noted in the review below, was her collaboration with her ex-hustand Avram Davidson (they were married 1962-64), the last novel he would see published in his lifetime, the fine Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (Baen, 1988), which I'd hoped to reread for review today, but circumstances haven't allowed for that...I also have several of Davis's solo volumes at hand, including her recent retrospective collection of short stories, Tree of Life, Book of Death, too on the nose a title at the moment, published in 2013 by Richard Lupoff's imprint Surinam Turtle Press. I also have copies of her novels The Great Perpendicular Path, The Rainbow Annals and Moonbird in my vast To Be Read stacks, though I certainly meant to get to the collection first, and read the half or so of the book that will be still new to me. Perhaps sooner than I would've eventually gotten to that, now. 


Kind of a pity "David's Friend, the Hole" didn't make the cut...it's a disturbing but quiet fantasy story about a bright young kid in deprived circumstances, less obviously anguished than the older teens of Kathe Koja's first novel The Funhole, always published as The Cipher...and David's hole is less communicable. The two stories aren't too similar other than in spirit and in the central metaphor, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if reading Davis's story didn't plant a seed, or vacuole, that grew in Koja's imagination. Koja did recently tweet that the current edition of her book would make a lovely Mother's Day gift, for that special someone...yes, and throw in a copy of Davis's... In the penultimate comment reprinted below, Ethan Davidson, the son of Grania and Avram Davidson, notes they were about to publish the collection of father-son collaborations, and that's out now, too...I was one of several passing along copies of the more obscurely-published Avram Davidson stories as I found them to Grania, for a sequel to this and her other volumes collecting Davidson's short stories, and I hope her sons do manage to finish that collection or those collections as well.

When I was a senior (Class of '82) at Honolulu's Punahou Academy, I made mention in my quarter-page of the yearbook that year of AD, and a frosh girl of my acquaintance, Katie Swift, asked if I was referring referring to the writer Avram Davidson, who along with Grania Davis, at that time resident in Kaneohe with her husband Stephen Davis and their son Seth and, I believe, her and AD's son Ethan, were all family friends of Katie and her parents. When I struck up acquaintance with Grania (at last) through FB, I had my first bulletin about the apparently happily thriving Katie in decades.

One of the happier moments of patron advice I was able to achieve when clerking at a Crown Books, in Fairfax, VA, between taking my BA and going onto  a short stint in grad school, was putting a copy of Marco Polo... in the hands of a couple of young women looking for recommendations, when the book was new...they were pleased enough to come back  for more, but apparently my second recommendation, Robert Coover's You Must Remember This, didn't send them...

Perhaps I should've opted for some Jane Yolen or Kate Wilhelm. Alas, Davis's completion of the late Davidson's novella The Boss in the Wall wouldn't be published for a decade, and no other Davis books were in print at that time, unless perhaps her first two picture books, for beginning readers, still were, but not her first novel, Doctor Grass, nor her other novels all from a few years earlier, and her anthology of Japanese sf and fantasy in translation Speculative Japan a couple of decades away. And a decade before the lovely string of impressive Avram Davidson collections she co-edited would emerge, this one below the second to appear. 

She died suddenly last week, while watching a televised opera in a local, northern California  cinema. At last report, her sons are still trying to place Grania's cat, Kiwi, in a new home.   








Friday, March 4, 2016

FFB: THE INVESTIGATIONS OF AVRAM DAVIDSON: Collected Mysteries, edited by Grania Davis and Richard A. Lupoff (St Martin's Press, 1999)

My default choice for my favorite writer, and yet I've only done up a few of his books so far, even given the excellence of the knot of Davidson collections his old friend and collaborator (in life as ex-wife as well as in literature) Grania Davis was responsible for, often in partnership with another admirer of Davidson and his work, at the turn of the last century. So, let's start to remedy that...

Davidson was a brilliant fantasist and a brilliant writer in nearly any field he turned his hand to, and crime fiction seems to have been at worst his second love among literary modes, whether it was in the sleek, pointedly effective historical fiction "The Necessity of His Condition" (where the rationalizations for chattel slavery catch up with a slaveholder), or the discursive, just this side of surreal contemporary fiction "The Lord of Central Park" (about the conduct of river pirates in modern-day Manhattan, and much else); "'Thou Still Unravished Bride'" is anticipatory of the likes of Gone Girl in its short focus, while also drawing in poetic allusion to a deft procedural approach--this was one of two stories by Davidson adapted for episodes of Alfred Hitchcock's television series; the other (and Davidson's first story in a crime-fiction magazine) "The Ikon of Elijah" had also previously been the source of an episode of the CBC-TV anthology The Unforeseen. This book is by no means a comprehensive collection of Davidson's best crime fiction (perhaps more's the pity) so much as a nice sampling of the range of what he wrote in the criminous field...most of the stories from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, where he was one of Frederic Dannay's great favorites (and, as a result, eventually ghost-writer of two "Ellery Queen" novels), augmented by one each from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, The Saint Mystery Magazine and the 1980s horror-fiction digest Night Cry, all among the many receptive markets for Davidson's work; he is one of the few to
"Ellery Queen" novels by Davidson
from Dannay outlines.
 have received the Hugo Award (from the World SF Convention), the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and also the soon to be renamed Howard Award from the World Fantasy Convention, among other honors. It's difficult for me not to simply rattle off a string of superlatives when considering Davidson's short fiction, which almost always has an energy to match the imagination and erudition, the elegance and wit on display that his novels, usually written under less than the best financial circumstances, can lack; as ambitious as the short work can be, as well, it also has a certain completeness that the same insecure circumstances denied some of his best work in novel form (where sequels that were clearly planned were either never written or didn't quite reach finished form by the time of Davidson's death); such books as Masters of the Maze, Marco Polo and the Sleeping Beauty (in collaboration with Davis), or 
Joyleg (with Ward Moore) are everything they should be, and wonderful, while others, such as The Phoenix and the Mirror, are perhaps even more impressive in their ambition, and not quite as thoroughly realized.  Davis and collaborators are readying another knot of collections and completed works for publication now, and you should watch out for them, and you could do worse than to dip into this, with its excellent introduction by Dick Lupoff and good story-note introductions by Lupoff and Davis, or the broad-spectrum The Avram Davidson Treasury, the collection of his stories published in the Jewish press, his explorations of myth and historical legend in "unhistory", or the collections devoted to such recurrent characters as Doctor Eszterhazy (my own favorites among his work) and Jack Limekiller, or others while waiting for the new books to appear; an e-book edition of this volume was published by Minotaur in 2015.

The contents, courtesy ISFDB:
For more of today's books, with a special emphasis on Ruth Rendell this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Labels: , , , , , 

8 comments:

Jerry House said...
Davidson, like Fritz Leiber, never ceases to amaze. In my greatest fancies, I am transported to a world where there are many more stories about Dr. Eszterhazy, Jack Limekiller, Vergil Magus, and Peregrine...a world where he and Harlan Ellison actually finished and published DON'T SPEAK OF ROPE...a world where Davidson continues to write those amazing Adventures in Unhistory...a world that sadly exists only in my dreams. **sigh**
March 4, 2016 at 11:35 AM 
Jim C. said...
"The Necessity of His Condition" has haunted me for many years -- a memorable piece of writing. 
March 4, 2016 at 11:59 AM 
Todd Mason said...
Or, perhaps, Jerry, Davidson and Ellison might've written the comic novel they might've, along the lines of "Up Christopher to Madness"...or, better yet perhaps, a novel set in the Greenwich Village or larger New York that Davidson certainly dealt with in some of his most personal and delightful short stories.

Jim, it's a strong and sardonic story...Davidson's anger is usually expressed in his most straightforward and concise work.
March 4, 2016 at 12:48 PM 
Graham Powell said...
This one's been on my list for a while. I'll have to finally pick it up.
March 4, 2016 at 1:27 PM 
Todd Mason said...
Indeed. And THE AVRAM DAVIDSON TREASURY, THE OTHER NINETEENTH CENTURY, THE ENQUIRIES OF DOCTOR ESZTERHAZY (or the ADVENTURES volume expanding that), ADVENTURES IN UNHISTORY, MASTERS OF THE MAZE or THE REDWARD EDWARD PAPERS would all make sensible next reads, if you haven't yet...
March 4, 2016 at 1:45 PM 
Sergio (Tipping My Fedora) said...
Fascinating - I do have a nice copy of TREASURY on my shelves I'm glad to say but have not actually come across this one (I did read the Ghosted Queen books - not my favourites frankly). 
March 11, 2016 at 4:11 AM 
ethan davidson said...
We have just collected an anthology of colaborations between myself, Ethan and my father, Avram Davidson. It is called "Davidson & son". It is avaliable on Amazon.
April 12, 2016 at 3:34 AM 
Todd Mason said...
I saw your mother's citations on FaceBook...looking forward to it!
April 13, 2016 at 8:14 AM 
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FFB: TURNING POINTS edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1977); DREAM MAKERS: VOLUME II interviews conducted by Charles Platt (Berkley 1985)

May 12, 2017, 2:56 am
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Two books about sf and fantasy and what's around them, Damon Knight's pioneering gathering of essays from various sources, about "The Art of Science Fiction" as the subtitle notes (there had been numerous all-original symposia, and some collections of criticism by individual writers, including Knight himself, but no anthology drawing widely on the previously-published literature)...and the second and perhaps more surprising volume of interviews with sf and fantasy writers by the always ready to be contentious Charles Platt (there are two editions of Dream Makers by Platt...the first his first collection of interview essays, the second Platt's selection of entries from both the first two volumes--I recommend reading the entirety of the two earlier volumes).

Knight's volume, which includes a bit of new material in its time (1977, most notably Knight's own essays on the nature of sf and writing and selling the literature) also offered the first widespread access to certain other documents, published, if at all, only in fanzines of varying degrees of obscurity. This is true of the debate, of sorts, between the rather obscure Philip Geffe and four rather prominent scientists or ex-secientists in the sf field about how scientists are
treated in the fiction, and Joanna Russ's speech, "Alien Monsters," which might be even more controversial, citing as it does an illustration in an sf magazine that no one, apparently, has since found...and which I suspect refers to the resolution to Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People...which Russ cites along the way toward calling for much greater sophistication in dealing with characters and characterization in SF. There is no single thread to the essays Knight collects here, sometimes even within the subheadings the selections are classed with in the table of contents, and I don't think Knight ever intended us to consider each contribution to be the equal of every other one, so much as various sorts of nudges to get the reader new to sf, or a veteran reader or otherwise more involved, to consider or reconsider both conventional wisdom or their own opinions about the field...since the book is mostly about sf, rather than the larger field of fantastic fiction, even if the other sorts of speculative fiction by necessity are discussed. 

The contents:
i. A Walk Around the Topic
II. History without Tears
III. Criticism, Destructive and Otherwise
IV. S.F. and Science
V. How To, in Four Tricky Lessons
VI. S.F. as Prophecy
VII. Confessions
(The Franklin item, from his book-length study Future Perfect [Oxford, 1966] was omitted by the ISFDB listing for the book; possibly for some reason it's missing from the Macmillan/Orion 2014 ebook edition.)

Casting one's eye over the contents, one can see contributions from those with careers at the heart of the SF fields, including such critics and historians as Versins and Franklin, and those who made notable contributions, sometimes their most important contributions, but who are best-remembered for other work, such as Richard McKenna, whose bestselling historical and only novel The Sand Pebbles might be better known than his notable fantasy short story "Casey Agonistes" and his other work in his brief career in and out of SF, or  Amis, Lewis or Huxley...Lewis definitely considering himself a fantastic-fiction writer, and Amis as well when so engaged, and Huxley apparently not too worried about being so tagged. I do wish another essay by James Blish was included here, though this one is clearly close to Blish's heart, even if the core assumption, that any sentient species is likely to construct a pantheon of gods since humans all over the world do so, seems to me to be shaky anthropomorphism at its most self-reassuring. 

It's a fine and useful book, and I'm glad to see it's once again available, even if solely electronically. 

Charles Platt, for his part, took a few more chances and widened his remit rather better for the interviews gathered for his second collection of interview-based profiles...he, with not much justification, insisted that most of the women writers in SF were essentially fantasy rather than sf writers, so there was only the most begrudged space given to Kate Wilhelm as the only woman writer in the first volume of Dream Makers. And that because Platt didn't have access to Damon Knight, so the married couple interviewed each other for Platt's book, making that the only entry which was not the result of a visit by Platt to the habitation of the writer (or editor) being queried. And to wrap the book, writer and fellow interviewer Douglas Winter interviews Platt (Winter's similar book of interview essays with horror-fiction writers, Faces of Fear, would be released the same year as DM2.
But, despite the presence of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke in this volume (along with the somewhat later arrivals such as Joe Haldman, Larry Niven and Keith Launer), Platt mostly felt freer to include more writers beyond the Old Lions of the field, and with Russ, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.")  and Kit Reed managed to take in three of the more important women writers, even if neither was averse to writing fantasy, science fantasy or otherwise not have a periodic table of the elements at hand at all times while writing. Andre Norton, then as now, was vastly better known for her YA fiction than her adult work, and others, such as D. M. Thomas, William Burroughs, and to some extent Robert Anton Wilson, were often seen as apart from SF, no matter how much or how often their key works either were firmly in SF traditions or drew heavily on SF viewpoints or techniques. Alvin Toffler was the one non-fiction writer, albeit an allied futurist, included.  But interviews with Russ, the often interview-shy John Sladek, D. M. Thomas (I prefer his sf poetry to his bestseller, in part a time-travel fantasy, The White Hotel)(William Kotzwinkle's The Exile deals far more nimbly with similar materials, I'd suggest). Sturgeon and Laumer capture each at crucial moments in their careeers, or (as in Russ's case) when cagily willing to discuss questions of sexual identity that had not, as far as I know, been stated even as not quite plainly as they are here. And the candid opinions of such writers as Harry Harrison and Stephen King are more than useful in this context; King's cogent assessment of the work of Lin Carter wasn't likely to arise in too many other discussions he'd have in public, much less transcribed. Platt doesn't actually get to see L. Ron Hubbard, but puts an oar in to suggest he was still alive by the time of their 1983 correspondence. 

These two books are collections of useful, if not always the most reliable, statements of thought by mostly major figures in the fields of fantastic fiction, and even those who are not major for one reason or another are worth hearing from even if mostly for the bad example they set. And the mutual appearance of Sturgeon, Russ and Laumer in both volumes isn't the only reason you might gain something from reading them together. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books.
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FFB: THE BEST OF MYSTERY edited by Harold Q. Masur (attributed to Alfred Hitchcock) (Galahad Books 1980) along with other poorly-published books

May 18, 2017, 9:08 pm
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The Best of Mystery: 63 Short Stories Chosen by the Master of Suspense is probably two (or so) otherwise unpublished books smashed together, though I'm not sure how to determine conclusively whether that's a correct supposition or not. Harold Q. Masur was the primary ghost-editor of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents:" (henceforward AHP:) anthologies for Random House in the 1970s, from the 1971 AHP: Stories to Stay Awake By through the 1979 AHP: The Master's Choice; Robert Arthur had been the editor of the Random House series (and their YA anthology series, and the creator and overseer of AH and the Three Investigators children's mysteries) till his early death in 1969 (and even Frank Babics's fine accounting of the ridiculously complex mass of "Hitchcock" books slips here and attributes Awake By to Arthur, an error replicated as a result by The Hitchcock Zone). Hitchcock's death in 1980 probably meant that Random House was uninterested in putting out any further books attributed to him (or took it as a good excuse to end their series), no matter how blatantly ghost-edited they always had been, and yet, I suspect, the (alas, now late) Masur had at least two anthologies mapped out for publication, or a list of stories he hoped to place in further volumes...and those were combined/gathered for salvage-market publication by the "instant remainder" publisher Galahad Books...a suspicion which is furthered by the appearance of two or three stories each by such AHP: volume regulars as Lawrence Block, Bill Pronzini, Donald Westlake (with another yet by "Richard Stark"), C.B. Gilford and others...including "Pauline C. Smith," who is further problematic by being a pseudonym for Robert Arthur as well as the real name of two other writers active in the same years as Arthur...though one of them signed herself Pauline Smith and perhaps had a different middle initial if any...and the other Pauline C. Smith was younger, started publishing later than and outlived Arthur (and continued seeing her work published after his death). In any case, this last Harold Masur "Hitchcock" anthology is a fine, huge collection, hewing more closely to fairly recent (at the time) stories published in the crime-fiction magazines or by regular, active crime-fiction writers than most of the AHP: books did, as they strove to include more chestnuts, particularly from the horror-fiction canon, and more writers who might be seen as at the fringes of crime fiction (such as satirist John Kefauver, in most of Masur's volumes), as well as a science fiction story (such as C. B. Gilford's older story here) or fantasy or two or a grim naturalistic character study among the more straightforward suspense and mystery stories. The "instant remainder" books attributed to Hitchcock published since have been products of the editors of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, whose "best-of" volumes were most of the books attributed to Hitchcock published by Dell in paperback in the latest 1950s onward, along with Dell's reprints of earlier ghosted anthologies attributed to Hitchcock, such as Bar the Doors, and Dell's reprints of the Random House AHP: hardcovers, usually split into two paperback volumes and sometimes replacing some of the content of the AHP: hardcovers with other stories (frequently taken from Robert Arthur's YA anthologies). Usually this last happened because an AHP: hardcover, particularly the Arthur volumes, might reprint a novel that had had no hardcover publication, but did have an in-print paperback edition...and, to further the confusion, Dell in the 1970s started reissuing their AHP: reprint volumes under some variant titles, rather than the previous format of calling the second paperback volumes "[X number, for example:] 13 More Stories from AHP: [Whichever]"...Frank's site valuably also takes into account Peter Haining's UK "Hitchcock" anthologies, which, unlike most Haining anthologies, weren't reprinted in the US. Ridiculously complex mass might be an understatement.

Contents

  1. Winter Run by Edward D. Hoch
  2. You Can't Blame Me by Henry Slesar
  3. A Flower in Her Hair by Pauline C. Smith — from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine volume 13 (number 7)
  4. The Cost Of Kent Castwell by Avram Davidson
  5. Pseudo Identity by Lawrence Block
  6. That Russian! by Jack Ritchie
  7. Galton and the Yelling Boys by Hillary Waugh — from AHMM 15(3)
  8. Blind Date by Charles Boeckman
  9. Pressure by Roderick Wilkinson — from AHMM 13(1)
  10. The Running Man by Bill Pronzini — from AHMM 13(1)
  11. The Vietnam Circle by F.J. Kelly
  12. Sadie When She Died by Ed McBain
  13. A Very Cautious Boy by Gilbert Ralston
  14. A Try for the Big Prize by Borden Deal
  15. Voice in the Night by Robert Colby — from AHMM 14(4)
  16. Undertaker, Please Drive Slow by Ron Goulart
  17. Never Shake a Family Tree by Donald E. Westlake
  18. Here Lies Another Blackmailer by Bill Pronzini
  19. Dead Duck by Lawrence Treat
  20. Games for Adults by John Lutz
  21. Night of the Twisters by James Michael Ullman
  22. Variations on a Game by Patricia Highsmith
  23. Child's Play by William Link and Richard Levinson
  24. Just a Little Impractical Joke by Richard Stark
  25. Murderer #2 by Jean Potts — from AHMM 6(1)
  26. The Third Call by Jack Ritchie
  27. Damon and Pythias and Delilah Brown by Rufus King
  28. Glory Hunter by Richard M. Ellis — from AHMM 15(8)
  29. Linda is Gone by Pauline C. Smith
  30. Frightened Lady by C.B. Gilford
  31. Come Back, Come Back ... by Donald E. Westlake — from AHMM 5(10)
  32. Once Upon a Bank Floor by James Holding
  33. Warrior's Farewell by Edward D. Hoch — from AHMM 12(8)
  34. Death By Misadventure by Wenzell Brown
  35. With a Smile for the Ending by Lawrence Block
  36. Television Country by Charlotte Edwards — from AHMM 7(12)
  37. Art for Money's Sake by Dan J. Marlowe
  38. Nothing But Human Nature by Hillary Waugh
  39. Murder, 1990 by C.B. Gilford — from AHMM 5(10)
  40. Panther, Panther in the Night by Paul W. Fairman
  41. Perfectly Timed Plot by E.X. Ferrars
  42. #8 by Jack Ritchie
  43. All the Needless Killing by Bryce Walton
  44. A Melee of Diamonds by Edward D. Hoch
  45. One for the Crow by Mary Barrett
  46. Happiness Before Death by Henry Slesar
  47. I Don't Understand It by Bill Pronzini — from AHMM 17(12)
  48. News from Nowhere by Ron Goulart
  49. A Case of Desperation by Kate Wilhelm
  50. An Interlude for Murder by Paul Tabori
  51. Death Overdue by Eleanor Daly Boylan
  52. The Best-Friend Murder by Donald E. Westlake
  53. Pattern Of Guilt by Helen Nielsen
  54. A Real, Live Murderer by Donald Honig
  55. Doctor Apollo by Bryce Walton
  56. The Pursuer by Holly Roth
  57. Final Arrangements by Lawrence Page
  58. Countdown by David Ely — from AHMM 7(2)
  59. Murder Between Friends by Nedra Tyre
  60. The Case of the Kind Waitress by Henry Slesar
  61. Ghost of a Chance by Carroll Mayers
  62. The Montevideo Squeeze by James Holding
  63. The White Moth by Margaret Chenoweth
The uglier, probably original edition cover
Previously on the blog I'd reviewed two other anthologies, among so many others, associated with and in their case drawn from favorite fiction magazines of mine, and in looking again at the two books, one drawn from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the other from Fantastic, it still impresses me how they demonstrated all the ways fine books can be mispublished. For example, I was at best barely aware of either book when they were published in 1985 and 1987 respectively, despite being their ideal audience. Of course, the F&SF volume, which was presumably offered to mainline publishers such as Doubleday, the regular publishers of a once-annual series best-of anthologies from the magazine, being instead published by an instant remainder publisher, which had no ad budget and presumably saw no review copies sent anywhere (even given that Octopus was a more ambitious remainder line than most), and ISFDB indeed records no reviews for the book in the usual media of the time. And yet it's at least a near-brilliant and hefty selection, as the table of contents below will demonstrate. Meanwhile, the somewhat more slapdash volume taken from Fantastic...with one story curiously reprinted from the utterly different 1950s magazine Fantastic Universe, presumably out of some sort of filing error on the part of co-editor Martin Harry Greenberg, who'd systematized his editing process by creating a vast database of stories including his rating of their quality, showed other signs of being assembled with less than full attention, but was similarly offered on the market by its wealthy game publisher, TSR, with little sense of how to connect with the fantasy- and sf-reading public. And it, too, got no reviews in the fantastic-fiction media as notated by ISFDB. TSR spent enough on the book to include a rather haphazard selection of covers from issues of the magazine, on heavy stock and in full color, when that was still rather more expensive to do than it is now, but couldn't be bothered to list the contributors' names legibly anywhere on the covers. And while the selection of stories from the pages of the magazine is more very good than as great as it should be (no Fritz Leiber story?--not that the Leiber choice in the F&SF volume is ideal, either), there is no lack of commercially potent as well as distinguished artists among those contributors. So, at least one of the best books drawn from F&SF's inventory, comparing even with a long list of very good books indeed, and only the third book (and last, so far) to cover nearly three decades of Fantastic, and the first not to be published by an impoverished publisher, were both barely made available to their natural audience and are mostly forgotten still. 



The Best Fantasy Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ed. Edward L. Ferman (Octopus 0-7064-2568-5, 1985 [Jan ’86], $9.98, 792pp, hc) Anthology of 40 stories from F&SF. An instant remainder book.
  • 9 · Far from Home · Walter S. Tevis · ss F&SF Dec ’58
  • 13 · My Dear Emily · Joanna Russ · nv F&SF Jul ’62
  • 33 · The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule [Griaule] · Lucius Shepard · nv F&SF Dec ’84
  • 59 · The Vanishing American · Charles Beaumont · ss F&SF Aug ’55
  • 69 · The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D [Vermillion Sands] · J. G. Ballard · ss F&SF Dec ’67
  • 85 · The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost · Russell Kirk · nv F&SF Dec ’83
  • 125 · The Accountant · Robert Sheckley · ss F&SF Jul ’54
  • 134 · The Fire When It Comes · Parke Godwin · nv F&SF May ’81
  • 176 · My Boy Friend’s Name Is Jello · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Jul ’54
  • 181 · San Diego Lightfoot Sue · Tom Reamy · nv F&SF Aug ’75
  • 222 · Sooner or Later or Never Never [Crispin Mobey] · Gary Jennings · nv F&SF May ’72
  • 250 · Jeffty Is Five · Harlan Ellison · ss F&SF Jul ’77
  • 269 · The Third Level · Jack Finney · ss Colliers Oct 7 ’50; F&SF Oct ’52
  • 274 · The Silken-Swift · Theodore Sturgeon · nv F&SF Nov ’53
  • 292 · Another Orphan · John Kessel · na F&SF Sep ’82
  • 334 · The Manor of Roses [John & Stephen] · Thomas Burnett Swann · na F&SF Nov ’66
  • 389 · Please Stand By [Max Kearny] · Ron Goulart · nv F&SF Jan ’62
  • 409 · Downtown · Thomas M. Disch · ss F&SF Oct ’83
  • 419 · Man Overboard · John Collier · nv Argosy (UK) Jan ’60; F&SF Mar '60
  • 441 · One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts · Shirley Jackson · ss F&SF Jan ’55
  • 451 · Yes, We Have No Ritchard · Bruce Jay Friedman · ss F&SF Nov ’60
  • 459 · The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet · Stephen King · na F&SF Jun ’84
  • 504 · That Hell-Bound Train · Robert Bloch · ss F&SF Sep ’58
  • 517 · Will You Wait? · Alfred Bester · ss F&SF Mar ’59
  • 524 · Sule Skerry · Jane Yolen · ss F&SF Jul ’82
  • 533 · La Ronde · Damon Knight · ss F&SF Oct ’83
  • 546 · Narrow Valley · R. A. Lafferty · ss F&SF Sep ’66
  • 559 · Not Long Before the End [Mana] · Larry Niven · ss F&SF Apr ’69
  • 570 · $1.98 · Arthur Porges · ss F&SF May ’54
  • 574 · The Tehama · Bob Leman · nv F&SF Dec ’81
  • 594 · Ghost of a Crown [Brigadier Ffellowes] · Sterling E. Lanier · nv F&SF Dec ’76
  • 634 · Pages from a Young Girl’s Journal · Robert Aickman · nv F&SF Feb ’73
  • 666 · Narapoia [“The Origin of Narapoia”; Manly J. Departure] · Alan Nelson · ss What’s Doing Apr ’48; F&SF Apr ’51
  • 672 · Born of Man and Woman · Richard Matheson · vi F&SF Sum ’50
  • 675 · Mythago Wood [Mythago] · Robert Holdstock · nv F&SF Sep ’81
  • 711 · Harrison Bergeron · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · ss F&SF Oct ’61
  • 717 · Four Ghosts in Hamlet · Fritz Leiber · nv F&SF Jan ’65
  • 748 · Gorilla Suit · John Shepley · ss F&SF May ’58
  • 756 · Green Magic · Jack Vance · ss F&SF Jun ’63
  • 768 · Black Air · Kim Stanley Robinson · nv F&SF Mar ’83

Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird and Wondrous
 ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Patrick L. Price (TSR 0-88038-521-9, May ’87, $7.95, 253pp, tp) Anthology of 16 stories from the magazine, with an introduction by James E. Gunn plus a selection of color cover reproductions.
  • 7 · Introduction · James E. Gunn · in
  • 11 · Double Whammy · Robert Bloch · ss Fantastic Feb ’70
  • 21 · A Drink of Darkness · Robert F. Young · ss Fantastic Jul ’62
  • 33 · A Question of Re-Entry · J. G. Ballard · nv Fantastic Mar ’63
  • 59 · The Exit to San Breta · George R. R. Martin · ss Fantastic Feb ’72
  • 70 · The Shrine of Temptation · Judith Merril · ss Fantastic Apr ’62
  • 85 · Dr. Birdmouse · Reginald Bretnor · ss Fantastic Apr ’62
  • 97 · Eve Times Four · Poul Anderson · nv Fantastic Apr ’60
  • 126 · The Rule of Names [Earthsea] · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Fantastic Apr ’64
  • ins. · Artists’ Visions of the Weird & Wondrous · Various Hands · il
  • 135 · The Still Waters [“In the Still Waters”] · Lester del Rey · nv Fantastic Universe Jun ’55
  • 144 · A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins · David R. Bunch · vi Fantastic Jun ’61
  • 148 · Novelty Act · Philip K. Dick · nv Fantastic Feb ’64
  • 174 · What If... · Isaac Asimov · ss Fantastic Sum ’52
  • 186 · Elixir for the Emperor · John Brunner · ss Fantastic Nov ’64
  • 202 · King Solomon’s Ring · Roger Zelazny · nv Fantastic Oct ’63
  • 220 · Junior Partner · Ron Goulart · ss Fantastic Sep ’62
  • 229 · Donor ·  James E. Gunn · nv Fantastic Nov ’60
  • An abridged second edition, from another publisher, of the F&SF volume that gives a less useful title and leaves off Edward Ferman's credit...a nice if misleading illustration for the Walter Tevis story, though.

    Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books. I'll be the likely host next week.

    from: Friday, June 10, 2016


    FFB: Instant Remainders: THE BEST FANTASY STORIES FROM THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION edited by Edward Ferman (Octopus, 1985); TALES OF TERROR edited by Eleanor Sullivan (attributed to Alfred Hitchcock)(Galahad, 1986)

    "Instant remainders" are books, usually but not always hardcovers with the text on low-grade paper, published by such discount (and often short-lived) imprints as these volumes'"Octopus Books" and "Galahad Books" (in their first editions at least), meant to be sold inexpensively in the remainder shelves of (usually) chain bookstores; it's a pretty raffish and catch-as-catch-can corner of the publishing business, which is a pity when they offer (often in multiple editions, sometimes with slight variations in content, with the titles often changing along with the imprint names) two volumes such as these, the Ferman brilliant, the Sullivan at very least interesting and useful.

    The Edward Ferman volume was the first sweeping anthology he or his predecessors had selected from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, that wasn't sparked by an anniversary of the magazine per se, though perhaps it had been meant to be published a bit earlier, in the 1984 35th anniversary year of the magazine, which is still publishing today. It's an excellent slice through the fantasy and some of the more "off-trail" fiction (sometimes surreal, sometimes merely odd) F&SF had been willing to publish over those first half of its run so far, without these latter stories having any explicit fantasticated content. Examples of this tendency are Shirley Jackson's whimsical "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" or the bit of psychodrama that is "The Vanishing American" by Charles Beaumont, and arguably, at least, the most famous "first story" the magazine has published, "Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson, or the antic "outback" missionary story by Gary Jennings, the first of his Crispin Mobey series. A few others are more arguably science fiction, even when more satirical than not, such as Kurt Vonnegut's widely reprinted "Harrison Bergeron,". The balance, however, are all but inarguably fantasy fiction as we usually think of the term, and include such good to brilliant work as Robert Bloch's fable, the first inarguable fantasy story to win the Hugo Award, Arthur Porges's clever joke vignette, Avram Davidson's first story published outside the Jewish press, a deftly allusive borderline horror story that displays its wit so offhandedly as to nearly slip the nature of the magic at work past the reader, and R. A. Lafferty's typically audacious tall tale. More explicitly horror fiction ranges from Fritz Leiber's rather gentle "Four Ghosts in Hamlet" through the nostalgia and angst of Harlan Ellison's award-winner "Jeffty is Five," from the witty psychic investigation by Ron Goulart's Max Kearney (still my favorite series of stories I've read from Goulart) to haunting vampire stories by the young Joanna Russ (her first story she seemed very happy with) and the past-master, by time of writing and publishing "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal," Robert Aickman. Such stalwarts of F&SF as Bob Leman, Russell Kirk, Jane Yolen, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, Thomas Disch and Jack Vance have stories joined by work from such more occasional visitors as Jack Finney, John Collier, J. G. Ballard, Bruce Jay Friedman, Parke Godwin, Tom Reamy and Thomas Burnett Swann, the latter two having their careers and lives cut far too short. About the only, not quite minor but not crippling complaint I have about this selection is the relative lack of women contributors, given how many have done impressive work for F&SF over the decades...in the fantasy volume, at very least Phyllis Eisenstein should have a story, and Lisa Tuttle; Carol Emshwiller had had at least borderline fantasy enough published there, as had Kate Wilhelm, while Kit Reed had gone well beyond borderlines thus. I've never thoroughly enjoyed Sterling Lanier's club stories, so might well've dispensed with that one if I had been the editor...though they apparently were a popular recurring feature in the magazine. Stephen King's F&SF work has also often been dispensable, if certainly providing an appeal to the casual reader. Really just a fine collection that shouldn't've slipped away from less casual publishers, as no F&SFanthology had done before nor has since. It deserves better than two (only) rather middling-packaged discount editions (the latter somewhat more succinctly if slightly less defensibly called simply Great Tales of Fantasy and Science Fiction)...though at least copies of both editions are reasonably priced in the usual secondhand markets.

    The Best Fantasy Stories from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction


    The "Hitchcock" volume, attributed shamelessly in various editions' packaging to the several years deceased Hitchcock (by time of first publication), was instead the work of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and stablemate Ellery Queen's MM, (now also late) editor Eleanor Sullivan; their magazines continue to publish, as well; several publishers and decades ago, EQMM and F&SF had both been founded as revenue-generating support for the less-reliably popular mostly-political and critical magazine American Mercury (AM's predecessor magazine, The Smart Set, had been similarly helped along when editors H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan had also founded the major crime-fiction pulp Black Mask...they sold BM to another publisher rather quickly, though not before two new writers, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, had tried contributing to both, joining the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill in the one and Paul Cain and Horace McCoy at the other. James M. Cain would write for the Mercury after it started, while also growing increasingly annoyed with his editorial job on the staff of The New Yorker). Tales of Terror is apparently also the second volume from the AHMM staff to be an instant remainder offer (Galahad Books, I belatedly discover, had issued the similar The Best of Mystery first in 1980, albeit that one was edited by Harold Q. Masur, of whom more below), and has seen several editions sporadically up to the present...it adds to the confusion around anthologies attributed to Alfred Hitchcock in at least two manners, as one of the series of hardcover anthologies taken (in this case mostly) from the magazine (when previously to 1977, the anthologies from the magazine had only appeared in Dell paperbacks, while Dell also did the paperback editions of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies originally published by Random House in hardcover, and originally edited by Robert Arthur from their beginning in 1956 up through Arthur's early death in 1969; Harold Q. Masur would edit AHP: books from then till 1980 and Hitchcock's death. In 1977, AHMM's new publisher, Davis Publications, began offering Alfred Hitchcock Anthology, a fat semi-annual  reprint magazine similar to the longstanding Davis Ellery Queen's Anthology...Dell's hardcover arm, the Dial Press, did hardcover editions of the anthologies simultaneously with the magazine issues, mostly for the library market one assumes. (Then there are the YA anthologies and the Three Investigators series of YA novels, initially also Arthur's work.) A slightly less complex confusion also can arise from one of the contributions to Tales of Terror, a 1953 story attributed to Pauline C. Smith, which was presumably one of the relatively few reprints published over the years in AHMM...this Smith being one of Robert Arthur's pseudonyms, the one under which he'd ghost-edited the first AHP: volume in '56...but another writer, actually named Pauline C. Smith, began contributing to AHMM and other crime-fiction magazines in the late '60s and continued into the 1980s, so confusion between those two can arise easily as well. Meanwhile, the casualness with which instant remainders are often treated with by library catalogers and indexers is much in evidence here, as many different online sources carefully replicate the error that Robert Bloch's fine suspense story "A Home Away from Home" is by Barry N. Malzberg...while not mentioning Barry's actual contribution to the book, the somewhat relevantly titled "After the Unfortunate Accident".  Tales of Terror is something of a misnomer, as many of the same online reviewers will tell you, as most of the stories are suspense or even relatively straightforward mystery stories, some lighthearted...it isn't as brilliant a representation of AHMM as the other book is of its magazine, but it's another good cross-section and core sampling, and offers work by a number of the same writers, such as Bloch, Arthur Porges and Ron Goulart.

    courtesy The Hitchcock Zone:

    Tales of Terror: 58 Short Stories Chosen by the Master of Suspense [sic]

    Contents

    1. Killed by Kindness by Nedra Tyre
    2. Just a Minor Offense by John F. Suter
    3. A Home Away from Home by Robert Bloch
    4. Death of a Derelict by Joseph Payne Brennan
    5. The Arrowmont Prison Riddle by Bill Pronzini
    6. The Dettweiler Solution by Lawrence Block
    7. The Whitechapel Wantons by Vincent McConnor
    8. Cora's Raid by Isak Romun
    9. Life or Breath by Nelson DeMille
    10. A Private Little War by William Brittain
    11. Have You Ever Seen this Woman? by John Lutz
    12. Joe Cutter's Game by Brian Garfield
    13. A Cabin in the Woods by John Coyne
    14. The Long Arm of El Jefe by Edward Wellen
    15. Kid Cardula by Jack Ritchie
    16. Career Man by James Holding
    17. The Perfidy of Professor Blake by Libby MacCall
    18. Sea Change by Henry Slesar
    19. The Blue Tambourine by Donald Olson
    20. Graveyard Shift by William P. McGivern
    21. A Bottle of Wine by Borden Deal
    22. Man Bites Dog by Donald Honig
    23. Never Trust an Ancestor by Michael Zuroy
    24. Another War by Edward D. Hoch
    25. Sparrow on a String by Alice Scanlan Reach
    26. The Missing Tattoo by Clayton Matthews
    27. The Fall of Dr. Scourby by Patricia Matthews
    28. The Loose End by Stephen Wasylyk
    29. That So-Called Laugh by Frank Sisk
    30. A Very Special Talent by Margaret B. Maron
    31. The Joker by Betty Ren Wright
    32. The Very Hard Sell by Helen Nielsen
    33. The Tin Ear by Ron Goulart
    34. The Time Before the Crime by Charlotte Edwards
    35. After the Unfortunate Accident by Barry N. Malzberg
    36. The Grateful Thief by Patrick O'Keeffe
    37. The Inspiration by Talmage Powell
    38. Death is a Lonely Lover by Robert Colby
    39. The Witness was a Lady by Fletcher Flora
    40. Scheme for Destruction by Pauline C. Smith
    41. To the Manner Born by Mary Braund
    42. Black Disaster by Richard O. Lewis
    43. The Marrow of Justice by Hal Ellson
    44. Innocent Witness by Irving Schiffer
    45. We're Really Not that Kind of People by Samuel W. Taylor
    46. Pocket Evidence by Harold Q. Masur
    47. The Death Desk by S.S. Rafferty
    48. A Left-Handed Profession by Al Nussbaum
    49. Second Spring by Theodore Mathieson
    50. Bank Night by Arthur Porges
    51. The Contagious Killer by Bryce Walton
    52. Bad Actor by Gary Brandner
    53. Free Advice, Incorporated by Michael Brett
    54. The Real Criminal by James M. Gilmore
    55. The Hard Sell by William Dolan
    56. The Prosperous Judds by Bob Bristow
    57. The Dead Indian by Robert W. Alexander
    58. The China Cottage by August Derleth
    Both books will reward your attention, and deserve at least some more serious attention from critical historians and bibliographers. 

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

    Friday, December 19, 2014


    FFB: FANTASTIC STORIES: TALES OF THE WEIRD AND WONDROUS ed. Martin H. Greenberg and Patrick Price (TSR, 1987)...among some "hidden" fiction magazine best-ofs...

    cover illo by Janet Aulisio, for Robert
    Bloch's "The Double Whammy"
    Fantastic, as a magazine, for most of its 28 years and some months of existence (from launch in 1952, early absorption of its predecessor Fantastic Adventures in 1954, and folding into companion title Amazing Science Fiction Stories in early 1981), was usually an example of at least someone involved doing the best they could with the magazine, in the face of serious obstacles. Sometimes the chiefest obstacle was the apathy of the editor, particularly true during the latter years of founding editor Howard Browne's tenure, and those of his former assistant and heir Paul Fairman...the magazine, starting out with a large budget and some fanfare by a serious, though not quite top-of-the-industry, publisher (Ziff-Davis), achieved initial sales beyond reasonable expectation (the third issue featured a story attributed to Mickey Spillane, at the early height of his popularity, which had been highlighted--and "spoiled" with extensive description--by a Life magazine profile of the Mike Hammer creator, on newsstands before the Fantastic issue was published...so Browne quickly ghosted a new story, "The Veiled Woman," and published it as by Spillane)(in later accounts of the incident, Browne also notes that he thought the genuine Spillane story terrible; the Browne counterfeit is a reasonably good, and probably intentionally slightly parodic, pastiche). 
    The first issue, a cover much referred to in
    James Gunn's introduction and that of
    the source of Asimov's story in the book...and 
    not included in the selected cover images...
    illo by Barrye Phillips and Leo Morey


    However, those high circulation figures were not sustained into the second year of publication, and with the folding in of FA, Fantastic's budget was cut and Browne went back to the usually relatively indifferent efforts he'd been making at Fantastic Adventures, accepting and publishing good work when it was offered by writers but just as happy to run that good work alongside no-more-than-readable hackwork by regular Ziff-Davis writers, much of the latter published under "house names" such as "Lawrence Chandler" and "Ivar Jorgensen"--the actual authors could be any number of contributors including Browne and Fairman themselves (many of the stable of contributors in those years haven't remembered clearly [or didn't choose to] who wrote what among the less memorable items, and the office records of the era have apparently not all been retained; among the best writers who didn't always do their best efforts for Ziff-Davis fiction magazines in their Chicago-based days were Robert Bloch and William McGivern). When Browne officially resigned in 1956 (having checked out to the degree of spending much of his office time writing his crime fiction, and deciding that the relocation of the editorial offices from Chicago to New York City were his cue to try his luck as a screenwriter in Hollywood), newly official editor Fairman went even further along into systematization of Fantastic and Amazing, depending not entirely but largely on four relatively young writers to produce wordage that would be accepted and published unread (under a variety of bylines), as long as the manuscript delivery was punctual and the stories didn't cause any problems that might interfere with Fairman's own in-office writing for other markets...and even this arrangement managed to bring in some good or promising work among the acceptably mediocre, since the quartet was comprised of Milton Lesser (who would publish most of his better work as Stephen Marlowe), Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett. And Fairman had as his assistant a young and
    illo by Richard Powers
    inexperienced but diligent and talented recent Vassar graduate, Cele Goldsmith, who would dig through the "slushpile" of submitted manuscripts and would occasionally find very interesting work indeed, including what would be the first published story by Kate Wilhelm. When Fairman left, in 1958 (primarily to be a full-time freelance writer, but briefly taking on managing editorship of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, by then published by Ziff-Davis co-founder B. G. Davis, who'd quit ZD in 1958, as well), Goldsmith was elevated to editorship (at 25 years of age), and with far less cynicism if also less of a sense of the history of fantastic fiction, she would go on at the magazines to put together issues that would mix brilliantly innovative, interesting if more traditional, and sometimes merely notional work, till the magazines were sold by Ziff-Davis in 1965.  Under Goldsmith (who took through marriage the name Cele Lalli during her tenure), the fiction magazines had lost their champion at ZD with Davis's departure, as William Ziff, Jr. began his successful focus of ZD on hobbyist and highly specialized magazines, which meant that for most of her career with them, Fantastic and Amazing were secondary projects, with art direction and packaging that was somewhat less consistently good than her editorial product deserved. A fellow named Norman Lobsenz was given the task of overseeing her work, though apparently he mostly wrote the consistently trivial editorials and responses in the reader letters columns in the magazines. Among the writers she "discovered" through first professional publication as editor, were Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Sonya Dorman (her prose, at least, aside from a student story in Mademoiselle--as with Disch only even moreso, Dorman's career as a poet was at least as prominent as that as a fiction-writer),  Roger Zelazny, Ben Bova, Ted White, Keith Laumer, and Piers Anthony (when still a promising young writer, well before he made jejune fantasy novel-series his primary occupation). Her magazines were one of the primary markets for the mostly young writers who were shaking up fantasy and particularly sf in the early 1960s, along with Avram Davidson's editorship of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and, increasingly, Frederik Pohl's work at Galaxy magazine and its siblings. Among those she worked with closely was 
    One of the better covers from the Goldsmith/
    Lalli years...Jakes, who wrote many sorts of
    fiction, made his biggest splash in historical
    fiction in the mid-1970s. Illo by 
    Vernon Kramer.

    Fritz Leiber, though the reports of her courtesy and quick and enthusiastic response, trumping even the withered budget she had for her version of the magazines, is the common narrative (much noted by Le Guin and others) of her career at the magazines (and her later work on Ziff-Davis bridal magazines, which comprised most of her career), and is one of the more important points made by James Gunn in his introduction to the volume theoretically under review here. Gunn's introduction, for what it's worth, is rather short, Very oddly copy-edited and is the Only editorial matter in the book to give any sense of the context the collected stories were published in, aside from the copyright acknowledgements page bearing the years of publication; there aren't even headnotes to any of the stories nor contributor notes. That is most assuredly Strike One against this anthology, despite it being only the third book (I believe; please see below) to collect a sampling specifically from Fantastic, the heftiest of the three volumes, and the last so far (this latter fact is Strike One against the publishing industry).  There is also a rather offhandedly selected set of plates in the center of the book, on heavy slick paper displaying in color some of the front covers from some of Goldsmith's and later editor Ted White's issues, with minimal comment there, and a set of new illustrations for the stories, by such talented artists as Janet Aulisio and Stephen Fabian, which nonetheless mostly seem rather uninspired and oddly out of place in the anthology, rather than magazine, format...indicative of TSR's stewardship of Amazing (combined with Fantastic Stories) and their publishing efforts generally...haphazard tossing around of money, with rather half-assed follow-through (aside from all the Dungeons & Dragons product money TSR had at hand, they'd also gotten a windfall from Steven Spielberg's renting of the Amazing Stories title, and a/v rights to as many of the stories in the back issues as possible, for his misbegotten and shortlived tv anthology series). Also included in the volume, for no obvious reason and probably in part because Martin Greenberg had made an error in his famous filing system and indexed a short story by Lester Del Rey, published in 1955 in the unrelated magazine Fantastic Universe, as a contribution to Fantastic...or perhaps Greenberg just wanted an excuse to run the story, and hoped no one would notice. Together, let's call those Strikes Two and Three against this book being taken too seriously by the casual browser of bookstands, particularly if she knows anything about the magazine whose provenance was one of the primary selling points here. And I haven't even gotten to the contributions of the editors who worked with publishers Sol Cohen and Arthur Bernhard, who ran the magazines on the thinnest of shoestrings, from 1965 through the sale of Amazing to TSR in the early '80s, and all the roadblocks they threw up against good work by subsequent editors Joseph "Ross"/Wrocz, Harry Harrison, Barry Malzberg, longest-serving Ted White, and Elinor Mavor (who for no good reason called herself "Omar Gohagan" in her first issues). Of course, the anthology editors and Gunn don't mention these folks' efforts, either, even if they include some of the fiction White published. (I've personally had the good fortune to speak and correspond with 
    A typically handsome (and comics-
    influenced) cover from Ted White's term
    as editor and art director; illo by Douglas
    Chaffee
    Harrison, Malzberg and White, if very briefly in the first case, about their experiences as editors for Cohen's Ultimate Publications; Harrison was breezily philosophical, looking upon his short tenure as just another part-time job that helped keep body and soul together during a brief period of living back in the US again; Malzberg I think found the experience as fascinating as it was frustrating, for what it told him about the nature of the markets he was working in as writer, editor and agent; White, who stuck with it for a decade despite eventually qualifying for welfare payments, since his stipend as editor and designer was so slight, was nonetheless devoted to the task and willing to put up with the strictures he faced, however grumpily...his next job after leaving Fantasticand Amazing was a year as editor of the then-flourishing, and very well-budgeted, adult fantasy comic Heavy Metal.)

    The earmarks of nonchalance all over this anthology are a pity, because the selection of stories is pretty good, though not reasonably representative of the best of the magazine's career. It's also notable which of the contributors whose work is collected here have gone onto ever greater fame in the years since this 1987 book was published, much less their stories' original publication (pretty obvious examples: J. G. Ballard and particularly George R. R. Martin), those whose fame has been sustained (Le Guin and Philip K. Dick), those whose star has dimmed (almost inarguably unfairly, given their best work: Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and to a much lesser extent Isaac Asimov) and those who remain stubbornly underappreciated (Ron Goulart, David Bunch, and to too great an extent Robert Bloch...Judith Merril is perhaps as well-remembered today as a mover and shaker in the Toronto countercultural scene in the 1970s and '80s as she is for her extensive work in sf and related literatures).

    Courtesy the Locus Index: 
    Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird and Wondrous ed. Martin H. Greenberg & Patrick L. Price (TSR 0-88038-521-9, May ’87, $7.95, 253pp, tp) Anthology of 16 stories from the magazine, with an introduction by James E. Gunn plus a selection of color cover reproductions.
    • 7 · Introduction · James E. Gunn · in
    • 11 · Double Whammy · Robert Bloch · ss Fantastic Feb ’70
    • 21 · A Drink of Darkness · Robert F. Young · ss Fantastic Jul ’62
    • 33 · A Question of Re-Entry · J. G. Ballard · nv Fantastic Mar ’63
    • 59 · The Exit to San Breta · George R. R. Martin · ss Fantastic Feb ’72
    • 70 · The Shrine of Temptation · Judith Merril · ss Fantastic Apr ’62
    • 85 · Dr. Birdmouse · Reginald Bretnor · ss Fantastic Apr ’62
    • 97 · Eve Times Four · Poul Anderson · nv Fantastic Apr ’60
    • 126 · The Rule of Names [Earthsea] · Ursula K. Le Guin · ss Fantastic Apr ’64
    • ins. · Artists’ Visions of the Weird & Wondrous · Various Hands · il
    • 135 · The Still Waters [“In the Still Waters”] · Lester del Rey · ss Fantastic Universe Jun ’55
    • 144 · A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins · David R. Bunch · vi Fantastic Jun ’61
    • 148 · Novelty Act · Philip K. Dick · nv Fantastic Feb ’64
    • 174 · What If... · Isaac Asimov · ss Fantastic Sum ’52
    • 186 · Elixir for the Emperor · John Brunner · ss Fantastic Nov ’64
    • 202 · King Solomon’s Ring · Roger Zelazny · nv Fantastic Oct ’63
    • 220 · Junior Partner · Ron Goulart · ss Fantastic Sep ’62
    • 229 · Donor · James E. Gunn · nv Fantastic Nov ’60
    Two weeks ago, I gave a quick gloss of a review of Ted White's The Best from Fantastic, and the other anthology drawn largely from Fantastic, even earlier than White's and including stories from Fantastic Adventures and one from Amazing, is Ivan Howard's Time Untamed, mentioned here briefly some time back(with its original ugly cover, as cheerfully reproduced by an Award Books reprint); the slightly less ugly second edition and UK covers are below.  This volume is an example of the "hidden" anthology drawn from a given magazine, or in this case a magazine group (as is the Weird Tales magazine anthology The Unexpected,mentioned in that same post), as are Ivan Howard's several other anthologies for the publisher Belmont/Belmont Tower, which drew from Science Fiction, Future Fiction, Dynamic Science Fiction and the other sf magazines Robert Lowndes edited for Columbia Publications, owned by Louis Silberkleit, who also owned the later, and similarly low-budget Belmont books concern (Silberkleit was also a partner of Archie Comics guy Martin Goodman in several projects over the decades) ...no mention, or essentially so, in the book's packaging that all the collected stories are from the one source, or related group of sources.  Fantastic Universe, mentioned above as the source of the Del Rey story that has no reason to be in a Fantastic anthology, had one obvious anthology drawn from its pages, The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, but FU (and The Saint Mystery Magazine) editor Hans Stefan Santesson later published several anthologies that draw all but exclusively from FU's pages, while not advertising that fact, beginning with Rulers of Men. I recently suggested to the editors of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction that not only Samuel Mines's The Best from Startling Stories should be noted in the entry for Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling's older sibling which the anthology also draws from, but that Damon Knight's anthology The Shape of Things should also be cited in both magazines' entries, as it's also an anthology drawn intentionally and exclusively from both magazines (and quite a good one)...another "hidden" example (as the Mines Startlingvolume almost is for TWS...). Joseph Ferman's No Limits (quite possibly co- or ghost-edited by his son, Edward Ferman) is an anthology drawn from the 1950s version of Venture Science Fiction magazine; Once and Future Tales, an all-but "hidden" anthology from Venture's sibling The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (and commissioned by a short-lived publishing project, and outside the then-regular set of Doubleday's Best from F&SF volumes). I hope to add other examples to an ongoing list here...I've also briefly reviewed a vintage pirated volume taken from Christine Campbell Thomson's legitimate UK anthology series Not at Night that drew regularly on the early Weird Tales for its contents...the pirated volume published here as one of the early products of The Vanguard Press, co-founded by Rex Stout, no less.

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

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews and more.

May 26, 2017, 4:32 am
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The first pass for this Friday's crop of reviews of books, and magazines and more, that the contributors feel might warrant more attention than they've received or received of late (except for this which are warnings). A few contributors will probably be added over the course of the day, as they upload their reviews...if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments. Thanks, everyone!  Todd Mason

Sergio Angelini: Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Mark Baker: The Miser's Dream by John Gaspard

Les Blatt: Arsène Lupin: Gentleman-Thief by Maurice Leblanc

Bill Crider: The Best of Keith Laumer; Dragon Society and Dragon Venom by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Scott Cupp: The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by "Robin Hobb" (Meghan Lindholm)

William Deeck: The Dogs Do Bark by Jonathan Stagge

Martin Edwards: High Seas Murder by Peter Drax

Barry Gardner: A Superior Death by Nevada Barr

Rich Horton: Rodney Stone by A. Conan Doyle

TracyK: Murder...Now and Then by Jill McGown

George Kelley: The Prentice-Hall Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Garyn G. Roberts

Margot Kinberg: Fatal Enquiry by Will Thomas

Rob Kitchen: Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin and a Century in Two Lives by Karin Wieland

Marvin Lachman: Net of Cobwebs by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Evan Lewis: The Maltese Falcon comics adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, illustration by Rodlow Willard

Steve Lewis: Straits of Fortune by Anthony Gagliano; The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block; The Fast Buck by Bruno Fischer; Catastrophe Planet by Keith Laumer

Matt Paust: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperberger's by John Elder Robison

James Reasoner: Trouble at War Eagle by W. C. Tuttle

Richard Robinson: Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler

Gerard Saylor: Doc by Maria Doria Russell

Dan Stumpf: Alder Gulch by Ernest Haycox

"TomKat": The Weight of Evidence by Roger Ormerod
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May's Underappreciated Music: the links

May 27, 2017, 9:17 pm
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The monthly assembly of undervalued and often nearly "lost" music, or simply music the blogger in question wants to remind you reader/listeners of...





Patti Abbott: Rhiannon Giddens: "Come, Love, Come"

Brian Arnold: Galactic Empire

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

Augusta Bluegrass Women: "Road to Carolina"


Paul D. Brazill: A Song for Saturday

Jim Cameron: Todd Barkan

Sean Coleman: Paul McCartney: Flowers in the Dirt; Yes: Close to the Edge

Bill Crider: Song of the Day; Forgotten Hits; Earl Sinks

Jawbox: "Mirrorful"


Jawbox: "Static"


Jawbox: "Cornflake Girl"

Jeff Gemmill: Rumer: Seasons of My Soul; Jan and Dean: Folk 'n' Roll; Fazerdaze: Morningside;  Top 5; Graham Parker live 2017;  Erin O'Dowd; Courtney Marie Andrews live 2017;  Juliana Hatfield 1993;Hatfield's letter and lock of hair; Hannah Layton Turner (of Hannah's Yard); Maria McKee live 2003; Garland Jeffreys: 14 Steps to Harlem

Jerry House: The Sons of the Pioneers; Hymn Time; Music from the Past

George Kelley: The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band deluxe multidisc set

Kate Laity: Song for a Saturday

B. V. Lawson: Your Sunday Music Treat: Concerto for Theremin by Anis Fuleihan; Satie: Gymnopédie No.1

Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake: "Something's Coming"


Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake: "A Taste of Honey"


Steve Lewis, Jonathan Lewis and Michael Shonk: Music I'm Listening To

Maltin on Movies: composer Michael Giacchino

J. Eric Mason: Foxygen: "San Francisco"


Kliph Nesteroff: Hanna-Barbera Records

Andrew Orley: Nobody's Listening

Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

Charlie Ricci: The Allman Brothers Band: Hittin' the Note

Stereo Williams: George Harrison (courtesy Bill Crider)

The Zombies: "Beechwood Park" (text interview)


The Zombies: Remember You


The Zombies: Any Other Way
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Overlooked A/V: reviews, etc. of films, television, radio, podcasts, stage productions, video games, museum shows and more

June 1, 2017, 11:45 am
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A. J. Wright: Silent-Filmmaking in Birmingham

Alice Chang:  South Park: The Stick of Truth; The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (parody of typical game reviewers)

the Allan Fish Online Film Festival 2017

Anne Billson: The Comedy of Terrors

The Big Broadcast: 28 May 2017; features Murder by Experts and The Mysterious Traveler 

Bill Crider: The Count of Monte Cristo (1934 film)[trailer]







Jack Criddle: Underrated 1987 films

Jackie Kashian/The Dork Forest: Charlie Hester, voice actress/composer
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Friday's "Forgotten" Books; links to the reviews and more

June 2, 2017, 9:14 am
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This Friday's crop of reviews of books, and magazines and more, that the contributors feel might warrant more attention than they've received or received of late (except for those which are warnings--more of these than usual this week!). A few contributors might be added over the course of the day, as they upload their reviews...if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments. Thanks, everyone!  Todd Mason

Sanford Allen: NASA research database

Sergio Angelini: Money, Money, Money by "Ed McBain" (Evan Hunter); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Mike Ripley

Yvette Banek: The Burning of Billy Toober by Jonathan Ross

Joe Barone: A History of God by Karen Armstrong

Les Blatt: Body Unidentified by John Rhode

Elgin Bleecker: No Beast So Fierce by Edward Bunker

John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, April 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Brian Busby: Frustration by Henry C. Clayton

Bill Crider: Virgin Cay by Basil Heatter; The Space Magicians edited by Alden H. Norton and Sam Moskowitz; The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

William Deeck: The Lion's Mouth by James Corbett

Martin Edwards: Journal by Kate Paul; The Arsenal Stadium Mystery by Leonard R. Gribble

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: DC war comics, April/May 1969

Barry Ergang: Drum Beat--Marianne by Stephen Marlowe (hosted by Kevin Tipple)

Will Errickson: The Woodwitch by Stephen Gregory

Curt Evans: Blood and Judgment by Michael Gilbert

C. C. Finlay: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1956, edited by Anthony Boucher

Fred Fitch: The Road to Ruin by Donald Westlake

Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1952, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

Barry Gardner: A Beautiful Death by S. T. Haymon

Charles Gramlich: The Bane of Kanthos by Alex "Dain" (Alex Lukeman)

John Grant: The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael T. Mann

Rich Horton: Point Ultimate by Jerry Sohl

Jerry House: Scared Shirtless: Thirteen Spooky Stories by R. M. Sebastian

Tracy K.: The Hunter by "Richard Stark " (Donald Westlake)

George Kelley: Rock and Roll is Here to Stay edited by William McKeen; The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen by Hope Nicholson

Joe Kenney: The Executioner: Vegas Vendetta by Don Pendleton; Death List by Ronald Casler

Margot Kinberg: Never Buried by Edie Claire

Rob Kitchin: After the Fire by Jane Casey

Richard Krauss: Suspense Magazine, Summer 1951, edited by Theodore Irwin

B. V. Lawson: Windy City by Hugh Holton

Evan Lewis: The Maltese Falcon comics adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, illustration by Rodlow Willard (continued)
note George Chesbro story

Steven Lewis: Ransome's Move by Kyle Hollingshead; The House without a Door by Elizabeth Daly; "Ballots and Bandits" by Keith Laumer (Worlds of If,  September/October 1971, edited by Ejler Jakobsson); Jemez Brand by L. L. Foreman; The Lady in the Morgue by Jonathan Latimer

Marcia Muller: Green for Danger by Christianna Brand

John ONeill: the fiction of E. Hoffmann Price

Matt Paust: Reykjavik Nights and Into Oblivion by Arnaldur Indridason (both translated by Victoria Cribb)

James Reasoner: Flash Casey, Hard-Boiled Detective by George Harmon Coxe; Triple Western, April 1953, edited by G. B. Farnum

Gerard Saylor: Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew 

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, April 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith


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Friday's Forgotten Books: the links to the reviews and more

June 9, 2017, 2:20 pm
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By the "Wade Miller" duo...a Suspense novel
This Friday's crop of reviews of books, and magazines and more, that the contributors feel might warrant more attention than they've received or received of late (except for those which are warnings--more of these than usual this week!). Yvette Banek suspects, and I think correctly, that she has the Least Forgotten entry this week, though a few others have probably never been out of print among the other citations...and there is a greater representation of fiction-magazine editors perhaps than ever before, with novels by such editors as Ted White and, next to each other, former "officemates" Michael Moorcock and  Kyril Bonfiglioli (the former edited New Worlds, initially for Compact, while the latter edited, sometimes leaning very heavily on Keith Roberts, stablemate Science Fantasy, later retitled SF Impulse and then Impulse, for the same publisher), and a book about Leo Margulies mixed in (along with magazine issues themselves, and anthologies edited by magazine editors).  A few contributors might be added over the course of the day, as they upload their reviews...if I've missed yours or someone else's, please let me know in comments. Thanks, everyone! 

Patti Abbott should be back to gathering the links next Friday, and, as always, it's been a pleasure to spell her.  Todd Mason

Mark Baker:  The Last Dinosaur by Sandy Dengler

Yvette Banek: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Joe Barone: Wings of Fire by Charles Todd

Les Blatt: Mystery Mile by Margery Allingham


John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, June 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Brian Busby: News Stand Library books

David Cramner: Forever and a Death by Donald Westlake

Bill Crider: Mulliner Nights by P. G. Wodehouse; Dragon's Claw by Peter O'Connell (a Modesty Blaise novel)

Jose Cruz, Peter Enfantino & Jack Seabrook: EC Comics for April 1953, adapting Ray Bradbury et al., edited by Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman

Scott A. Cupp: The Chinese Agent by Michael Moorcock

William F. Deeck: Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Martin Edwards: Until She Was Dead by Richard Hull

Will Errickson: Something Evil by Arthur Hoffe (and the cover art of Bob Foster)

Curt Evans: Such a Nice Client, A Swan-Song Betrayed and The Innocent by Josephine Bell

C. C. Finlay: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1964, edited by Avram Davidson

Fred Fitch: The Road to Ruin by Donald Westlake (continued)

Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1952, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas

John Grant: The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette (translated by James Brook)

Rich Horton: Sweet William by Marguerite Bouvet

Jerry House: Tom Swift and His Aerial Warship, Or, The Naval Terror of the Seas by "Victor Appleton" (Howard Garis)

Nick Jones: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, Galactic North by Alistair Reynolds and many others

Tracy K: Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood (a Phryne Fisher novel)

George Kelley: The Fredric Brown Mystery Library, Volume One: Death in the Dark; Volume Two: Murder Draws a Crowd edited by Stephen Haffner

Joe Kenney: The Strangler by "David Black"

Margot Kinberg: You by Zoran Drvenkar (translated by Shaun Whiteside)

Rob Kitchin: Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Richard Krauss: The Case of the Lonely Lovers by "Will Daemer" (Robert Wade and Bill Miller)

B.V. Lawson: Find the Innocent by Roy Vickers (William Edward Vickers)

Evan Lewis: The Maltese Falcon comics adapted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, illustration by Rodlow Willard (continued)

Steve Lewis: Murder is My Dish by Stephen Marlowe (a Chester Drum novel); The Altar of Asconel by John Brunner; Hot Summer, Cold Murder by Gaylord Dold; Android Avenger by Ted White

Colin McGulgan (hosted by Sergio Angelini): Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley

Neeru: Journey Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino (translated by Alexander Smith)

Francis M. Nevins: Strangers in the Night by Georges Simenon; The Case of the Shivering Chorus Girls by James Atlee Phillips; The Count of 9 by "A. A. Fair" (Erle Stanley Gardner)

John F. Norris: The Thing in the Brook by "Peter Storme" (Philip Van Doren Stern)

John ONeill: World's Best Science Fiction, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1970 edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr

Matt Paust: The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau by Anthony Hope

Bill Pronzini: The Pricking Thumb by H. C. Branson

James Reasoner: Lust Shop by "John Dexter";Leo Margulies: Giant of the Pulps by Philip Sherman
"The Snail Watcher" by Patricia Highsmith

Kelly Robinson: "The Snail-Watcher" and "The Quest for Blank Claveringi" by Patricia Highsmith (an FFB Classic, which has resulted in BBC Radio interviewing Kelly for a program about snails...)

Richard Robinson: The Fredric Brown Mystery Library, Volume One: Death in the Dark; Volume Two: Murder Draws a Crowd edited by Stephen Haffner

Gerard Saylor: Blood of Victory by Alan Furst

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, June 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Kerrie Smith: A Jarful of Angels by Babs Horton

Charlie Stella: The Running Kind by Craig McDonald; North DIxie Highway by Joseph Haske

"TomKat": The Cases of Hildegard Withers by Stuart Palmer

A. J. Wright: Dan Dunn by Norman Marsh


























































Frank Babics 2012 FFB review











































































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FFB: ALIEN CARGO by Theodore Sturgeon (Bluejay Books/St. Martin's 1984)

June 16, 2017, 4:18 am
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Theodore Sturgeon's other collections can all be considered to be superfluous, after the monument that was Paul Williams (and daughter Noel Sturgeon)'s The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon set (Williams couldn't quite complete his work with the multivolume project, due to early-onset Alzheimer's after a traffic accident while bicycling) ...except there is something to be gained in trying to determine why certain stories were included by which editor...presumably Sturgeon (presumably with input from Bluejay editor/publisher Jim Frenkel), in selecting this cross-section as some of his best short fiction from the first two decades+ of his professional career, had some interesting reasons for putting together this set of stories, when such early collections as E Pluribus Unicorn and Caviar had also covered this ground (it shares no less than six stories with the latter, and six more with Sturgeon's first collection Without Sorcery, and perhaps was meant in some way to be a new edition of these books). Happily, Sturgeon provides headnotes to the stories as presented here, though as he was going into his final months, he wasn't as loquacious as with some of his earlier collections, including those for Bluejay and Dell publication over the previous half-dozen years. (And there have been collections published since, which hope to be more portable introductions to Sturgeon, and the potential for the small press North Atlantic to give up the ghost or at least the in-print status for the Complete Stories is not negligible.) Alien Cargo was the last new Sturgeon book published during his lifetime. 

Here's what this book offers, from the Locus Index of anthologies and collections:

Alien Cargo Theodore Sturgeon (Bluejay 0-312-94008-4, Jun ’84 [Jul ’84], $14.95, 284pp, hc) Collection of 14 early stories culled from other collections (there are no copyright acknowledgements), with a few lines of new introduction to each.
  • 7 · Introduction · in
  • 11 · It · nv Unknown Aug ’40
  • 31 · Cargo · nv Unknown Nov ’40
  • 54 · Poker Face · ss Astounding Mar ’41
  • 64 · Microcosmic God · nv Astounding Apr ’41
  • 87 · Two Percent Inspiration · ss Astounding Oct ’41
  • 103 · Brat · ss Unknown Dec ’41
  • 118 · Medusa · nv Astounding Feb ’42
  • 135 · The Martian and the Moron · nv Weird Tales Mar ’49
  • 156 · Shadow, Shadow on the Wall · ss Imagination Feb ’51
  • 165 · The Traveling Crag · nv Fantastic Adventures Jul ’51
  • 191 · The Touch of Your Hand · na Galaxy Sep ’53
  • 227 · Twink · ss Galaxy Aug ’55
  • 242 · Bright Segment · nv Caviar, Ballantine, 1955
  • 262 · “Won’t You Walk...” · nv Astounding Jan ’56
There are surprising and unsurprising inclusions and omissions here, even given the aforementioned collections of the previous five years (and the return to print of such books as E Pluribus Unicorn in that period). Any best-of the early Sturgeon not including "It" is simply wrong, and any not including "Microcosmic God" is bucking the nostalgic glow this story has for many...it's the One Story, written at the beginning of his career essentially, that too many people would continue to insist for decades afterward was the best story he would ever write...also simply wrong. (It's comparable thus to such other early hits as "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch, "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov and "El hombre de las esquinas rosadas" by Jorge Luis Borges, aka "Streetcorner Man"--the Bloch not only hugely plagiarized, but also the story he was tagged with for general identification purposes till the film version of his novel Psycho appeared...all four writers have noted that in their correct estimate, they did much better work after learning a bit more about life and writing, which wouldn't stop the unclever from letting them know they'd peaked with near-juvenilia). 

So, aside from a handsome if busy cover by Rowena Morrill, and a typeface used throughout the book which is too faint for absolute ease of reading, what we have here is something like, but not quite, a Sturgeon best-of his short fiction, despite a strong case to be made that either A Touch of Strange or E Pluribus might better represent his short work at its best; certainly the two together are at least as good a selection as this one is, and they don't include dozens of stories collected in the later best-ofs as well as those only available in the complete set.  "It" would be worth the purchase price of the book by itself, literally Sturgeon's masterwork, the story which demonstrated how he had gone beyond the flashily promising newcomer of his earlier work to a fully-formed artist; the last sentences will probably stick with me for several more decades, as they have over the forty-plus years since I first read them. And the introductory note to this one, one of the longer in the book, is also quoted in the appropriate volume of the Complete Stories, noting Sturgeon's surprise at learning how influential his story was particularly on comics artists and writers (characters running from the Hulk to Swamp Thing, and no doubt such more ridiculous creatures as the Heap, owed more than a little of their
conception to the relentless, uncreated but utterly curious golem that is It in the story) and his gratitude toward Ray Bradbury, tasked with presenting Sturgeon with an award at the first San Diego ComicCon, unstintingly praising the slightly older writer and noting how much of his work was patterned on Sturgeon's. (Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King being among the more obviously influenced by Sturgeon, as well, as both were happy to state...Vonnegut character Kilgore Trout has this name for a reason.) "Brat" and "Shadow, Shadow, On the Wall" remind me again that we could still use a collection devoted exclusively to Sturgeon's horror fiction, some of the best from a 20th Century writer never devoting most of his energy in that direction (putting him in the same class thus as Patricia Highsmith, Muriel Spark, Saki and Cornell Woolrich)...these not being on par with "It" or "A Way of Thinking" or "The Professor's Teddy Bear" but certainly worth gathering with those and the others. 

There's barely a Sturgeon book not worth reading (I'm told that one might be the highly sought-after-by-collectors rush job/Jean Shepherd-instigated literary open hoax/joke that is I, Libertine, written by Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine under extreme time constraints in a marathon session, and published as by "Frederick Ewing" as a Ballantine Books offer), and this one has both Sturgeon's desire to preserve these stories together and his too-brief introductions to further recommend it. If you're still on the fence about investing in the Complete Stories...go check it out of a library...but you'll still have a fine time with an inexpensive copy (or less inexpensive one) of this collection. (Sturgeon's West being the most unlikely item, and quite brilliant, many of the stories in collaboration with Zane Grey Western Magazine editor Don Ward.)

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more on this week's books. 
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