THE DUTTON REVIEW, edited by Jerome Charyn, Hal Scharlatt and Robert Brown (E. P. Dutton, 1970)

June 23, 2017, 6:07 am

≫ Next: Friday's "Forgotten" Books; the links to the reviews for 30 June 2017

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

The Dutton Review got off to a good start and didn't get to go anywhere else; this was the only issue. And while E. P. Dutton had a lot to be proud of on its lists, they clearly weren't too interested in their women writers; even Managing Editor Susan Stern apparently couldn't convince them to publish more than one writer, Norma Meacock, with a novel excerpt, who didn't carry the XY chromosome.

Otherwise, it's a nice mix of poetry, short fiction (albeit as much excerpts from novels by William Gaddis and Stanley Elkin), Anthony Kerrigan writing on Borges to accompany the Borges story (translated by Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in the midst of their project producing the best translations of Borges's work), Jack Newfield's critical survey of journalism, Rudolf Wurlitzer's "found poem" of sorts, and somewhat more traditional autobiography (also an excerpt) from Ray Mungo. There's a brief editorial request that contributions be sent to a certain address, further suggesting this was not meant to be purely a loss-leader and sampler of forthcoming work, but something along the lines of New American Review or New World Writing or New Directions (clearly missing the requirement that New be part of the title) or Works in Progress (the Book of the Month Club series that did somewhat more resemble, if not entirely, a sampler of recent offers). Probably a pity it didn't get to a second issue, nor a healthy run.

From the FictionMags index, slightly corrected:

The Dutton Review [#1, 1970] ed. Jerome Charyn, Hal Scharlatt, Robert Brown and Susan Stern (E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., $1.95, 219pp, 5½" x 8¼")
Details supplied by Ned Brooks (and here revised by TM).

5 · JR or the Boy Inside · William Gaddis · na/ex J R (1975)
69 · The Guns of August · Raymond Mungo · bi/ex Famous Long Ago (1970)
99 · Three Poems · C. P. Cavafy · pm
103 · “Aaron” · Norma Meacock · ss/ex Thinking Girl (1969 UK. 1972 US)
111 · The Horse’s Ass · Barton Midwood · ss
121 · The First Twenty Objects in My Friend’s Apartment Plus My Own Monthly Expenses · Rudolph Wurlitzer · mi/pm
125 · Borges in Madrid · Anthony Kerrigan · nf
127 · Burnt Orange · John Hawkes · ss
151 · Journalism: Old, New, and Corporate · Jack Newfield · nf
167 · The Library · Richard Brautigan · ss/ex The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971)
183 · The Dick Gibson Show · Stanley Elkin · nt/ex The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
215 · The Intruder · Jorge Luis Borges; translated by Norman di Giovanni · ss

Please see Patti Abbott's blogfor more of this week's books, and I'll be hosting next week.

↧

Friday's "Forgotten" Books; the links to the reviews for 30 June 2017

June 30, 2017, 11:14 am

≫ Next: FFB: PULLING OUR OWN STRINGS: FEMINIST HUMOR & SATIRE edited by Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely (Indiana University Press 1980)

≪ Previous: THE DUTTON REVIEW, edited by Jerome Charyn, Hal Scharlatt and Robert Brown (E. P. Dutton, 1970)

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, very few this week). A small lot of fiction being adapted for television drama 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! And please spare a thought for those feeling the weight of poor health and other burdens, near and dear to several contributors this week.

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: Counterfeit Conspiracies by Ritter Ames

Yvette Banek: Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts

Joe Barone: The Mountains Have a Secret by Arthur W. Upfield

Les Blatt: The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes: Stories from the Golden Age of Gaslight Crime edited by Nick Rennison

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

Brian Busby: Cry Hallellujah! by Kenneth Orvis

Bill Crider: Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse; The Killing Breed by "Frank Leslie" (Peter Brandvold); Kiss Off the Dead by "Garrity" (David J. Gerrity)

Jose Cruz, Peter Enfantino & Jack Seabrook: EC Comics for Mayl 1953; Enfantino and Seabrook: DC War Comics June/July 1969

Scott A. Cupp: Libriomancer by Jim Hines

Martin Edwards: The Little Walls by Winston Graham ; The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Texts by Martin Edwards (blog tour)

Barry Ergang: The Sixteenth Man by Thomas B. Sawyer

Will Errickson: Scorpion by Michael R. Linaker

Curt Evans: Murder in Pastiche by Marion Manwaring

C. Coleman Finlay: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1997, edited by Gordon Van Gelder

Fred Fitch: Watch Your Back! by Donald Westlake

Paul Fraser: Startling Stories, September 1951, edited by Samuel Mines

Barry Gardner: The Best Defense by Kate Wilhlem

John Grant: The Mad and the Bad by Jean-Patrick Manchette (translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith)(introduction by James Sallis); A Fine and Private Place by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

Rich Horton: The Leopard Woman by Stewart Edward White ; Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, October 1963, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Jeanne: The Big Kitty by Claire Donally

Jerry House: Stone, MIA Hunter: Desert Death Raid by "Jack Buchanan" (Bill Crider)

Tracy K: Dangerous Davies:The Last Detective by Leslie Thomas

George Kelley: Turn on the Heat by "A. A. Fair" (Erle Stanley Gardner)

Joe Kenney: Soldato! by "Al Conroy" (Marvin H. Albert)

Margot Kinberg: Not a Creature Was Stirring by Jane Haddam

Rob Kitchin: Pilgrim Soul by Gordon Ferris

Richard Krause: Strange Pursuit (originally Madman on a Drum) by "N. R. de Mexico" (Robert Bragg)

Frank Lawrence: Charles Ricketts: Subtle and Fantastic Decorator by Stephen Calloway

B. V. Lawson: The Summer School Mystery by "Josephine Bell" (Doris Collier Ball)

Steve Lewis: Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie; The Necklace of Skulls by Ivor Drummond; Guilty Minds by Joseph Finder; Gila City by Bennett Foster; Rafferty: Cannon's Mouth by W. Glenn Duncan; When They Kill Your Wife by "John Crowe" (Dennis Lynds)

John ONeill: The Worlds of Jack Vance (probably edited by Vance or Frederik Pohl); The Best of C. L. Moore edited by "Lester Del Rey" (Leonard Knapp); Agents of Insight by Steven Klaper

Matt Paust: The Heart of Princess Osra by Anthony Hope

Mildred Perkins: A Zombie's History of the United States by "Dr. Worm Miller" (Josh Miller)

James Reasoner: Kothar:Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox; Famous Western, April 1958, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes

Richard Robinson: Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie

Gerard Saylor: After the First Death by Lawrence Block; Round Mountain by Castle Freeman, Jr.

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

Kerry Smith: Where Roses Never Die by Gunnar Staalesen (translated by Don Bartlett)

Kevin R. Tipple: Relic Tech by Terry W. Ervin II

"TomKat": He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr

A. J. Wright: The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

Bill Crider's back cover image of Strange Pursuit

↧

FFB: PULLING OUR OWN STRINGS: FEMINIST HUMOR & SATIRE edited by Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely (Indiana University Press 1980)

July 7, 2017, 8:31 am

≫ Next: Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the Reviews: 14 July 2017

≪ Previous: Friday's "Forgotten" Books; the links to the reviews for 30 June 2017

This 1980 volume somewhat unsurprisingly gathers materials from the 1970s and earlier...one might be surprised by the eclecticism of those materials, including short stories, essays, novel excerpts and others from longer works, one-panel cartoons, comic strips, poetry, quip quotations, letters to editors of various publications, transcripts of a couple of standup duo Pat Harrison and Robin Tyler's comedy routines, and songs, some with the actual sheet music included along with the lyrics. C0-editor Gloria Kaufman in her introduction draws a distinction between what she sees as "female humor" and feminist humor: the former is usually full of bitterness, as it is mostly about the impossibility of the improvement of women's plight in society, and if anything celebrates working around while accepting rather than working against traditional limitations, while feminist humor is predicated on the possibility of change for the better, for liberation and equality, and highlights the absurdity of misogyny as well as its not at all necessary evil; Mary Kay Blakely in her introduction notes that feminist humor is often tasked with being the only humor of an oppressed group that really shouldn't ever hurt anyone's feelings in any way, and the impossibility of that task. While some of what is collected here, being satire and other comedy from a disadvantaged group and the wits within that group and their sympathizers, is at times bitter or angry, that's justified, and not all of it is by any means...a fair amount of whimsey and gentle observation appear alongside, or even within the same works.

In large format, and with pages laid out in a manner more reminiscent of a magazine than more traditional books (but less busily than most slick magazines are today), the editors gather their selections under several chapter-headings, as transcribed from their table of contents in WorldCat thus:

192 pages : illustrations, music ; 29 cm
Contents: "Dear Gloria" / by Mary Kay Blakely -- Introduction / by Gloria Kaufman -- PERIODIC HYSTERIA -- Becoming a Tampax junkie / by Ivy Bottini -- Ragtime -- Periodical Bea / by E.M. Broner -- Splat / by Marilyn French -- A person who menstruates is unfit to be a mother / by Hadley V. Baxendale -- A crowd of commuters / by Mary Ellmann -- If men could menstruate / by Gloria Steinem -- Walking the knife's edge / by Lisa Alther -- Mosquitoes and menses -- New discoveries hailed as birth control breakthroughs / by Jane Field -- Superpower sought on the contraceptive front / by Carol Troy -- Jumbo, colossal and supercolossal -- To the editor / by Shirley L. Radl -- The natural masochism of women / by Hadley V. Baxendale -- Revolutionary contraceptive / by Roberta Gregory -- The perfect job for a pregnant woman -- A few words about breasts / by Nora Ephron -- Mammary glands / by Kristin Lems -- What do you say when a man tells you, You have the softest skin / by Mary Mackey -- Keeping abreast of what men want / by Mary Kay Blakely-- UNTYING THE MOTHER KNOT -- On sleeping with your kids / by Alta -- The day's work / by Barbara Holland -- The pee-in / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Fairyland Nursery School / by Shiela Ballantyne -- Molly's beginnings / by Rita Mae Brown -- The Christmas pageant / by Rita Mae Brown -- Needle-and-thread envy / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Raising sons / by Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- The pros and cons of motherhood / by Mary Kay Blakely -- CLICKING, CLUNKING, AND CLOWNING -- Clicking -- A bargain with the judge / by Florynce Kennedy -- Don't you wish you were liberated too / by Shirley Katz -- The man was right / by Ellen Goodman -- Clunks / by Jane O'Reilly -- Pandephobium / by Sue Held -- Clothes make the man / by Sally Sertin -- Untitled / by Alta -- On stage with Harrison and Tyler -- Clowning with Ivy Bottini -- Monumental prophylactic -- Men: beware the ATR -- WE MEASURED 56-480-47-277-30-19, AND NOW WE MEASURE MORE! -- Carrie Chapman Catt -- When taxes are taxing -- A consistent anti to her son / by Alice Duer Miller -- The woman question in 1872 / by Fanny Fern -- Predictions for 1979 / by Yenta -- A Flo Kennedy sampler -- The lifting power of woman / by Joan Honican -- Why we oppose votes for men / by Alice Duer Miller -- How the women sang their way out of jail / by Mary Harris Jones -- The human-not-quite-human / by Dorothy Sayers -- I laughed when I wrote it / by Nikki Giovanni -- Liberation of the Yale Divinity School library men's room / by Carol P. Christ -- We need a name for Bernadette Arnold / by Joan D. Uebelhoer -- On a different track / by Sharon McDonald -- RAPE AND OTHER BIG JOKES -- The Saturday night special / by Naomi Weisstein -- How to avoid rape -- LABORING UNDER FALSE ASSUMPTIONS -- A great satisfaction / by Dorothy Sayers -- The aroma of "Miss" / by Virginia Woolf -- Marginal workers / by Hadley V. Baxendale -- Letter to the editor / by Joan D. Uebelhoer -- A writer's interview with herself / by Mary Ellmann -- Crooked and straight in academia / by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope -- The conference / by E.M. Broner -- MLA / by Mary Mackey -- HERE COMES THE BRIDLE -- Lady in red / by Ntozake Shange -- Sterner stuff / by Sue Held -- Marriage quickies -- Dishwashing & suicide / by Maxine Hong Kingston -- The politics of housework / by Pat Mainardi -- We don't need the men / by Malvina Reynolds -- Of bikers, brides & butches / by Sharon McDonald -- What Mother never told me / by Sharon McDonald -- FOR ALL THE "CRAZY LADIES" -- No one has a corner on depression but housewives are working on it / by Gabrielle Burton -- Multiple penis envy / by Haldley V. Baxendale -- What God hath wroth / by Charlotte Painter -- Mother's Day poem / by Pauline B. Bart -- I'm sorry, you're sorry / by Mary Kay Blakely -- Don't wear your guitar, darling Mother / by Shirley Katz-- Football / by Crazy Hazel Houlihingle -- Aaaaaaaaaargh! / by Sheila Ballantyne -- ONCE UPON A MYTH -- Application for employment / by Rhoda Lerman -- The creation of man / by Rhoda Lerman -- To whom it may concern / by Rhoda Lerman -- Quips of a high priestess / by Zsuzsanna Budapest -- You are what is female / by Judy Grahn -- The House of Mirrors / by Mary Daly -- Norma Jean's theory / by Sheila Ballantyne -- Honk if you think she's Jesus / by Mugsy Peabody -- Why little girls are sugar & spice and when they grow up become cheesecake / by Una Stannard -- S/HE-IT -- A feminist alphabet / by Eve Merriam -- "Him" to the weather / by Judith K. Meuli -- Overcoming a man-nerism / by Naomi R. Goldenberg -- Talkin' gender neutral blues / by Kristin Lems -- An eight-letter word / by Mary Ellmann -- Letter to the editor / by Patricia Miller -- Dear Colleague: I am not an honorary male / by Joanna Russ -- Another name for "down there" / by Sue Held -- Pickups, puns, & putdowns -- Josie takes the stand / by Ruth Herschberger. As one can see, there's quite a mix of mostly fairly contemporary writing and other art, along with some classic examples, many from 19th Century feminists and some few from earlier yet (you can't leave out Mary Wollstonecraft), and the TOC doesn't cite the comics contributions, including multiple items by Jules Feiffer, Gary Trudeau and Johnny Hart as well as Nicole Hollander and Bulbul. And, given that Kaufman taught in South Bend and Blakely lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at time of assembly, certain bits of locally-published material appear at various points in the book that editors elsewhere would likely not've seen, giving this somewhat unusual university press item a regional flavor that probably didn't hurt in getting through the approval process. Certainly the Nora Ephron essay has since become a bit of a classic itself, and others here should've; excerpts from now largely overlooked former bestsellers as Kinflicks and The Women's Room are useful to have at hand, as are the multiple excerpts from Sheila Ballantyne. Those who remember Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" fondly will find "Dear Colleague" cuts a similar path rather closer to home. Inexpensive copies of the 1980 and 1994 reprint editions (I hope the later printing had better binding than mine does) are to be had from the usual sources, and one can definitely do worse. This very late entry in Friday's Books hopes to join Patti Abbott's selection of same as detailed and linked here; next week, I will be gathering the list again.

192 pages : illustrations, music ; 29 cm

Contents:

"Dear Gloria" / by Mary Kay Blakely --
Introduction / by Gloria Kaufman --

PERIODIC HYSTERIA --
Becoming a Tampax junkie / by Ivy Bottini --
Ragtime --
Periodical Bea / by E.M. Broner --
Splat / by Marilyn French --
A person who menstruates is unfit to be a mother / by Hadley V. Baxendale --
A crowd of commuters / by Mary Ellmann --
If men could menstruate / by Gloria Steinem --
Walking the knife's edge / by Lisa Alther --
Mosquitoes and menses --
New discoveries hailed as birth control breakthroughs / by Jane Field --
Superpower sought on the contraceptive front / by Carol Troy --
Jumbo, colossal and supercolossal --
To the editor / by Shirley L. Radl --
The natural masochism of women / by Hadley V. Baxendale --
Revolutionary contraceptive / by Roberta Gregory --
The perfect job for a pregnant woman --
A few words about breasts / by Nora Ephron --
Mammary glands / by Kristin Lems --
What do you say when a man tells you, You have the softest skin / by Mary Mackey --
Keeping abreast of what men want / by Mary Kay Blakely--

UNTYING THE MOTHER KNOT --
On sleeping with your kids / by Alta --
The day's work / by Barbara Holland --
The pee-in / by Sheila Ballantyne --
Fairyland Nursery School / by Shiela Ballantyne --
Molly's beginnings / by Rita Mae Brown --
The Christmas pageant / by Rita Mae Brown --
Needle-and-thread envy / by Sheila Ballantyne --
Raising sons / by Elizabeth Cady Stanton --
The pros and cons of motherhood / by Mary Kay Blakely --

CLICKING, CLUNKING, AND CLOWNING --
Clicking --
A bargain with the judge / by Florynce Kennedy --
Don't you wish you were liberated too / by Shirley Katz --
The man was right / by Ellen Goodman --
Clunks / by Jane O'Reilly --
Pandephobium / by Sue Held --
Clothes make the man / by Sally Sertin --
Untitled / by Alta --
On stage with Harrison and Tyler --
Clowning with Ivy Bottini --
Monumental prophylactic --
Men: beware the ATR --

WE MEASURED 56-480-47-277-30-19, AND NOW WE MEASURE MORE! --
Carrie Chapman Catt --
When taxes are taxing --
A consistent anti to her son / by Alice Duer Miller --
The woman question in 1872 / by Fanny Fern --
Predictions for 1979 / by Yenta --
A Flo Kennedy sampler --
The lifting power of woman / by Joan Honican --
Why we oppose votes for men / by Alice Duer Miller --
How the women sang their way out of jail / by Mary Harris Jones --
The human-not-quite-human / by Dorothy Sayers --
I laughed when I wrote it / by Nikki Giovanni --
Liberation of the Yale Divinity School library men's room / by Carol P. Christ --
We need a name for Bernadette Arnold / by Joan D. Uebelhoer --
On a different track / by Sharon McDonald --

RAPE AND OTHER BIG JOKES --
The Saturday night special / by Naomi Weisstein --
How to avoid rape --

LABORING UNDER FALSE ASSUMPTIONS --
A great satisfaction / by Dorothy Sayers --
The aroma of "Miss" / by Virginia Woolf --
Marginal workers / by Hadley V. Baxendale --
Letter to the editor / by Joan D. Uebelhoer --
A writer's interview with herself / by Mary Ellmann --
Crooked and straight in academia / by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope --
The conference / by E.M. Broner --
MLA / by Mary Mackey --

HERE COMES THE BRIDLE --
Lady in red / by Ntozake Shange --
Sterner stuff / by Sue Held --
Marriage quickies --
Dishwashing & suicide / by Maxine Hong Kingston --
The politics of housework / by Pat Mainardi --
We don't need the men / by Malvina Reynolds --
Of bikers, brides & butches / by Sharon McDonald --
What Mother never told me / by Sharon McDonald --

FOR ALL THE "CRAZY LADIES" --
No one has a corner on depression but housewives are working on it / by Gabrielle Burton --
Multiple penis envy / by Haldley V. Baxendale --
What God hath wroth / by Charlotte Painter --
Mother's Day poem / by Pauline B. Bart --
I'm sorry, you're sorry / by Mary Kay Blakely --
Don't wear your guitar, darling Mother / by Shirley Katz--
Football / by Crazy Hazel Houlihingle --
Aaaaaaaaaargh! / by Sheila Ballantyne --

ONCE UPON A MYTH --
Application for employment / by Rhoda Lerman --
The creation of man / by Rhoda Lerman --
To whom it may concern / by Rhoda Lerman --
Quips of a high priestess / by Zsuzsanna Budapest --
You are what is female / by Judy Grahn --
The House of Mirrors / by Mary Daly --
Norma Jean's theory / by Sheila Ballantyne --
Honk if you think she's Jesus / by Mugsy Peabody --
Why little girls are sugar & spice and when they grow up become cheesecake / by Una Stannard --

S/HE-IT --
A feminist alphabet / by Eve Merriam --
"Him" to the weather / by Judith K. Meuli --
Overcoming a man-nerism / by Naomi R. Goldenberg --
Talkin' gender neutral blues / by Kristin Lems --
An eight-letter word / by Mary Ellmann --
Letter to the editor / by Patricia Miller --
Dear Colleague: I am not an honorary male / by Joanna Russ --
Another name for "down there" / by Sue Held --
Pickups, puns, & putdowns --
Josie takes the stand / by Ruth Herschberger.

As one can see, there's quite a mix of mostly fairly contemporary writing and other art, along with some classic examples, many from 19th Century feminists and some few from earlier yet (you can't leave out Mary Wollstonecraft), and the TOC doesn't cite the comics contributions, including multiple items by Jules Feiffer, Gary Trudeau and Johnny Hart as well as Nicole Hollander and Bulbul. And, given that Kaufman taught in South Bend and Blakely lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at time of assembly, certain bits of locally-published material appear at various points in the book that editors elsewhere would likely not've seen, giving this somewhat unusual university press item a regional flavor that probably didn't hurt in getting through the approval process. Certainly the Nora Ephron essay has since become a bit of a classic itself, and others here should've; excerpts from now largely overlooked former bestsellers as Kinflicks and The Women's Room are useful to have at hand, as are the multiple excerpts from Sheila Ballantyne. Those who remember Joanna Russ's "Useful Phrases for the Tourist" fondly will find "Dear Colleague" cuts a similar path rather closer to home. Inexpensive copies of the 1980 and 1994 reprint editions (I hope the later printing had better binding than mine does) are to be had from the usual sources, and one can definitely do worse.

This very late entry in Friday's Books hopes to join Patti Abbott's selection of same as detailed and linked here; next week, I will be gathering the list again.

↧

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the Reviews: 14 July 2017

July 14, 2017, 4:43 pm

≫ Next: FFB: Heist Week: ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW by William P. McGivern (Dodd, Mead 1957); YA birthday bonus heistlet: FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E. L. Konigsburg (Antheneum 1967)

≪ Previous: FFB: PULLING OUR OWN STRINGS: FEMINIST HUMOR & SATIRE edited by Gloria Kaufman and Mary Kay Blakely (Indiana University Press 1980)

This Friday's (evening) 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). 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! And please spare a thought for those feeling the weight of poor health and other burdens, near and dear to several contributors this week. Kerry Smith is not represented at this hour since I couldn't get her blog to load properly...I hope nothing too permanent is going wrong there.

Patti Abbott will be collecting the links (much more promptly!) next week, and as always, it's been a pleasure to gather them while she and her husband tend to other business.

Frank Babics: An Eye for an Eye: The Doll by John Saul

Mark Baker: Demolition Angel by Robert Crais

Yvette Banek: Cue for Murder by Helen McCloy

Joe Barone: Watchers of Time by "Charles Todd" (Caroline and Charles Todd)

Les Blatt: The Four Just Men by Edgar Wallace

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

Alice Chang: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski (translated by Danusia Stok)

Bill Crider: The Impossible Virgin by Peter O'Donnell (a Modesty Blaise novel); Edge #1: The Loner by "George G. Gilman" (Terry Harknett); Another Man's Claim by "Henry Whittier" (Harry Whittington)

Jose Cruz, Peter Enfantino & Jack Seabrook: EC Comics for June 1953; Enfantino and Seabrook: DC War Comics October/November 1969

Scott Cupp: Mexican Pulp Art edited by Bobbette Axelrod and Ted Frankel

William Deeck: Six Minutes Past Twelve by "Gavin Holt" (Charles Rodda)

Martin Edwards: Death by Two Hands by Peter Drax

Will Errickson: Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

Curtis Evans: Plot It Yourself by Rex Stout

C. Coleman Finlay: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1958, edited by Anthony Boucher

Fred Fitch: Transgressions edited by "Ed McBain" (Evan Hunter)

Paul Fraser: Astounding Science Fiction, July 1953, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr.

John Grant: Grim Tales by E. Nesbit

Rich Horton: The Road to Frontenac by Samuel Merwin (Sr.); Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, February 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith

Jerry House: The Woggle-Bug Book by L. Frank Baum

Tracy K: Passing by Nella Larsen

George Kelley: The Wench is Wicked; The Blonde and Blonde Verdict by "carter brown" (Alan Yates)

Joe Kenney: Death Flight by Charles Miron

Margot Kinberg: A Morbid Taste for Bones by "Ellis Peters" (Edith Pargeter)

Rob Kitchin: Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus

Richard Krause: Suspense, Fall 1951, edited by Theodore Irwin

Frank Lawrence: A Crown of Violets by Renée Vivien (translated by Samantha Pious)

B. V. Lawson: A Crime Remembered by "Jeffrey Ashford" (Roderic Jeffries)

Evan Lewis: Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

Steve Lewis: Stalker by Liza Cody; "How Sere Picked Up Her Laundry" by Alexander Jablokov; Deadly Like a .45 by "Reese Sullivan" (Giles A. Lutz); "Not Far Enough" by Martin L. Shoemaker

Gideon Marcus: Galaxy Science Fiction, August 1962, edited by Frederik Pohl

James McGlothlin: The Best of John W. Campbell, Jr. edited by "Lester Del Rey" (Leonard Knapp)

John F. Norris: Something about Midnight by D. B. Olsen

John ONeill: Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp ; Modern Classics of Fantasy edited by Gardner Dozois

Matt Paust: The Dolly Dialogues by Anthony Hope

Mildred Perkins: Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Cally Phillips: The Azure Hand by Samuel Rutherford Crockett

James Reasoner: The Paradise Time Forgot by "John Peter Drummond" (a Ki-Gor novella from Jungle Stories, Fall 1940)

Richard Robinson: Miraculous Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards; Hard Ground by Joseph Heywood

Gerard Saylor: Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer; The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War by Thomas P. Lowry

Art Scott: Slit My Throat, Gently by Michael Brett

Dan Stumpf: Talk of the Town aka Stain of Suspicion by Charles Williams

Kevin Tipple: The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths

"TomCat": Cased Closed#61: Shoes to Die For by Gosho Aoyama (translation uncredited)

David Vineyard: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang by Mike Ripley

↧

FFB: Heist Week: ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW by William P. McGivern (Dodd, Mead 1957); YA birthday bonus heistlet: FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E. L. Konigsburg (Antheneum 1967)

July 21, 2017, 6:26 am

≫ Next: FFStories: Mickey Spillane Parodies and Pastiches by Jean Kerr, Fritz Leiber and Howard Browne

≪ Previous: Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the Reviews: 14 July 2017

William P. McGivern is a writer who shouldn't need rediscovery, but he consistently is being reintroduced, as publishers keep proudly offering his work (with good reason) with notes of just how good he was (with good reason) and yet you probably don't know him except indirectly, as the source of one or another brilliant film or television episode. Despite having written a number of other well-received novels, including her first, published as was From the Mixed Up Files in 1967 and a runner up for the 1968 Newbery that Frankweiler won, E. L. Konigsburg is remembered almost exclusive for this one novel, which (with good reason) has stayed in print consistently since 1967, even if the film adaptation, The Hideaways, a Rather Good Try starring Ingrid Bergman as Frankweiler, fizzled as a commercial property and was pulled down from YouTube not long ago mostly so Warner's burn on demand Archive label would have a clearer field in which to sell it to you. It's the 60th anniversary year for the McGivern novel the 50th for the Konigsburg.

William McGivern began publishing as part of the cluster of writers around Ziff-Davis's Chicago-based fiction magazines in the 1940s, in fact with a collaboration with David Wright O'Brien, along with McGivern the best of the writers to break into print thanks to Ziff-Davis editor Ray Palmer (such other ZD Chicago/landers as Robert Bloch and eventually Fritz Leiber had Been Invented or at least first published elsewhere). Both of those young men went off to World War II, and McGivern was able to come back...he would grind out reasonably good copy for Palmer magazines, which were not on balance looking for anything beyond routine light adventure fiction too much of the time, along with the rest of the writer stable, but, in the manner of Bloch when also providing mere copy, even McGivern's routine stories often demonstrated a certain sophistication of technique or ideation that helped set them slightly apart from the typical Chester Geier or Paul Fairman story, or Howard Browne banging out just another page-filler...Browne, of course, being one of the other genuinely talented writers often simply grinding away for Palmer's magazines, and who eventually became the fitfully better successor editor to Palmer for ZD fiction magazines; Paul Fairman succeeded Browne in that position, and arguably averaged even worse than Palmer as editor, despite having an even more talented, on balance, cast of page-fillers turning in most of the copy in his tenure, and their work augmented by the occasional actually good story his eventual successor Cele Goldsmith pulled out of the slush pile as Fairman's assistant. (Fairman's Usual Suspects in terms of delivery of routine to occasionally better material, published apparently without anyone reading it first, in the mid '50s were Milton Lesser, not yet legally Stephen Marlowe, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Randall Garrett and, increasingly by the end of Fairman's tenure, Henry Slesar; among the items Goldsmith found was Kate Wilhelm's first published story.) But by the mid '50s, McGivern had already given up on supplementing his income as police reporter among other things for the Philadelphia Bulletin with hacking for Ziff-Davis, as his crime fiction was starting to get consistently good reception from better-paying markets such as The Saturday Evening Post and Blue Book, and from Hollywood, with film adaptations of his novels The Big Heat, Shield for Murder, Rogue Cop and Hell on Frisco Bay released in 1953-55, following television adaptations of his shorter work on Lights Out, Studio One and Suspense in 1950-52. Cosmopolitan became a consistent market for McGivern's fiction for at least a decade, starting with a novella version of Odds Against Tomorrow, published ahead of the novel in hardcover, also in 1957.

Odds Against Tomorrow would also be filmed, for 1959 release, rather well but in a sort of hothouse manner, with one of the most over-the-top climaxes in film history; the novel is more subtle, and with a much more realistic ending that has its own dramatic heft. Like most of McGivern's 1950s crime fiction, the novel is set in and around Philadelphia, but the author is intentionally circumspect about that; one early tipoff is that an elevator operator wonders if one of the primary cast knows the score of the Eagles game in progress. But like the film, the novel deals intensely with race relations and the tensions along those lines brought out by the alienation of the working people in this country, as well as tensions between the hothead former soldier Earl and his cohabitating womanfriend, and current financial support, Lorraine. Earl and another lost veteran, Ingram, a compulsive gambler with no one left in his life, are recruited for a bank job by Novak, who is setting up a small crew for the purpose. Unlike in the film, Ingram is not the musician Harry Belafonte plays, but is nearly as desperate and impulsive, and is African-American and not afraid to mock anyone who wants him to take a slight because of that; Earl is Texan out of grinding poverty, and Caucasian, with both a compulsive sense of honor and rigid sense of How Things Ought to Be, including relations between the races, that that background inculcated. As with the film, most of the most important parts of the story will revolve around Ingram and Earl, and Earl and Lorraine, as the crime doesn't quite resolve itself they way Novak and company hoped, nor do the protagonists behave quite the way the police pursuing them quite expect. It's a serious novel of character as well as a tense account of a crime not quite foolproofed, and while the main characters don't end up where they hoped they might, they do have somewhat more to say for themselves than their even more debased correspondents in the film adaptation.

Bill Crider this week is considering Ross Macdonald, and McGivern isn't too far in his talent and appeal from Kenneth Millar's crime fiction; as I reread this for the first time in almost thirty years, I was also reminded even more than I was then of Algis Budrys's almost exactly contemporary novel The Death Machine, originally published and usually reprinted as Rogue Moon, though the Budrys novel is more satirical as well as then near-future science fiction, rather than contemporary crime fiction; both have a small group of damaged people about to undertake a very dangerous task requiring expert team effort, and both make rather important and not too dissimilar points about what in and how lives matter, even when it seems that the characters have lost sight of such guiding principles. The tone even feels similar, hardboiled without resort to the cliches well in place by the late '50s, and the mix of conscious and less-conscious understanding of just how the characters are getting at each other, that is not merely simply a matter of the tension of the job at hand or clashing personality.

I'm also a bit amused about how I first came to this novel, after seeing the film, which I was first drawn to because of the soundtrack; I knew of McGivern's work, and had read a little of it in anthologies, but was a hungry fan of the Modern Jazz Quartet beginning in the latest '70s, and one of my early used-LP purchases was Patterns, the MJQ's interpretation of the score the quartet's pianist John Lewis had written for the film (some of which was also on the soundtrack, though mostly mixed in with larger-group recording). The film and the book are both eminently worthy of your time (as is the album), even as they diverge rather profoundly by their end. And both works have been, I think, more influential on similar work which has followed than is often mentioned.

To be reconstructed later today after a catastrophic crash. Grr.

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FFStories: Mickey Spillane Parodies and Pastiches by Jean Kerr, Fritz Leiber and Howard Browne

July 28, 2017, 5:39 am

≫ Next: FFB: THE BARBIE MURDERS aka PICNIC ON NEARSIDE by John Varley (Berkley 1980)

≪ Previous: FFB: Heist Week: ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW by William P. McGivern (Dodd, Mead 1957); YA birthday bonus heistlet: FROM THE MIXED UP FILES OF MRS BASIL E. FRANKWEILER by E. L. Konigsburg (Antheneum 1967)

Three stories this week that are meant to be parodic pastiches of Mickey Spillane, at least in part. I'd first read all these before I'd actually read Spillane, but the degree of his influence on the literary culture and beyond was already felt sufficiently that I could see where they were coming from. (I might be one of the relative few modern readers who read Spillane's great model, upon whom he improved, Carroll John Daly, before reading Spillane as well. Three writers, all playwrights at various points in their careers, and all prone toward the satirical when the mood struck).

Jean Kerr's "Don Brown's Body"was the first I'd read, in her Please Don't Eat the Daisies, a collection of essays and fictions, which might (unfairly) mostly bring to mind the Doris Day film (and subsequent tv series) based on the coping-with-children title entry, very much in the Shirley Jackson/Erma Bombeck "safe" mode of such writing, though perhaps a bit less anodyne than they could be. Spillane is one of two primary targets here, the other the pomposity of staged readings, particularly when devoted to such at times heavy going as the epic poetry of Stephen Vincent Benet...a genius, but definitely one better remembered for his shorter works. (Kerr was a playwright as well as prose writer, and Kerr's husband was a prominent stage drama critic, Walter Kerr, and presumably not a little time not spent with the children was devoted to accompanying her husband to some lesser as well as greater performances, when she wasn't attending or attending to productions on her own). "Don Brown's Body" was my favorite piece in the book, deft and certainly with a Harvey Kurtzmanesque insouciance taking down her mash-up subjects. Sally's beverage of choice, and the reason it was, was perhaps my favorite single joke in the piece.

Fritz Leiber's "The Night He Cried"uses Slickey Millane as a character (who both writes about a Hammer character and is himself "the dispenser of sex and justice" in these parts), rather than Mike Hammer himself, albeit Millane is clearly more a stand-in for the Hammer Geist than for Spillane as person or even perhaps as prime mover of the genre. Another Maddish parody, in this one an alien observer is sent down to try to encourage the arrested-development case Millane to realize that he might relate to a woman as something other than punching bag, sex target and bullet repository, when not simply barking at them...Leiber having a rather complex set of reactions to the Spillane school of hardboiled writing. Leiber was a rather pro-feminist man, as such work as Conjure Wife and, perhaps less blatantly, The Big Time makes very clear, but also felt at least somewhat henpecked from early on (see "Gonna Roll the Bones" as well as his autobiographical essay in the late collection The Ghost Light) when raised by highly controlling aunts and such while his parents toured with their Shakespearean company; his relation with his wife was both very close and complex, as explored in such work as "The

Secret Songs" and a story in part a memorial of her, "Ill Met in Lankhmar". So, even though he could and did write in a Spillane mode less parodically (see "I'm Looking for 'Jeff'"--a story, published in Howard Browne's Fantastic, which upset James Blish by its apparent faithfulness to a Spillane template), his desire to parody the extremity of Spillane's black and white judgment of his women characters was strong, and elegantly expressed in this novelet, originally in the first volume of Frederik Pohl's anthology series Star Science Fiction. The imagery of the alien creature, slightly inebriated and with all loving intention losing the ability to control its woman-like appearance, has stuck with me, as it understandably upsets the already somewhat unmanned Millane in the story. I first read it in The Best of Fritz Leiber, where Leiber has a brief comment on it as he does on all the contents.

And Howard Browne's "The Veiled Woman"is the least (on its face) parodic, and perhaps even the least fond (though the misogyny Leiber chides and Kerr gleefully mobs in their stories is slightly more played along with, in some ways and less in others, in this novella than in the others). Browne famously ghosted this story, much to Spillane's initial displeasure, after Spillane's "The Green Girl," the contracted-for story for the third issue of Browne's new magazine Fantastic, was described in some detail by Spillane in the course of a photo-profile in Life magazine, released at about the same time as the Fantastic issue was going to press. Faced with the "scoop" of the actual Spillane story by one of the largest-circulation magazines in business, and, as Browne would later admit, because he absolutely hated "The Green Girl" as a story, Browne hurriedly wrote a Spillane pastiche that also gathered up a favored trope of Browne's predecessor editor at the Ziff-Davis's fiction magazines, Ray Palmer, who always was ready for another Lost Civilization, Hidden from Human Ken, story. "The Veiled Woman" also allowed Browne, a not untalented crime fiction writer in his own right (and capable of competent if uninspired copy in sf, and sometimes more-engaged fantasy), to take a whack at McCarthyism and the Cold War, from the same sort of Benevolent Visitor perspective as Leiber had employed...only, to keep it true to the Mike Hammer-and-company canon, things turn out much less well for everyone involved. (The not-quite nihilist vigilantism of Spillane's stories would certainly be amped up the next year in another magazine that got of to a popular start in part due Spillane's by-line on new fiction within, Manhunt.) One imagines that Browne was enjoying mocking Spillane's work to some extent, and perhaps more acutely than some feeling envious of Spillane's market for the work he wanted to do...while Browne increasingly sought to find time to write, eventually letting his editorial duties go by the wayside to do so as Ziff-Davis cut the resources they made available to their fiction magazines. However sliced, this third issue of Fantastic is still legendarily the best-selling single issue of any fantasy or sf magazine published so far (I've been looking for an image with the banner-wrap that announced the "Spillane" story...the usual citation is that the third issue of Fantastic sold about 300,000 copies, between the demand for Spillane fiction and the boost, ironically, the Life profile might have given to reader curiosity...).

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

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FFB: THE BARBIE MURDERS aka PICNIC ON NEARSIDE by John Varley (Berkley 1980)

August 4, 2017, 8:19 am

≫ Next: FFB: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCH'S BREW edited by Henry Veit (Random House 1977)...as opposed to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCHES' BREW edited by the staff of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (Dell Books 1965)

≪ Previous: FFStories: Mickey Spillane Parodies and Pastiches by Jean Kerr, Fritz Leiber and Howard Browne

In 1980, after the publication of his first three somewhat disappointing novels and the all but intolerably brilliant first, 1978, collection of his shorter fiction, Berkley, which was publishing his trilogy of (again, disappointing) novels beginning with Titan, decided to release The Barbie Murders, which appeared to be meant as the B-side collection of his shorter works. The Persistence of Vision (aka In the Hall of the Martian Kings in the UK; the two longest and most widely-hailed stories in the earlier volume thus vied for collection title for, no doubt, Publishers' Reasons), had been seen as kind of the cream of his shorter work published up to 1978; the weakest story in the book was also one of the most popular, "Air Raid," one of two Varley stories in the first issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the source, after a torturous years-long process, of a not-bad short novel by Varley and a somewhat more disappointing film, script by Varley, starring Daniel Travanti, Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson, both entitled Millennium. "Air Raid" had been the one of the two in that IASFM issue published under a pseudonym (in longstanding bad magazine-publishing tradition, that would suggest two stories by the same writer in an issue Would Be Wrong), while "Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe" (the better story, I'd say, and perhaps Varley would, too) was published under the John Varley byline.

So, these were the stories published in this volume, most of them also pretty damned brilliant, and certainly better, at very least on average, than the novels Varley was publishing in those years (as did his occasional editor Damon Knight, Varley showed a remarkable tendency to slough off good sense or believable character development at novel length, despite being so very good at both in even novellas as well as shorter fiction; both would eventually get past that, Varley happily rather sooner in his career than Knight in his):

The Barbie Murders John Varley (Berkley, Sep ’80, pb) (1984 Berkley edition retitled Picnic on Nearside)

Bagatelle [Anna-Louise Bach] · nv Galaxy Oct 1976
The Funhouse Effect · nv F&SF Dec 1976
The Barbie Murders [Anna-Louise Bach] · nv Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Jan/Feb 1978
Equinoctial · na Ascents of Wonder, ed. David Gerrold, Popular Library 1977
Manikins · ss Amazing Science Fiction Jan 1976
Beatnik Bayou · nv New Voices III, ed. George R. R. Martin, Berkley 1980
Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe · nv Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Spr 1977
Lollipop and the Tar Baby · nv Orbit 19, ed. Damon Knight, Harper & Row 1977
Picnic on Nearside · nv F&SF Aug 1974

While these had been the stories gathered in The Persistence of Vision, one of the several volumes published in a new and sadly short-lived program edited by D, R. Bensen, who had been Pyramid Books' primary editor for more than two decades, and who had been rewarded, after Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought up Pyramid and rebranded it as Jove Books, with the new Quantum imprint, with some serious promotion and editorial budget, the books published by a consortium of James Wade and Dell Books (and Dell's subsidiary hardcover line the Dial Press), duly reprinted in Britain by Sidgwick & Jackson. (Quantum launched with the first and probably least bad of Varley's first five or six disappointing novels, The Ophiuchi Hotline.)

The Persistence of Vision John Varley (Quantum/Dial, 1978, hc)
UK editions (Sidgwick & Jackson/Futura 1978) as In the Hall of the Martian Kings.

Introduction · Algis Budrys · in
The Phantom of Kansas · nv Galaxy Feb 1976
Air Raid · ss Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine Spr 1977, as by Herb Boehm
Retrograde Summer · nv F&SF Feb 1975
The Black Hole Passes · nv F&SF Jun 1975
In the Hall of the Martian Kings · na F&SF Feb 1977
In the Bowl · nv F&SF Dec 1975
Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance · nv Galaxy Jul 1976
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank · nv Galaxy May 1976
The Persistence of Vision · na F&SF Mar 1978

It's not putting it lightly how mind-blowing Varley's short fiction, up to novella length, was for me as 13yo reader, digging deeply into the new fiction magazines for the first time in 1978, and in my first new issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction finding Varley for the first time with the novella "The Persistence of Vision" and needing to see as much of his fiction as I could gather. He was doing what Heinlein could no longer do, and had been less adept at even at his best (and in establishing a template, or further establishing that of H. G. Wells and other forebears), in providing glimpses of actually lived-in futures, and ones where technological quantum leaps had had concomitant effects on the lives and behavior of the characters, including no little their sexuality. Varley had a very 1970s-era sexual libertinism inherent in much of his work (which also didn't offend me at all at thirteen, relatively alienated and well into puberty) but managed to express it for the most part naturally through a sophisticated take on his characters' lives and interactions, in posited worlds where changing bodies was only mildly more difficult than changing clothes, and (in many of his linked stories) humanity had been displaced from Earth by alien invaders, who came to save the cetaceans, and thus the human diaspora was spread across the other planets and other bodies of the Solar System, giving Varley a lovely assortment of (then up-to-date-detailed) environments on those planets, etc., to explore. Joanna Russ noted that his female characters were unusually good for a male writer, perhaps for all writers (given how there simply was less tradition of good portrayal of women in fiction, not least fantastic fiction, to draw on); Algis Budrys suggested that at his best, Varley was drawing together all the things that science fiction, at least, could do best and uniquely. Even as a new reader of the new work in the field, it felt to me like Varley, while perhaps not the best creator of lapidary prose in the field at the time, was nonetheless otherwise ahead of (nearly if not) everyone else's curve in showing how a future life might be, indeed a quantum jump of his own in the way that, say, Stanley Weinbaum's work had been in the late 1930s in sf, albeit Varley was innovating in a now much richer and vastly more sophisticated tradition.

And while the stories in the earlier collection averaged a bit more brilliant (and the next collection, Blue Champagne, would also have a slightly better if less startling batting average), the majority here are more than fine, such as "Robinson Crusoe" or "Picnic on Nearside", and the intentionally outrageous "Lollipop and the Tar Baby" (which features among other things a sentient black hole and is one of the most explicitly sex-driven of Varley's stories); all are worthy of standing with his other early short fiction (and most of it has been offered again in Varley's most recent and retrospective collections, The John Varley Reader and Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories). Original title story "The Barbie Murders" was the second account, after introduction in "Bagatelle", of police officer Anna-Louise Bach, whom as Varley has noted lives in a somewhat grittier future than that of most of his human-diaspora stories (I believe Mattel, the doll line's manufacturer, took issue with the book's first title, in part driving the retitling, not that the second title isn't a better one for the collection...wish we could say the same for the new cover). Both Berkley editions were released to coincide with first releases of the latter two novels cited in the blurb between Varley's name and the book title on the cover below.

But I will grant it's better than the Orion/Futura UK paperback cover on the first collection:

Though even that is vastly better than what Futura did with The Barbie Murders in their edition:

For swank, and eyewash, here are the somewhat more dignified and better covers Varley has had on his collections since:

Though I will grant that none of the covers are absolutely brilliant, and this one particularly seems to me could've used another draft...

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

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FFB: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCH'S BREW edited by Henry Veit (Random House 1977)...as opposed to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCHES' BREW edited by the staff of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (Dell Books 1965)

August 11, 2017, 12:35 pm

≫ Next: FFM/B: New fantasy short fiction on the US newsstands & bookshelves, late 1976: ARIEL, Autumn 1976, edited by Thomas Durwood; CHACAL, Winter 1976, edited by Arnie Fenner and Byron Roark; FANTASTIC, November 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October, November and December 1976, edited by Edward Ferman; FLASHING SWORDS #3, edited by Lin Carter; WHISPERS, December 1976, edited by Stuart David Schiff; THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY STORIES, Volume 2, edited by Lin Carter; THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, Series 4, edited by Gerald W. Page

≪ Previous: FFB: THE BARBIE MURDERS aka PICNIC ON NEARSIDE by John Varley (Berkley 1980)

Among the manifold confusions that the branding of "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies has engendered, between their clutch of publishers (particularly Dell Books, which was in the "Hitchcock" anthology business the longest and mostest--and the books they didn't generate they often reprinted, the long Random House hardcovers frequently broken into two volumes each and sometimes with differing contents from the original anthologies and sometimes with new titles) and ghost-editors (it's not too clear that Hitchcock himself ever did much to edit any of the books credited to him; it's utterly clear that he didn't do much more than sign off in a general way on almost all of them, along with the magazine named for him and other similar products), one of those which can even vex such careful "Hitchcock" readers as Frank Babics and the folks at The Hitchcock Zone, much less all the others more casually engaged (such as ISFDB or GoodReads, and even WorldCat), is the similarity of titles between the last of the young readers' anthologies in the series Random House would publish, Henry Veit's 1977 Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, and the early (1965) entry in the long series of Dell Books paperback original volumes of stories drawn from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, edited anonymously but presumably by the editorial staff at AHMM. Hell, I tripped up on this when writing to George Kelley, who was trying to figure out the confusion these and other references had presented, in his post on both books a year or so back.

The known ghost-editors of Hitchcock anthologies include: Don Ward (long-term Dell editor who did "Hitchcock" anthologies from the years before the AH Presents: tv series began and branding went into overdrive, with both the Random House anthologies and AHMM beginning along with the show in 1956; notably, later, Ward edited Zane Grey's Western Magazine for Dell), Patricia Hitchcock aka O'Connell (his daughter), most diversely and importantly Robert Arthur (the one who also wrote radio scripts as well as for a wide range of fiction magazines, and who edited such magazines as The Mysterious Traveler keyed to one of his radio series), Harold Q. Masur (who succeeded Robert Arthur as editor of Random House's anthologies aimed at adults when Arthur died rather young in 1969), Peter Haining (primarily for UK paperback line the New English Library's Four Squar imprint), Muriel Fuller (a children's lit specialist who edited the first Random House YA, Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful, before Arthur took the series over till his death), and for the last two YA volumes, Veit.

So...I remember reading Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, already a bit nostalgically as I'd gone through Robert Arthur's YA Hitchcocks several years before, while sitting in detention at what was then Londonderry Junior High School one afternoon. I'd already read through some back issues of AHMM by that time, borrowed from the library or purchased at used book sales, but was a month or so away from buying my first new issue of AHMM (January 1978) and growing as addicted as I've been since to fiction magazines generally. Following the Robert Arthur YA model rather well (though it's arguably a bit less focused an anthology than most of the Arthur YAs, more like the Arthur and Masur Alfred Hitchcock Presents: adult anthologies thus, even given the witchy theme), it's a diverse and good collection of horror, fantasy and related stories mostly by notable writers in these fields, mixed in this case with a novel excerpt (from T. H. White's Arthurian fantasy The Sword in the Stone) and another novelty for the series, an abridged version of a story, this one probably an improvement on the original by the windy Sterling Lanier.

The contents of Witch's Brew (courtesy ISFDB and corrected with The FictionMags Index, since ISFDB incorrectly assumes several of the newer stories first appeared in the Dell anthology, which it mistakes for the first edition of this book):

The Wishing-Well • (1929) • short story by E. F. Benson
That Hell-Bound Train • (1958) • short story by Robert Bloch
As Gay As Cheese • (1956) • short story by Joan Aiken
Madame Mim • (1938) • excerpt by T. H. White (The Sword in the Stone, Chapter 6)
Blood Money • (1975) • short fiction by M. Timothy O'Keefe •

London Mystery Selection [v26, #107, December 1975] (35p, 128pp+, pb)

His Coat So Gay • [Brigadier Ffellowes] • (1970) • novelette by Sterling E. Lanier (1977 abridgment)
They'll Never Find You Now • (1974) • short story by Doreen Dugdale •

London Mystery Selection [v25, #100, March 1974] (25p, 128pp+, small digest)

The Widow Flynn's Apple Tree • (1943) • short fiction by Lord Dunsany
In the Cards • (1951) • short story by John Collier
Strangers in Town • (1959) • short story by Shirley Jackson
The Proof • (1953) • short story by John Moore (1907-1967)

Illustration from AH's Witch's Brew by Stephen Marchesi; scan courtesy The Hitchcock Zone.

Meanwhile, here is the Hitchcock Zone table of contents of Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, the 1965 AHMM best-of, with the pagination of the 1978 edition added by me, and original publication info from the FictionMags Index:

1965 first edition; not solely in paperback

6. Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost-written)

9. Premonition by Charles Mergendahl Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1957

19. A Shot from the Dark Night by Avram Davidson Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1958 (incorrectly cited in the book's acknowledgments as a 1960 story)

31. I Had a Hunch, and... by Talmage Powell (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1959 (incorrectly cited in the book as a 1960 story) (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #18 1984)
43. A Killing in the Market by Robert Bloch Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1958 (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #16 1983)

65. Gone as by Magic by Richard Hardwick Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1960

80. The Big Bajoor by Borden Deal Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1962 (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #13 1983)

91. The Gentle Miss Bluebeard by Nedra Tyre Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1959

104. The Guy that Laughs Last by Philip Tremont Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1960

112. Diet and Die by Wenzell Brown Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Sep 1962

121. Just for Kicks by Richard Marsten (Evan Hunter) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1958

132. Please Forgive Me by Henry Kane Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1959

150. A Crime Worthy of Me by Hal Dresner Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1962

169. When Buying a Fine Murder by Jack Ritchie Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1960

Richard Decker was the AHMM editor for much of 1964, succeeded by G. F. Foster, so one or the other is probably the editor of this volume unless the Dell Books editor made the selection...or some combination...

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #13, a Davis Publications magazine issue, reprinted by the Dial Press (a Dell hardcover imprint) as Alfred Hitchcock's Death-Reach

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #16 reprinted by the Dial Press as Alfred Hitchcock’s A Choice of Evils

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #18 reprinted by the Dial Press as Alfred Hitchcock's Crimewatch

I don't remember if I picked up my then-new 1978 third edition or the secondhand copy of the 1965 original first, but probably the former...I don't think I have a copy of the 1975 second edition from Dell:

The AHMM best-of is very much comparable, if certainly less diverse, a reading experience to the YA anthology of a dozen years earlier, with a similar mix of brilliant to decent writers; the classic Robert Bloch story in the Random House volume is certainly better than the good Bloch story in the AHMM book, but that's hardly a fair comparison, as "That Hell-Bound Train" is one of the key stories in Bloch's career. The ghosted introduction to the Dell book is rather funnier, one of the best in that series...one wonders who actually wrote it (perhaps devising editorials for her father was one of Patricia Hitchcock's duties in the office of the magazine).

For some reason, the Random House paperback editions of the YA volumes would often drop some of the stories, though I don't see that RH even ever offered a paperback reprint of Witch's Brew, though the UK saw both hardcover and paperback editions:

For more of today's books, much more promptly reviewed,
please see the gracious and patient Patti Abbott's blog.

↧

FFM/B: New fantasy short fiction on the US newsstands & bookshelves, late 1976: ARIEL, Autumn 1976, edited by Thomas Durwood; CHACAL, Winter 1976, edited by Arnie Fenner and Byron Roark; FANTASTIC, November 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October, November and December 1976, edited by Edward Ferman; FLASHING SWORDS #3, edited by Lin Carter; WHISPERS, December 1976, edited by Stuart David Schiff; THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY STORIES, Volume 2, edited by Lin Carter; THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, Series 4, edited by Gerald W. Page

August 18, 2017, 2:20 am

≫ Next: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES annual, edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner, from DAW Books, Sphere Books and Orbit Books, 1971-1994

≪ Previous: FFB: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCH'S BREW edited by Henry Veit (Random House 1977)...as opposed to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCHES' BREW edited by the staff of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE (Dell Books 1965)

Short fantasy fiction on the American racks, late 1976:

There were other magazines and other books publishing new fantasy fiction (including horror and often along with crime or science fiction), but in the last months of 1976, these are the eight magazines and anthology series offering the most new fiction in the field. Two were new, three were semi-professional or "little" magazines, two theoretically best of the year anthologies featuring some new fiction, one a specialized sword & sorcery anthology series, and three were magazines which had offered special Fritz Leiber issues (Fantastic in 1959, F&SF in 1969 and Whispers in 1979)...

F&SF and Fantastic were low-budget but professional magazines, both put together in the houses of their editors, Edward Ferman's F&SF from Cornwall, Connecticut and Ted White's Fantastic, with companion Amazing Science Fiction, in Falls Church, Virginia. Ferman also published his magazine, having inherited its concern, Mercury Press, from his father, Joseph Ferman; White was working for a very modest stipend from Ultimate Publications, which amounted to a retirement job for magazine veteran Sol Cohen and a diversified holding for his junior partner Arthur Bernhard, who published other low-budget magazines on his own. A few other newsstand fantasy-fiction magazines had briefly appeared on the newsstands to join Fantastic and F&SF in the 1970s, including Coven 13, purchased, retitled and edited by Gerald W. Page as Witchcraft and Sorcery in the early 1970s, a brief run of Worlds of Fantasy magazine from the Galaxy group of magazines (where Cohen had worked just before setting up Ultimate in 1965) and the first attempt to revive Weird Tales, in 1973-74 by Leo Margulies, at that point still trying to expand his line beyond the long-running Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. But Fantastic (since 1952) and F&SF (since 1949) had been the consistently-appearing magazines in the field, helped to continue in part by both usually featuring some science fiction in their mix. Even in these days of a resurgence in fantasy (Tolkien, Richard Adams, Richard Bach) and horror (Ira Levin, William Peter Blatty, Stephen King) fiction as potent commercial forces in book form, fantasy including some horror wasn't necessarily going to sell copies of a fiction magazine by itself in sustainable quantity...though F&SF was the only fantastic-fiction magazine to steadily increase its circulation throughout the '7os,

and Fantastic, which had with the previous issue gone from bimonthly to quarterly publications, saw issues which included authorized pastiches of Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, usually by Lin Carter or Carter with L. Sprague de Camp, do rather well in sales. And both Ferman and White's magazines were well-regarded, offering usually good to brilliant fiction on their modest budgets, perhaps in part due to the continuing lack of other markets that would pay more for such fiction, with rare exceptions in the cases of (sophisticated) general-interest and gendered "slick" magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Cavalier, Playboy, Redbook or Mademoiselle. There were little magazines, such as TriQuarterly, Antaeus or Ontario Review (and, in their own way, the then-relatively new

folkloric journal Parabola), which were open to some fantasy as well as part of their regular remit, and there had been a longstanding tradition of such little magazines within the fantastic-fiction community, as well...Stuart David Schiff's Whispers was becoming one of the most prominent of these, meant in its own way to be a sort of Weird Tales revival of its own, like Witchcraft and Sorcery before it devoted to a WT-like mix of horror and mostly dark fantasy.

Weirdbook and Fantasy and Terror, two of the other notable little magazines in the field, produced no issues in late '76, but two new entries did, both in their ways hoping to demonstrate that relatively elegant, large-format packaging could be achieved on even a modest budget: Arnie Fenner's Chacal and Thomas Durwood's Ariel. Both were largely but not exclusively devoted to epic fantasy, and both would continue for several issues over the next several years, Chacal soon changing its title to Shayol and Durwood from issue two throwing in with Betty and Ian Ballantine at their Peacock Press imprint and changing the title formally to Ariel: The Book of Fantasy.

When the Ballantines had sold their paperback company, Ballantine Books, completely to Random House a few years previously, Lin Carter had lost one of his regular gigs, editing their line of Adult Fantasy reissues and infrequent new books, some of the latter anthologies he would edit of short fiction. Happily for him, he picked up two new annual projects, an anthology series devoted to publishing new sword and sorcery fiction, Flashing Swords!, published by Dell Books, and editorship of a new best-of-the-year (mostly) reprint anthology for DAW Books, joining Donald A. Wollheim's sf annual and what had become, with its fourth volume, Gerald W. Page's The Year's Best Horror Stories (the players do tend to recur in various roles in the small world of fantasy-fiction publishing in this era). And because it remained a relatively small world of fantasy and horror short-fiction publishing, both the Carter Fantasy and the Page Horror annuals were allowed, as Wollheim didn't allow himself in his series, to publish original stories in the BOTY volumes, rather than depend solely on reprints from the year's books and magazines...even given the quality of much of what those newsstand and little magazines were publishing. Page, on balance, was a better editor

of his books (including his own original-fiction anthologies Nameless Places and Heroic Fantasy), but Carter's books have their charm, as well, and draw from more than their share of notable contributors and present some very good fiction, reprinted from the other publications noted here and others beyond. With both editors including the original stories mentioned previously, these annual series were important showcases for new as well as reprinted fantasy fiction.

Some contents and comments on them:

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v51 #4, #305, October 1976] ($1.00, 164pp, digest, cover by Chesley Bonestell)

6 • The Hertford Manuscript • [H. G. Wells' Time Machine Universe] • novelette by Richard Cowper
37 • Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar • poem by Ray Bradbury
38 • From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet • short story by Harlan Ellison
49 • From A to Z, In the Chocolate Alphabet: a Note on how this Story Came to be Written • essay by Harlan Ellison
52 • The Barrow • [Orsinia] • short story by Ursula K. Le Guin
60 • A Case of the Stubborns • short story by Robert Bloch
75 • Cartoon: "I think he's gone soft!" • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
76 • Films: Watch out for Falling Men (And Bluebirds) • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles [The Man Who Fell To Earth; The Blue Bird (1970s Russian film)]
79 • Hero's Moon • novelette by Marion Zimmer Bradley
99 • Where the Woodbine Twineth • [Southern Appalachia] • short story by Manly Wade Wellman
109 • Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright! • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
120 • The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine • [Schimmelhorn] • novella by Reginald Bretnor [as by R. Bretnor]

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v51 #5, #306, November 1976] ($1.00, 164pp, digest, cover by Ed Emsh)
Special Damon Knight Issue.

5 • I See You • short story by Damon Knight
17 • Damon Knight: An Appreciation • essay by Theodore Sturgeon
26 • Damon Knight Bibliography • essay by Vincent Miranda
29 • Cartoon: "... but then I realized in order to make it work I'd have to invent a socket and God knows what else." • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
32 • Saviourgate • [Ralph Bain] • short story by Russell Kirk
48 • Children of the Forest • novelette by David Drake
66 • Books (F&SF, November 1976) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Joanna Russ
66 • Review: The Clewiston Test by Kate Wilhelm • review by Joanna Russ
70 • Review: Millennium by Ben Bova • review by Joanna Russ
70 • Review: Starmother by Sydney J. Van Scyoc • review by Joanna Russ
71 • Review: Comet by Jane White • review by Joanna Russ
72 • Review: Cloned Lives by Pamela Sargent • review by Joanna Russ
72 • Review: Star Trek: The New Voyages by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath • review by Joanna Russ
74 • Moses • short story by Ken Wisman
95 • Films: See Logan Run • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles [Logan's Run]
98 • The Coronet • [Incorporated Knight] • short story by L. Sprague de Camp
109 • The Comet That Wasn't • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
120 • The Doge Whose Barque Was Worse Than His Bight • [Ralph von Wau Wau • 2] • novelette by Philip José Farmer [as by Jonathan Swift Somers, III]

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [v51 #6, #307, December 1976] ($1.00, 164pp, digest, cover by Ron Walotsky)

6 • Ghost of a Crown • [Brigadier Ffellowes] • novelette by Sterling E. Lanier
46 • Books (F&SF, December 1975) • [Books (F&SF)] • essay by Algis Budrys
46 • Review: The Best of John W. Campbell by John W. Campbell, Jr. • review by Algis Budrys
54 • Life Among the Anthropologists • short story by Raylyn Moore
62 • The 14 Gifts • poem by Vance Aandahl
64 • Aliens • novelette by Robert Thurston
97 • Cribbing • short story by Gary Jennings
105 • Films: Space 1939 • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles [Space: 1999]
109 • Cartoon: no caption • interior artwork by Gahan Wilson
110 • The System • short story by J. R. Bourne
124 • The Sea-Green Planet • [Asimov's Essays: F&SF] • essay by Isaac Asimov
135 • The Funhouse Effect • [Eight Worlds] • novelette by John Varley
158 • F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 14 • essay by uncredited
162 • Index to Volume 51, July-December, 1976 • [Index F&SF] • essay by uncredited

This is a very good set of months for F&SF, even if the December issue isn't quite up to the previous two, even with a fine Varley and a Jennings. The all-star issue features fine work from Bloch, Ellison, Le Guin, Wellman and Cowper...the Bretnor is one of the earlier annoying Schimmelhorn stories, where the misogyny will out rather intensely (Raylyn Moore, in the December issue, can usually be counted on for some loathing of her own gender as well). The Damon Knight story is pretty brilliant, and it's an otherwise good issue built around him, with a very fine Joanna Russ book essay. Meanwhile, the Budrys book essay in the December issue is definitely one of the highlights there. Beware Ray Bradbury poetry.

Fantastic [v25 #5, November 1976] ed. Ted White (Ultimate Publishing Co., Inc., $1.00, 132pp, digest, cover by Doug Beekman) Note: title on spine is “Fantastic Stories”

4 • Editorial (Fantastic, November 1976) • [Editorial (Fantastic)] • essay by Ted White
6 • The White Bull • novelette by Fred Saberhagen
7 • The White Bull • interior artwork by Stephen Fabian [as by Steve Fabian]
26 • Parker Frightened on a Tightrope • short story by Robert Thurston
27 • Parker Frightened on a Tightrope • interior artwork by Richard Olsen
40 • Tharquest and the Lamia Orbiquita • short story by Brian Lumley
40 • Tharquest and the Lamia Obriquita • interior artwork by Doug Beekman
52 • Black Moonlight • [Thongor] • novelette by Lin Carter
53 • Black Moonlight • interior artwork by Tony Gleeson
69 • Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers: White Wizard in Tweeds • [Literary Swordsmen & Sorcerers] • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
92 • The Forest of Andred • [Felimid] • novelette by Keith Taylor [as by Dennis More]
93 • The Forest of Andred • interior artwork by Stephen Fabian [as by Steve Fabian]
118 • Fantasy Books (Fantastic, November 1976) • [Fantasy Books (Fantastic)] • essay by Fritz Leiber
118 • Review: Supernatural Cats by Claire Necker • review by Fritz Leiber
119 • Review: From the Hells Beneath the Hells by Robert E. Howard • review by Fritz Leiber
119 • Review: The Personal Eye by Clarence John Laughlin • review by Fritz Leiber
120 • Review: Kings of Horror (Fantasy Reader #6) by Arthur Machen and Robert W. Chambers • review by Fritz Leiber
120 • Review: The Ancient Mysteries Reader by Peter Haining • review by Fritz Leiber
124 · According to You · [The Readers] · lc
_124 · [letter] · L. Sprague de Camp · lt
_125 · [letter] · Michael McNierney · lt
_125 · [letter] · Erwin S. Strauss · lt
_126 · [letter] · Al Schroeder, III · lt
_128 · [letter] · Duncan Thornton · lt
_129 · [letter] · Bruce Moffitt · lt

Fantastic was in the midst of its several-years' experiment of explicitly labeling itself a fantasy-only magazine, with a special emphasis on sword and sorcery fiction. I've liked Brian Lumley's "Tharquest" only marginally better than Carter's "Thongor" over the years...but the Leiber and de Camp columns are fine, the other fiction mostly engaging.

Whispers [#9, v3 #1, December 1976] ($2.00, 68pp+, octavo, cover by Stephen E. Fabian)

fep • Weirdisms: The Hermit of Tweedy • [Weirdisms] • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye
fep • Weirdisms: The Hermit of Tweedy • [Weirdisms] • essay by Lee Brown Coye
1 • Whispers (masthead) • (1974) • interior artwork by John Linton
1 • Whispers #9 • interior artwork by Denis Tiani
1 • Whispers #9 • interior artwork by Steve Riley
2 • Editorial (Whispers #9) • essay by Stuart David Schiff
5 • News (Whispers #9) • essay by Stuart David Schiff
12 • Berryhill • short story by R. A. Lafferty
14 • Berryhill • interior artwork by Andrew Smith (artist)
18 • MIke Garcia: A Folio • essay by Mike Garcia
19 • The Outisder • interior artwork by Mike Garcia
20 • The Dunwich Horror • interior artwork by Mike Garcia
21 • The Outisder [2] • interior artwork by Mike Garcia
22 • The Outisder [3] • interior artwork by Mike Garcia
23 • Pickman's Model • interior artwork by Mike Garcia
24 • HPL (Part 1 of 2) • [HPL: A Reminiscence] • essay by H. Warner Munn
28 • HPL • interior artwork by Alan Hunter
29 • The Box • short story by Lee Weinstein
34 • Whispers #9 • interior artwork by Marcus Boas
35 • Whispers #9 [2] • interior artwork by Marcus Boas
37 • The Writer • short story by Paul Bond
41 • The Writer • interior artwork by Alan Hunter
42 • Dark Winner • short story by William F. Nolan [as by William Nolan]
47 • Dark Winner • interior artwork by A. B. Cox
48 • Myth-Maker • essay by Dirk W. Mosig (variant of H. P. Lovecraft: Myth-Maker) [as by Professor Dirk Mosig]
55 • Myth-Maker • interior artwork by Alan Hunter
56 • Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly • short story by Dennis Etchison
59 • At the Bottom of the Garden • (1975) • short story by David Campton Armada Sci-Fi 1, ed. Richard Davis, London: Armada 1975
68 • Bad Baby • poem by Gahan Wilson
bep • Bad Baby • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye
bc • Whispers #9 • interior artwork by Lee Brown Coye

One of the last issues of Whispers before its companion Doubleday anthology series began...and one of the best of the magazine issues to be published, with the Etchison and Campton stories highly memorable. I'll need to refresh my memory of the Lafferty.

Chacal [v1 #1, Winter 1976] ($3.50, 56pp+, quarto, cover by Jeff Easley) Editors: Byron L. Roark, Arnie Fenner

ifc • Chacal #1 • interior artwork by Jon Gerung
2 • Cast & Credits (Chacal #1) • essay by uncredited
3 • Editorial B. S. (Chacal #1) • essay by Arnie Fenner
3 • Editorial B. S. (Chacal #1) • essay by Byron L. Roark
4 • The Road of Azrael • novelette by Robert E. Howard
4 • The Road of Azrael • interior artwork by Marcus Boas
15 • Kirk's Corner (Chacal #1) • interior artwork by Tim Kirk
16 • Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen • short story by Howard Waldrop
16 • Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen • interior artwork by John C. Tibbetts [as by John Tibbetts]
20 • Reflections on the Winter of My Soul: A Portfolio of Kane • interior artwork by Jeff Easley
24 • Interview: C. L. Moore Talks to Chacal • interview of C. L. Moore • interview by uncredited
24 • Chacal #1 • interior artwork by Nestor Redondo
32 • Chacal #1 • interior artwork by Frank Frazetta
33 • The Ballad of Singapore Nell • poem by Robert E. Howard
33 • The Ballad of Singapore Nell • interior artwork by Clyde Caldwell
34 • The Mistress of Windraven • short story by Tom Reamy
34 • The Mistress of Windhaven • interior artwork by David Ireland
37 • The End of Days (Part 1 of 2) • serial by David C. Smith
37 • The End of Days (Part 1 of 2) • interior artwork by Stephen Fabian [as by Steve Fabian]
38 • Futility ("Time races on and none can stay the tread...") (excerpt) • (1926) • poem by Robert E. Howard
46 • Hannes Bok: Artist and Man • essay by Ben P. Indick [as by Ben Indick]
46 • Hannes Bok: Artist and Man • interior artwork by Hannes Bok
50 • Sing a Last Song of Valdese • [Kane] • short story by Karl Edward Wagner
50 • Sing a Last Song of Valdese • interior artwork by Jeff Easley
55 • Crosswinds (Chacal #1) • essay by Dave McFerran
57 • U.S. News (Chacal #1) • essay by uncredited
58 • Chacal, Winter 1976 • interior artwork by Richard Corben

A bit light on fiction, but when the fiction includes a Tom Reamy, a Howard Waldrop, and one of the more brilliant Karl Edward Wagner "Kane" novelets, something is being done correctly...

Ariel, A Fantasy Magazine [v1, Autumn 1976] ($5.95, 80pp+, 9" x 12" s/b, cover by Richard Corben) Editors: Thomas Durwood

1 • Ariel #1 • interior artwork by Arnold
1 • Ariel #1 • interior artwork by Frank Frazetta
1 • Ariel #1 • interior artwork by Richard Corben
3 • Ariel #1 • interior artwork by Burne Hogarth
6 • A Hero Lives in Brooklyn • essay by Peter Jackson
11 • Frazetta Interview (Part I) • interview of Frank Frazetta • interview by Armand Eisen
22 • On Frazetta's Art • essay by Margaret Wilson-Cline
22 • On Frazetta's Art • interior artwork by Frank Frazetta
26 • On Frazetta's Art • interior artwork by Charles Robinson
27 • Sister Act • short story by Paul Darcy Boles [as by Paul Boles]
28 • Sister Act • interior artwork by Margaret Wilson-Cline
32 • The Symbol • poem by Robert E. Howard
33 • Den • (1973) • interior artwork by Richard Corben
49 • A Crown for a King • [Voices of the Night • 5] • poem by Robert E. Howard
50 • Those Fantastic Titles • essay by Charles Wooley
54 • The Fiend Within • short story by John Pocsik
54 • The Fiend Within • interior artwork by Arnold
60 • Hogarth's Last Tarzan • interview of Burne Hogarth • interview by Thomas Durwood
60 • Hogarth's Last Tarzan • interior artwork by Burne Hogarth
66 • Will the Real Bruce Wayne Please Stand Up? • essay by Tappan King
67 • Will the Real Bruce Wayne Please Stand Up? • short fiction by Bob Kane and Carmine Infantino and Neal Adams
71 • Bloodstar (An Excerpt) • interior artwork by Richard Corben
77 • Conan the Existential • essay by Charles Hoffman (variant of Conan the Existentialist 1974)
77 • Conan the Existential • interior artwork by Barry Windsor-Smith [as by Barry Smith]
bc • Ariel #1 • interior artwork by Frank Frazetta (variant of cover art for Conan of Cimmeria 1969

Note a certain similarity to the Chacal contents, only with more engagement with comics, notably but not exclusively Batman comics...

Flashing Swords! #3: Warriors and Wizards ed. Lin Carter (Dell 2579, Aug ’76, $1.25, 272pp, pb) Cover: Don Maitz

11 • Warriors and Wizards: The Introduction • essay by Lin Carter
17 • L. Sprague de Camp • essay by Lin Carter
19 • Two Yards of Dragon • [Incorporated Knight] • novelette by L. Sprague de Camp
61 • Fritz Leiber • essay by Lin Carter
63 • The Frost Monstreme • [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] • novelette by Fritz Leiber
111 • Andre Norton • essay by Lin Carter
113 • Spider Silk • novelette by Andre Norton
175 • Lin Carter • essay by Lin Carter
177 • The Curious Custom of the Turjan Seraad • [Amalrik the Mangod] • novelette by Lin Carter
217 • Avram Davidson • essay by Lin Carter
219 • Caravan to Illiel • novella by Avram Davidson

It was not possible for me to pass up a book with new fiction from Leiber and Davidson in 1978...

The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 2 ed. Lin Carter (DAW UY1248, Aug ’76, $1.25, 192pp, pb) Cover: George Barr

9 · The Year in Fantasy · Lin Carter · in
15 · The Demoness · Tanith Lee · ss *
28 · The Night of the Unicorn · Thomas Burnett Swann · ss Nameless Places, ed. Gerald W. Page, Arkham House 1975
34 · Cry Wolf [Thula] · Pat McIntosh · nv Anduril Jul 1975
51 · Under the Thumbs of the Gods [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] · Fritz Leiber · ss Fantastic Apr 1975
66 · The Guardian of the Vault · Paul Spencer · ss *
77 · The Lamp from Atlantis [Willy Newbury] · L. Sprague de Camp · ss F&SF Mar 1975, as “The Lamp”
95 · Xiurhn · Gary Myers · ss The House of the Worm 1975
99 · The City in the Jewel [Thongor] · Lin Carter · nv Fantastic Dec 1975
135 · In ’Ygiroth · Walter C. DeBill, Jr. · ss Nameless Places, ed. Gerald W. Page, Arkham House 1975
143 · The Scroll of Morloc · Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter · ss Fantastic Oct 1975
152 · Payment in Kind · Caradoc A. Cador · ss Gnostica Aug 1975
161 · Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard [Dr. Eszterhazy] · Avram Davidson · nv The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, Warner 1975
188 · The Year’s Best Fantasy Books · Lin Carter · bi

Note that Carter, not for the first nor last time, is kind enough to include two of his own stories (including one based on a Clark Ashton Smith fragment) among the reprinted Year's Best...the two new stories in this volume have no previous publication site specified.

The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series IV ed. Gerald W. Page (DAW 0-87997-263-7, Nov ’76, $1.25, 208pp, pb) Cover: Michael Whelan

7 · Introduction · Gerald W. Page · in
10 · Forever Stand the Stones · Joseph F. Pumilia · ss Jack the Knife, ed. Michel Parry, Mayflower 1975
29 · And Don’t Forget the One Red Rose · Avram Davidson · ss Playboy Sep 1975
35 · The Christmas Present · Ramsey Campbell · ss Nameless Places, ed. Gerald W. Page, Arkham House 1975; broadcast on BBC Radio Merseyside on December 24th, 1969.
42 · A Question of Guilt · Hal Clement · nv *
79 · The House on Stillcroft Street · Joseph Payne Brennan · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1975
87 · The Recrudescence of Geoffrey Marvell [E. Strickland] · G. N. Gabbard · ss *
99 · Something Had to Be Done · David Drake · ss F&SF Feb 1975
105 · Cottage Tenant · Frank Belknap Long · nv Fantastic Apr 1975
130 · The Man with the Aura · R. A. Lafferty · ss Witchcraft & Sorcery #10 1974
141 · White Wolf Calling · Charles L. Grant · ss F&SF Apr 1975
154 · Lifeguard · Arthur Byron Cover · ss Nameless Places, ed. Gerald W. Page, Arkham House 1975
166 · The Black Captain · H. Warner Munn · ss Moonbroth #21 1975
172 · The Glove · Fritz Leiber · ss Whispers Jun 1975
185 · No Way Home · Brian Lumley · ss F&SF Sep 1975
202 · The Lovecraft Controversy— Why? · E. Hoffmann Price · ar *

While Page includes none of his own fiction, I suppose one could "fault" him for digging three times into his own anthology and magazine, and for going back an extra year for the Witchcraft and Sorcery story (but a Lafferty deserves the showcase)...but that would be foolishness, seeing the diversity of the sources tapped for this BOTY, along with the two newly-published short stories and Price's essay...

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

↧

THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES annual, edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner, from DAW Books, Sphere Books and Orbit Books, 1971-1994

August 19, 2017, 6:10 am

≫ Next: Brian Aldiss, RIP

≪ Previous: FFM/B: New fantasy short fiction on the US newsstands & bookshelves, late 1976: ARIEL, Autumn 1976, edited by Thomas Durwood; CHACAL, Winter 1976, edited by Arnie Fenner and Byron Roark; FANTASTIC, November 1976, edited by Ted White; THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, October, November and December 1976, edited by Edward Ferman; FLASHING SWORDS #3, edited by Lin Carter; WHISPERS, December 1976, edited by Stuart David Schiff; THE YEAR'S BEST FANTASY STORIES, Volume 2, edited by Lin Carter; THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES, Series 4, edited by Gerald W. Page

Since I rather laboriously straightened out the sequencing of the Richard Davis volumes as they were reshuffled and reprinted in the US for Wikipedia (and amended the introductory paragraph), I thought I might as well reprint that entry here, to have a snapshot of it (it might've been fiddled with since I did so some months ago, haven't checked closely, but another reason to archive it here). (Laboriously as everything is laborious when it comes to bibliographic detail and even the relatively open and simple format of Wikipedia). I'll add the Horrorstory hardcover omnibus reprints of several volumes each shortly.

from the series of hardcover omnibus reprints of the annual

The Year's Best Horror Stories

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Year’s Best Horror Stories was a series of annual anthologies published by DAW Books in the U.S.from 1972 to 1994 under the successive editorships of Richard Davis from 1972 to 1975 (after a 1971-1973 series published by Sphere Books in the U.K.; the first volumes had the same contents, the U.S. second volume in 1974 drew stories from the second and third U.K. volumes, and the 1975 U.S. third volume was very different from the U.K's.; the U.S. third volume was published as a one-shot volume in the U.K. by Orbit Books in 1976), and of Gerald W. Page from 1976 to 1979, and Karl Edward Wagner from 1980 to 1994. The series was discontinued after Wagner's death. It was a companion to DAW’s The Annual World’s Best SF and The Year's Best Fantasy Stories, which performed a similar function for the science fiction and fantasy fields.

Each annual volume reprinted what in the opinion of the editor was the best horror short fiction appearing in the previous year. The series also aimed to discover and nurture new talent. It featured both occasionally recurring authors and writers new to the horror genre. Veterans among the contributing authors included Brian Lumley, Eddy C. Bertin, Kit Reed, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Tanith Lee; some of the relative newcomers to the field featured were Stephen King, Al Sarrantonio, Lisa Tuttle, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, David Drake, Juleen Brantingham, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

The series

Volumes edited by Richard Davis

1. The Year’s Best Horror Stories, editor Richard Davis, Sphere Books (UK) 1971; DAW Books (US) 1972

Double Whammy (1970), by Robert Bloch
The Sister City (1969), by Brian Lumley
When Morning Comes (1969), by Elizabeth Fancett
Prey (1969), by Richard Matheson
Winter (1969), by Kit Reed
Lucifer (1969), by E. C. Tubb
I Wonder What He Wanted (1971), by Eddy C. Bertin
Problem Child (1970), by Peter Oldale
The Scar (1969), by Ramsey Campbell
Warp (1968), by Ralph Norton
The Hate (1971), by Terri E. Pinckard
A Quiet Game (1970), by Celia Fremlin
After Nightfall (1970), by David A. Riley
Death's Door (1969), by Robert McNear

2 (UK). The Year’s Best Horror Stories II, editor Richard Davis, Sphere Books (UK) 1972.

Foreword by Christopher Lee
Thirst (1972), by Gerald W. Page
David's Worm (1971), by Brian Lumley
The Price of a Demon (1972), by Gary Brandner
The Knocker at the Portico (1971), by Basil Copper
The Throwaway Man (1970), by Stepan Chapman [as by Steve Chapman ]
The Woman With the Mauve Face (1972), by Rosemary Timperley
The Shadows of the Living (1970), by Ronald Blythe
The Animal Fair (1971), by Robert Bloch
Napier Court (1971), by Ramsey Campbell
Haunts of the Very Rich (1971) by T. K. Brown, III

3 (UK). The Year’s Best Horror Stories III, editor Richard Davis, Sphere Books (UK) 1973.

Pages from a Young Girl's Journal (1973), by Robert Aickman
The Long-Term Residents (1971), by Kit Pedler
The Mirror from Antiquity (1972), by Susanna Bates
Like Two White Spiders (1973), by Eddy C. Bertin (trans. of Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen 1971)
The Old Horns (1973), by Ramsey Campbell
Haggopian (1973), by Brian Lumley
The Recompensing of Albano Pizar (1973), by Basil Copper
Were-Creature (1971), by Kenneth Pemrooke
Events at Poroth Farm (1972), by T. E. D. Klein

2 (US). The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series II, editor Richard Davis, DAW Books (US) 1974

Foreword by Christopher Lee
Thirst (1972), by Gerald W. Page
David's Worm (1971), by Brian Lumley
The Price of a Demon (1972), by Gary Brandner
The Knocker at the Portico (1971), by Basil Copper
The Throwaway Man (1970), by Stepan Chapman [as by Steve Chapman ]
The Woman With the Mauve Face (1972), by Rosemary Timperley
The Shadows of the Living (1970), by Ronald Blythe
The Animal Fair (1971), by Robert Bloch
Napier Court (1971), by Ramsey Campbell
Haunts of the Very Rich (1971) by T. K. Brown, III
Like Two White Spiders (1973), by Eddy C. Bertin (trans. of Als Twee Grote Witte Spinnen 1971)
The Old Horns (1973), by Ramsey Campbell
Haggopian (1973), by Brian Lumley
The Recompensing of Albano Pizar (1973), by Basil Copper
Were-Creature (1971), by Kenneth Pemrooke
Events at Poroth Farm (1972), by T. E. D. Klein

3 (US). The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III, editor Richard Davis, DAW Books (US) 1975; Orbit Books (UK) 1976 as The First Orbit Book of Horror Stories

The Whimper of Whipped Dogs (1973), by Harlan Ellison
The Man in the Underpass (1975), by Ramsey Campbell
S.F. (1975), by T. E. D. Klein
Uncle Vlad (1973), by Clive Sinclair
Judas Story (1975), by Brian Stableford
The House of Cthulhu (1973), by Brian Lumley
Satanesque (1974), by Allan Weiss
Burger Creature (1973) by Stepan Chapman [as by Steve Chapman]
Wake Up Dead (1975), by Tim Stout
Forget-Me-Not (1975), by Bernard Taylor
Halloween Story (1972), by Gregory Fitz Gerald
Big, Wide, Wonderful World (1958), by Charles E. Fritch
The Taste of Your Love (1971), by Eddy C. Bertin (trans. of De Smaak van Jouw Liefde 1971)

Volumes edited by Gerald W. Page

4. The Year’s Best Horror Stories IV, editor Gerald W. Page, 1976.

Forever Stand The Stones (1975), by Joseph F. Pumilia
And Don't Forget the One Red Rose (1975), by Avram Davidson
Christmas Present (1975), by Ramsey Campbell
A Question of Guilt (1976), by Hal Clement
The House on Stillcroft Street (1975), by Joseph Payne Brennan
The Recrudescence of Geoffrey Marvell (1976), by G. N. Gabbard
Something Had to Be Done (1975), by David Drake
Cottage Tenant (1975), by Frank Belknap Long
The Man with the Aura (1974), by R. A. Lafferty
White Wolf Calling (1975), by Charles L. Grant
Lifeguard (1975), by Arthur Byron Cover
The Black Captain (1975), by H. Warner Munn
The Glove (1975), by Fritz Leiber
No Way Home (1975), by Brian Lumley
The Lovecraft Controversy-Why? (1976) essay by E. Hoffmann Price

5. The Year’s Best Horror Stories V, editor Gerald W. Page, 1977.

The Service (1976), by Jerry Sohl
Long Hollow Swamp (1976), by Joseph Payne Brennan
Sing a Last Song of Valdese (1976), by Karl Edward Wagner
Harold's Blues (1976), by Glen Singer
The Well (1977), by H. Warner Munn
A Most Unusual Murder (1976), by Robert Bloch
Huzdra (1977), by Tanith Lee
Shatterday (1975), by Harlan Ellison
Children of the Forest (1976), by David Drake
The Day It Rained Lizards (1977), by Arthur Byron Cover
Followers of the Dark Star (1976), by Robert Edmond Alter
When All the Children Call My Name (1977), by Charles L. Grant
Belsen Express (1975), by Fritz Leiber
Where the Woodbine Twineth (1976), by Manly Wade Wellman

6. The Year’s Best Horror Stories VI, editor Gerald W. Page, 1978.

At the Bottom of the Garden (1975), by David Campton
Screaming to Get Out (1977), by Janet Fox
Undertow (1977), by Karl Edward Wagner
I Can Hear the Dark (1978), by Dennis Etchison
Ever the Faith Endures (1978), by Manly Wade Wellman
The Horse Lord (1977), by Lisa Tuttle
Winter White (1978), by Tanith Lee
A Cobweb of Pulsing Veins (1977), by William Scott Home
Best of Luck, (1978), by David Drake
Children of the Corn (1977), by Stephen King
If Damon Comes (1978), by Charles L. Grant
Drawing In (1978), by Ramsey Campbell
Within the Walls of Tyre (1978), by Michael Bishop
There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding (1976), by Russell Kirk

7. The Year’s Best Horror Stories VII, editor Gerald W. Page, 1979.

The Pitch (1978), by Dennis Etchison
The Night of the Tiger (1978), by Stephen King
Amma (1978), by Charles R. Saunders
Chastel (1979), by Manly Wade Wellman
Sleeping Tiger (1978), by Tanith Lee
Intimately, With Rain (1978), by Janet Fox
The Secret (1966), by Jack Vance
Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose (1978), by Charles L. Grant
Divers Hands (1979), by Darrell Schweitzer
Heading Home (1978), by Ramsey Campbell
In the Arcade (1978), by Lisa Tuttle
Nemesis Place (1978), by David Drake
Collaborating (1978), by Michael Bishop
Marriage (1977), by Robert Aickman

Volumes edited by Karl Edward Wagner

8. The Year’s Best Horror Stories VIII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1980.

The Dead Line (1979), by Dennis Etchison
To Wake the Dead (1979), by Ramsey Campbell
In the Fourth Year of the War (1979), by Harlan Ellison
From the Lower Deep (1979), by Hugh B. Cave
The Baby-Sitter (1978), by Davis Grubb
The Well at the Half Cat (1979), by John Tibbets
My Beautiful Darkling (1979), by Eddy C. Bertin
A Serious Call (1979), by George Hay
Sheets (1979), by Alan Ryan
Billy Wolfe's Riding Spirit (1979), by Kevin A. Lyons
Lex Talionis (1979), by Russell Kirk
Entombed (1979), by Robert Keefe
A Fly One (1979), by Steve Sneyd
Needle Song (1979), by Charles L. Grant
All the Birds Come Home to Roost (1979), by Harlan Ellison
The Devil Behind You (1979), by Richard A. Moore

9. The Year’s Best Horror Stories IX, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1981.

The Monkey (1980), by Stephen King
The Gap (1980), by Ramsey Campbell
The Cats of Pere Lachaise (1980), by Neil Olonoff
The Propert Bequest (1980), by Basil A. Smith
On Call (1980), by Dennis Etchison
The Catacomb (1980), by Peter Shilston
Black Man with a Horn (1980), by T.E.D. Klein
The King (1980), by William Relling Jr.
Footsteps (1980), by Harlan Ellison
Without Rhyme or Reason (1980), by Peter Valentine Timlett

10. The Year’s Best Horror Stories X, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1982

Through the Walls (1978), by Ramsey Campbell
Touring (1981), by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann, and Michael Swanwick
Every Time You Say I Love You (1981), by Charles L. Grant
Wyntours (1980), by David G. Rowlands
The Dark Country (1981), by Dennis Etchison
Homecoming (1981), by Howard Goldsmith
Old Hobby Horse (1981), by A. F. Kidd
Firstborn (1981), by David Campton
Luna (1981), by G. W. Perriwils
Mind (1980), by Les Freeman
Competition (1981), by David Clayton Carrad
Egnaro (1981), by M. John Harrison
On 202 (1981), by Jeff Hecht
The Trick (1980), by Ramsey Campbell
Broken Glass (1981), by Harlan Ellison

11. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XI, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1983.

The Grab (1982), by Richard Laymon
The Show Goes On (1982), by Ramsey Campbell
The House at Evening (1982), by Frances Garfield
I Hae Dream'd a Dreary Dream (1981), by John Alfred Taylor
Deathtracks (1982), by Dennis Etchison
Come, Follow! (1982), by Sheila Hodgson
The Smell of Cherries (1982), by Jeffrey Goddin
A Posthumous Bequest (1982), by David Campton
Slippage (1982), by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
The Executor (1982), by David G. Rowlands
Mrs. Halfbooger's Basement (1982), by Lawrence C. Connolly
Rouse Him Not (1982), by Manly Wade Wellman
Spare the Child (1982), by Thomas F. Monteleone
The New Rays (1982), by M. John Harrison
Cruising (1982), by Donald Tyson
The Depths (1982), by Ramsey Campbell
Pumpkin Head (1982), by Al Sarrantonio

12. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1984.

Uncle Otto's Truck (1983), by Stephen King
3.47 AM (1983), by David Langford
Mistral (1983), by Jon Wynne-Tyson
Out of Africa (1983), by David Drake
The Wall-Painting (1983), by Roger Johnson
Keepsake (1983), by Vincent McHardy
Echoes (1983), by Lawrence C. Connolly
After-Images (1983), by Malcolm Edwards
The Ventriloquist's Daughter (1983), by Juleen Brantingham
Come to the Party (1983), by Frances Garfield
The Chair (1983), by Dennis Etchison
Names (1983), by Jane Yolen
The Attic (1983), by Billy Wolfenbarger
Just Waiting (1983), by Ramsey Campbell
One for the Horrors (1983), by David J. Schow
Elle Est Trois, (La Mort) (1983), by Tanith Lee
Spring-Fingered Jack (1983), by Susan Casper
The Flash! Kid (1983), by Scott Bradfield
The Man with Legs (1983), by Al Sarrantonio

13. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1985.

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut (1984), by Stephen King
Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1984), by Charles L. Grant
Catch Your Death (1984), by John Gordon
Dinner Party (1984), by Gardner Dozois
Tiger in the Snow (1984), by Daniel Wynn Barber
Watch the Birdie (1984), by Ramsey Campbell
Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You (1984), by David J. Schow
Hands with Long Fingers (1984), by Leslie Halliwell
Weird Tales (1984), by Fred Chappell
The Wardrobe (1984), by Jovan Panich
Angst for the Memories (1984), by Vincent McHardy
The Thing in the Bedroom (1984), by David Langford
Borderland (1984), by John Brizzolara
The Scarecrow (1984), by Roger Johnson
The End of the World (1984), by James B. Hemesath
Never Grow Up (1984), by John Gordon
Deadlights (1984), by Charles Wagner
Talking in the Dark (1984), by Dennis Etchison

14. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIV, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1986.

Penny Daye (1985), by Charles L. Grant
Dwindling (1985), by David B. Silva
Dead Men's Fingers (1985), by Phillip C. Heath
Dead Week (1985), by Leonard Carpenter
The Sneering (1985), by Ramsey Campbell
Bunny Didn't Tell Us (1985), by David J. Schow
Pinewood (1984), by Tanith Lee
The Night People (1985), by Michael Reaves
Ceremony (1985), by William F. Nolan
The Women in Black (1984), by Dennis Etchison
...Beside the Seaside, Beside the Sea... (1985), by Simon Clark
Mother's Day (1985), by Stephen F. Wilcox
Lava Tears (1985), by Vincent McHardy
Rapid Transit (1985), by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Weight of Zero (1985), by John Alfred Taylor
John's Return to Liverpool (1984), by Christopher Burns
In Late December, Before the Storm (1985), by Paul M. Sammon
Red Christmas (1985), by David Garnett
Too Far Behind Gradina (1985), by Steve Sneyd

15. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XV, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1987.

The Yougoslaves (1986), by Robert Bloch
Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back (1986), by Joe R. Lansdale
Apples (1986), by Ramsey Campbell
Dead White Women (1986), by William F. Wu
Crystal (1986), by Charles L. Grant
Retirement (1986), by Ron Leming
The Man Who Did Tricks With Glass (1986), by Ron Wolfe
Bird in a Wrought Iron Cage (1986), by John Alfred Taylor
The Olympic Runner (1986), by Dennis Etchison
Take the “A” Train (1986), by Wayne Allen Sallee
The Foggy, Foggy Dew (1986), by Joel Lane
The Godmother (1986), by Tina Rath
"Pale, Trembling Youth" (1986), by W. H. Pugmire & Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Red Light (1986), by David J. Schow
In the Hour Before Dawn (1986), by Brad Strickland
Necros (1986), by Brian Lumley
Tattoos (1986), by Jack M. Dann
Acquiring a Family (1986), by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

16. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVI, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1988.

Popsy (1987), by Stephen King
Neighbourhood Watch (1987), by Greg Egan
Wolf/Child (1987), by Jane Yolen
Everything to Live For (1987), by Charles L. Grant
Repossession (1987), by David Campton
Merry May (1987), by Ramsey Campbell
The Touch (1987), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Moving Day (1987), by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
La Nuit des Chiens (1987), by Leslie Halliwell
Echoes from the Abbey (1987), by Sheila Hodgson
Visitors (1987), by Jack Dann
The Bellfounder’s Wife (1987), by A. F. Kidd
The Scar (1987), by Dennis Etchison
Martyr Without Canon (1987), by T. Winter-Damon
The Thin People (1987), by Brian Lumley
Fat Face (1987), by Michael Shea

17. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1989.

Fruiting Bodies (1988), by Brian Lumley
Works of Art (1988), by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
She’s a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother (1988), by Harlan Ellison
The Resurrection Man (1988), by Ian Watson
Now and Again in Summer (1988), by Charles L. Grant
Call 666 (1988), by Dennis Etchison
The Great God Pan (1988), by M. John Harrison
What Dreams May Come (1988), by Brad Strickland
Regression (1988), by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
Souvenirs from a Damnation (1988), by Don Webb
Bleeding Between the Lines (1988), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Playing the Game (1988), by Ramsey Campbell
Lost Bodies (1988), by Ian Watson
Ours Now (1988), by Nicholas Royle
Prince of Flowers (1988), by Elizabeth Hand
The Daily Chernobyl (1988), by Robert Frazier
Snowman (1988), by Charles L. Grant
Nobody’s Perfect (1988), by Thomas F. Monteleone
Dead Air (1988), by Gregory Nicoll
Recrudescence (1988), by Leonard Carpenter

18. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1990.

Kaddish (1989), by Jack Dann
The Gravedigger's Tale (1989), by Simon Clark
Meeting the Author (1989), by Ramsey Campbell
Buckets (1989), by F. Paul Wilson
The Pit-Yakker (1989), by Brian Lumley
Mr. Sandman (1989), by Scott D. Yost
Renaissance (1989), by Chico Kidd
Lord of Infinite Diversions (1989), by T. Winter-Damon
Rail Rider (1989), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Archway (1989), by Nicholas Royle
The Confessional (1989), by Patrick McLeod
The Deliverer (1989), by Simon MacCulloch
Reflections (1989), by Jeffrey Goddin
Zombies for Jesus (1989), by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The Earth Wire (1989), by Joel Lane
Sponge and China Tea (1989), by D. F. Lewis
The Boy With the Bloodstained Mouth (1989), by W. H. Pugmire
On the Dark Road (1989), by Ian McDowell
Narcopolis (1989), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Nights in the City (1989), by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Return to the Mutant Rain Forest (1989), by Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier
The End of the Hunt (1989), by David Drake
The Motivation (1989), by David Langford
The Guide (1989), by Ramsey Campbell
The Horse of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever (1989), by M. John Harrison
Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy (1989), by David J. Schow

19. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XIX, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1991.

Speed Demons (1990), by Andrew J. Wilson
The Grief Condition (1990), by Conrad Hill
Firebird (1990), by J. L. Comeau
Life Sentences (1990), by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Trophies (1990), by Richard McMahan
Lord of the Creepies (1990), by Sean Brodrick
Mongrel (1990), by Steve Vernon
The Man Who Collected Barker (1990), by Kim Newman
Hide and Seek (1990), by D. F. Lewis
Walking After Midnight (1990), by C. S. Fuqua
The Hermit (1990), by Joey Froehlich
The Soldier (1990), by Roger Johnson
Books of Blurbs, Vol. 1 (1990), by Mike Newland
You're a Sick Man, Mr. Antwhistle (1990), by Robert Hood
Elfin Pipes of Northworld (1990), by David Drake
A Bar Called Charley's (1990), by Charles Ardai
Great Expectations (1990), by Kim Antieau
Custer at the Wheel (1990), by James B. Hemesath
Identity Crisis (1990), by Patrick McLeod
Negatives (1990), by Nicholas Royle
A Candle in the Sun (1990), by David Niall Wilson
The Worst Fog of the Year (1990), by Ramsey Campbell
I'll Give You Half-Scairt (1990), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Different Kinds of Dead, (1990), by Ed Gorman
Full Throttle (1990), by Philip Nutman

20. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XX, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1992.

Ma Qui (1991), by Alan Brennert
The Same in Any Language (1991), by Ramsey Campbell
Call Home (1991), by Dennis Etchison
A Scent of Roses (1991), by Jeffrey Goddin
Root Cellar (1991), by Nancy Kilpatrick
An Eye for an Eye (1991), by Michael A. Arnzen
The Picnickers (1991), by Brian Lumley
With the Wound Still Wet (1991), by Wayne Allen Sallee
My Giddy Aunt (1991), by D. F. Lewis
The Lodestone (1991), by Sheila Hodgson
Baseball Memories (1991), by Edo van Belkom
The Bacchae (1991), by Elizabeth Hand
Common Land (1991), by Joel Lane
An Invasion of Angels (1987), by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
The Sharps and Flats Guarantee (1991), by C. S. Fuqua
Medusa's Child (1991), by Kim Antieau
Wall of Masks (1991), by T. Winter-Damon
Moving Out (1991), by Nicholas Royle
Better Ways in a Wet Alley (1991), by Barb Hendee
Close to the Earth (1991), by Gregory Nicoll
Churches of Desire (1991), by Philip Nutman
Carven of Onyx (1991), by Ron Weighell

21. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1993.

The Limits of Fantasy (1992), by Ramsey Campbell
China Rose (1992), by Ron Weighell
The Outsider (1992), by Rick Kennett
Briar Rose (1992), by Kim Antieau
Mom SchooL (1992), by Rand Soellner
The Hyacinth Girl (1992), by Mary Ann Mitchell
Mind Games (1992), by Adam Meyer
Mama's Boy (1992), by C. S. Fuqua
The Shabbie People (1992), by Jeffrey Osier
The Ugly File (1992), by Ed Gorman
Eyes Like a Ghost's (1992), by Simon Clark
Fallen Idol (1992), by Lillian Csernica
And Some Are Missing (1992), by Joel Lane
Welsh Pepper (1992), by D. F. Lewis
Tracks (1992), by Nicholas Royle
Largesse (1992), by Mark McLaughlin
City in the Torrid Waste (1992), by T. Winter-Damon
Haunting Me Softly (1992), by H. Andrew Lynch
Spring Ahead, Fall Back (1992), by Michael A. Arnzen
Apotheosis (1992), by Carrie Richerson
Defining the Commonplace Sliver (1992), by Wayne Allen Sallee
Feeding the Masses (1992), by Yvonne Navarro
Sanctuary (1992), by Jeffrey Osier
The Devil's Advocate (1991), by Andrew C. Ferguson
Week Woman (1992), by Kim Newman
A Father's Gift (1992), by W. M. Shockley

22. The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII, editor Karl Edward Wagner, 1994.

The Ripper’s Tune (1993), by Gregory Nicoll
One Size Eats All (1993), by T.E.D. Klein
Resurrection (1991), by Adam Meyer
I Live to Wash Her (1993), by Joey Froehlich
A Little-Known Side of Elvis (1993), by Dennis Etchison
Perfect Days (1993), by Chet Williamson
See How They Run (1993), by Ramsey Campbell
Shots Downed, Officer Fired (1993), by Wayne Allen Sallee
David (1993), by Sean Doolittle
Portrait of a Pulp Writer (1993), by F. A. McMahan
Fish Harbor (1993), by Paul Pinn
Ridi Bobo (1993), by Robert Devereaux
Adroitly Wrapped (1993), by Mark McLaughlin
Thicker Than Water (1993), by Joel Lane
Memento Mori (1993), by Scott Thomas
The Blitz Spirit (1993), by Kim Newman
Companions (1993), by Del Stone, Jr.
Masquerade (1993), by Lillian Csernica
Price of the Flames (1993), by Deidra Cox
The Bone Garden (1993), by Conrad Williams
Ice Cream and Tombstones (1993), by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Salt Snake (1993), by Simon Clark
Lady’s Portrait, Executed in Archaic Colors (1993), by Charles M. Saplak
Lost Alleys (1993), by Jeffrey Thomas
Salustrade (1993), by D.F. Lewis
The Power of One (1993), by Nancy Kilpatrick
The Lions in the Desert (1993), by David Langford
Turning Thirty (1993), by Lisa Tuttle
Bloodletting (1993), by Kim Antieau
Flying Into Naples (1993), by Nicholas Royle
Under the Crust (1993), by Terry Lamsley

References

The Year's Best Horror Stories series listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
DAW Books website (and other sites)

↧

Brian Aldiss, RIP

August 21, 2017, 7:57 am

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

≪ Previous: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES annual, edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner, from DAW Books, Sphere Books and Orbit Books, 1971-1994

Unfortunately, Brian Aldiss's family have this morning confirmed his death, on Friday, his 92nd birthday.

Brian Aldiss‏ @brianaldiss (Twitter)

It is with great sadness we announce the death of our beloved father & grandfather. Brian died peacefully at home on his 92nd birthday ^TA

8:00 AM - 21 Aug 2017

And the full statement, courtesy the Brian Aldiss Fan Page on FaceBook:

Announcement of the death of Brian Aldiss O.B.E.

It is with sadness that we announce the death of Brian Wilson Aldiss O.B.E. author, artist and poet, at his home in Oxford in the early hours of Saturday 19th August 2017, aged 92. Author of British Science Fiction classics Non-stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, Aldiss's writing spanned genres and generations, bridging the gap between classic science fiction and contemporary literature with his Helliconia Trilogy and Thomas Squire Quartet. Aldiss was also an entertaining memoirist, notably basing his Horatio Stubbs saga on his wartime adventures in Burma and the Far East, as well as the autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye.

A friend and drinking companion of Kingsley Amis and correspondent with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldiss was a founding member of the Groucho Club in London and a judge on the 1981 Booker Prize. Awarded the Hugo Award for Science Fiction in 1962 and the Nebula Award in 1965, Aldiss's writings were well received by the critics and earned a strong following in the United States and in Britain as well as being widely translated into foreign languages. In later years his cultured world view and enduring curiosity found expression in the novels Harm and The Finches of Mars, dealing with the contradictions of the war against terror and the logistical difficulties of accommodating different terrestrial belief systems in space.

Among his considerable body of short fiction are the ‘Supertoys’ stories, adapted for film as A.I., on which Aldiss collaborated with Stanley Kubrick for over a decade before its completion by Steven Spielberg. His novel Frankenstein Unbound was made for screen by Roger Corman.

In 2000 Brian Aldiss was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Reading and received the title of Grandmaster from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was honoured by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Literature with the O.B.E. in the 2005 Birthday Honours list.

my post last night began:

'I quote to him something he wrote in 1990: “Just as the [literary] establishment is philistine about science, the bulk of the science-fiction readership is philistine about literature.” “Ha!” he cries gleefully, “offends both parties.” “Well done, Brian,” says Alison, rolling her eyes.'

--Brian Aldiss, reveling in telling what is too frequently the truth...though these days, it's more likely philistinism between contemporary-fiction writers and fantastic-fiction writers, aside from those who have frequently done both, such as Aldiss. This quotation from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/brian-aldiss-interview-much-snobbery-science-fiction/

Further links:

http://brianaldiss.co.uk

https://twitter.com/brianaldiss/status/899602175218855937

https://www.facebook.com/brianaldiss/?hc_location=ufi

http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/aldiss_brian_w

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?131

And my own thoughts about his work, from this morning on a discussion list which includes many of his friends, and simply long-term readers such as myself:

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" and "Full Sun" were my first Aldiss fictions, when I was 9yo and, with "Police State" fascinated by the concept of the hellish jail, a sort of water-wheel structure, the protagonist found himself in...probably introduced me to the concept of a police state, as well. And the reverse lycanthropy of "Full Sun" amused me. His and Harry Harrison's annual Best SF '71 was one of the first of my father's anthologies I read at about the same time, introducing me to Donald Barthelme as well as Barry N. Malzberg, Cynthia Ozick as well as Robert Sheckley, and gave me my first taste of non-cartoon Gahan Wilson...

The memoirs and critical writing joined my encounters with further fiction not long after.

Condolences to all who knew him.

Sweet Freedom links:
SF Horizons, his critical magazine

Hell's Cartographers, his anthology of memoirs

Best SF 1971 aka Best SF '71

All citations

↧

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

August 25, 2017, 1:29 pm

≫ Next: FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

≪ Previous: Brian Aldiss, RIP

This week's selection of books, magazine issues and a bit of shorter fiction that the reviewers feel has been unjustly (or occasionally justly) neglected in recent years or at least months...originator and regular host Patti Abbott will likely be back to gathering the links next week at this time, or a bit earlier!, and with luck without the technical glitches that slowed assembly this week. If I've missed your or someone else's review, please let me know, and many thanks to all the contributors and you readers.

Sergio Angelini: Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (translation: David Bellos)

Mark Baker: Gila Monster by Sandy Dengler

Yvette Banek: The Arrow Points to Murder by Frederica de Laguna

Bernadette: The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan

Les Blatt: The Penguin Pool Murder by Stuart Palmer

John Boston: Amazing: Fact and Science Fiction Stories, September 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)

Gilbert Colon: the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr

Bill Crider: What's New Pussycat? by Marvin H. Albert (novelization of the film);The Body Beautiful by Bill S. Ballinger;Silence by Thomas Perry

Scott Cupp: River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey

William Deeck: Heads You Live by "David Hume" (J. V. Turner)

Martin Edwards: The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolf Fisher

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: DC war comics April/May 1970;...and Jose Cruz: EC Comics, September 1953

Will Errickson: By Bizarre Hands by Joe R. Lansdale

Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1962, edited by Avram Davidson

Barry Gardner: The Black Mask Murders by William F. Nolan

John Grant: The Blonde Died Dancing by Kelley Roos; The Gilded Man by "Carter Dickson" (John Dickson Carr)

Rich Horton: Under the Rose by Frederic S. Isham

Jerry House: Motion Picture Comics #110 "When Worlds Collide", May 1952, edited by C. V. Woods

Nick Jones: the Revelation Space series by Alistair Reynolds

Tracy K: A Shock to the System by Simon Brett

George Kelley: Space Opera edited by Brian Aldiss

Margot Kinberg: Corridors of Death by Ruth Dudley Edwards

Rob Kitchin: Riptide by John Lawton

Richard Krauss: Suspense, Winter 1952, edited by Theodore Irwin

B. V. Lawson: A Time for Pirates by "Gavin Black" (Oswald Wynd)

Evan Lewis: The Boxer and the Spy by Robert B. Parker

Steve Lewis: Peregrine Dream by Ray Ring

Todd Mason: The Year's Best Horror Stories annual, serially edited by Richard Davis, Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner;Brian Aldiss, RIP

Neeru: Gossip to the Grave by John Burke

Scott Parker: "The Haunted Legion" by "Bradford" Scott (A. Leslie Scott)(Thrilling Western, May 1947)

Matt Paust: Lancelot by Walker Percy

Mildred Perkins: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

James Reasoner: The Last Notch by "Matthew Gant" (Arnold Hano)

Gerard Saylor: The Card Catalog by the Library of Congress; Once a Warrior by Anthony Neil Smith

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic: Stories of Imagination, September 1962, edited by Cele Goldsmith (Lalli)

Kerrie Smith: The Resistance Man by Martin Walker

Kevin Tipple: Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo

"TomKat": The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Tales by Edward D. Hoch

↧

FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

September 1, 2017, 3:44 am

≫ Next: Two Documents: 1992: Robert Bloch remonstrates with Joe Lansdale and David Webb for mocking Karen Finley; FANTASTIC absorbs FANTASTIC ADVENTURES in 1953

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

For fairly obvious reasons, there has been an interplay between First Amendment advocacy, bohemian writers, sexually explicit fiction and other publications, and the occasional publication of fairly serious work by houses that are better known for what was intentionally disposable literature, at best. Usually, whether we refer to such magazines as Evergreen Review or Playboy or Rogue or Eros, or to such publishers as Grove Press or Olympia Press, there was often some desire to package and present sophisticated material in every sense, even if the sophistication of some of that material was solely in the adult themes addressed by it. Thus, the Chicago-based New Classics House, which published such work as Kerry Thornley's assassination account Oswald, Albert Ellis's collection of essays Suppressed, and, in two volumes published in 1964 and '65, Paul Neimark's anthologies Taboo and Taboo 2. Not quite Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), nor DV's first form, the abortive Judith Merril anthology for Regency Books that Ellison had commissioned during his brief editorship at that paperback line (which was a corporate cousin to the more erotic Greenleaf Classics and other imprints), the Taboo volumes nonetheless managed to publish some work by notable writers, some of which remains otherwise unavailable...I'm not sure, but it's possible one or more of the stories in Taboo, at least, had been written with the Merril project in mind.

Taboo, for all the hype inherent in the subtitle "seven short stories that no publisher would touch from seven leading writers", reprints two of its stories from books published by mainline publishers, Charles Beaumont's "The Neighbors" (first in his 1960 Bantam Books collection Night Ride and Other Journeys) and Ray Russell's "Take a Deep Breath" (originally in a 1956 issue of George Fox's Chicago-based Playboy imitator Tiger, probably there as a salvage market since Russell was already an editor at Playboy by that time, but perhaps Hefner or A. C. Spectorsky didn't much care for the story; Russell included it in his 1961 Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories). I believe all the other stories were first published in this volume (index courtesy ISFDB) of 127pp.:

9 • Second Coming • short story by Robert Bloch
17 • The Neighbors • (1960) • short story by Charles Beaumont
31 • The Daddy of Them All • novelette by Nelson Algren
61 • Battle Without Banners • short story by Harlan Ellison
81 • Take a Deep Breath • (1956) • short story by Ray Russell
93 • Lie Still, Snow White • short story by Fritz Leiber
115 • The Lovers • short story by Paul Neimark [typo'd as by Paul Niemark]

As far as I've found so far, the Bloch and Neimark stories have not been reprinted anywhere else, nor the Algren at least under that title (though at least one study suggests that it's a rather different, more sardonic recasting of an incident in Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side). As the links above will demonstrate, the other stories original to the volume have since been reprinted in at least one collection of the authors' works. Neimark was a fairly prolific writer, perhaps best-known in his time as the as-told-to collaborator with Jesse Owens on several memoirs and related books by the Olympic athlete, and the author of the novel She Lives! (1972), which was adapted as one of the more popular US telefilms of the early 1970s. It's notable that all the writers involved had some strong ties to Chicago, and most had at least occasionally published in the men's magazines based in the city. Leiber's story includes an incident of incestuous necrophilia, so the tagline was perhaps not so very misleading as to the nature of the stories, if not the facts of their publication history.

Taboo 2 has a less stellar, if still good, lineup of writers, and, presumably as a result, is far easier to procure on the secondhand book market; the second volume includes four stories, one each by James T. Farrell, true crime writer Jay Nash, fellow prolific novelist Con Sellers (who, like Neimark, would make his biggest commercial splash in later years, with his novels set in and dealing with the run up to World War 2), and Neimark himself again--from the Miscellaneous Anthologies Index:

Taboo 2 ed. Anon. (New Classics House 7N760, 1965, 75¢, 91pp, pb)

7 · The Day They Cancelled Christmas · James T. Farrell · nt
33 · The Conversion · Paul G. Neimark · nt
45 · Two Triumphs · Jay Nash · nt
68 · Like the Best Wine · Con Sellers · nt

At least this one is held in local libraries nearby for me (interlibrary loan from mostly Chicagoland holdings for the first volume might be problematic, at best). Niemark published at least one other, nonfiction anthology with New Classics, 1964'sCrisis, which includes essays from Farrell and Algren mixed with considerations of the state of the world from L. Sprague de Camp, G. Harry Stine and L. G. Alexander, along with some verse from Carl Sandburg.

Given the importance of the contributors and the relative interest both the content and the writers in question might generate, I'm mildly surprised these two anthologies haven't been scanned and posted in such online resources as Open Library, but at least the physical copies are held by some libraries, and the books, like most published in any quantity, are available, if, again, it's far more likely one can buy a copy of 2 than the original. I would like to know what was so taboo about the Bloch story, and why it's not been included in any of his collections over the decades.

For more first-hand accounts of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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Two Documents: 1992: Robert Bloch remonstrates with Joe Lansdale and David Webb for mocking Karen Finley; FANTASTIC absorbs FANTASTIC ADVENTURES in 1953

September 4, 2017, 8:04 am

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≪ Previous: FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

Your horror/suspense and fantasy+ magazine artifacts for Labor Day.

Richard Chizmar shared some Cemetery Dancecorrespondence on FaceBook some years back. (Few spell "cemetery" correctly with consistency...I certainly have learned to look again when I type the word.)(Didn't hurt Chizmar's collaborator Stephen King any, though he might've had a point to make...)

And the house ad announcing that the semi-slick digest Fantastic would be absorbing its pulp predecessor Fantastic Adventures, marking the end of the run for an often engaging (and occasionally impressive, particularly around 1950) pulp title and no more attempt to make a sustained "prestige" magazine of Fantastic, which would go into a not-trying-too-hard slump till Cele Goldsmith, later Cele Lalli, and by the end of her career as a major editor of bridal magazines Cele Goldsmith Lalli, was given her first full-editor opportunity with Fantastic and Amazing Stories in 1959-65.

A rather typical, if star-studded, example of early FA (1941):

One of my favorite issues, 1950; the brilliant Leiber novella (apparently written for an purchased by Unknown Worlds, but in inventory when that magazine folded) is joined by pleasant stories by Robert Bloch, William McGivern and (though slight, I remember it as not bad) June Lurie:

Howard Browne was editing FA by 1950, having succeeded founding editor Ray Palmer; Browne was allowed to attempt a more sophisticated package with Fantastic, with one of Browne's best issues here:

The last FA:

Fantastic's first post merger issue...though it wouldn't start running on fumes for another year, with the August 1954 issue the first predominantly devoted to yard-goods fiction...

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books: redacted, technically scrambled post (corrected version above)

August 25, 2017, 10:00 am

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FFM: 1960 crime fiction magazines in English

September 7, 2017, 1:18 pm

≫ Next: FFB: some entry points: THE COMPLETE [sic] HUMOROUS SKETCHES AND TALES OF MARK TWAIN edited by Charles Neider (Doubleday 1961); STORIES OF MARK TWAIN, recorded by Walter Brennan and Brandon de Wilde (Caedmon Records 1956); OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE FANTASTICS/FANTASTIC LITERATURE by Michael Resnick (House of Collectibles 1976)

≪ Previous: Friday's "Forgotten" Books: redacted, technically scrambled post (corrected version above)

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Ellery Queen's Anthology
Bestseller Mystery Magazine
London Mystery Selection
John Creasey Mystery Magazine
Manhunt
The Saint Mystery Magazine
The Saint Mystery Library
Tightrope!
77 Sunset Strip
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine
Trapped Detective Story Magazine
Guilty Detective Story Magazine
Web Detective Stories
Keyhole Mystery Magazine
Shock
Double-Action Detective Magazine (on the cover)
Ed McBain's Mystery Book
Mystery Digest

...and most of them good or good enough...
Most issues pictured below cover-dated June 1960 or as close as could be found, courtesy the FictionMags Index.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Ellery Queen's Anthology

...EQMM was in 1960 a couple of years into its ownership by B. G. Davis and his still relatively new Davis Publications, founded in 1958 after he left Ziff-Davis, after the death of his cofounding partner William Ziff. Davis Publications would continue until 1992, buying Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1975, launching Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (shortened after the Dell purchase to the current Asimov's Science Fiction) in 1977, and buying Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in 1978; when losses on a personal finance magazine led Joel Davis, B. G. Davis's son and heir, to fold or sell his magazines to various other publishers, Dell Magazines bought the Davis fiction magazines, briefly added Louis L'Amour Western Magazine to their number, and then sold their magazine group to current publishers Penny Press in 1996.

Stefan Dziemianowicz thinks the cover model on this issue is Robert Arthur, and he might be right (the angle is rather different from those of the few other photographs of Arthur I've seen)--no mention is made in the magazine itself, if so. Frederic Dannay, the half of "Ellery Queen" the writing duo of cousins who edited the magazine from founding till his death, goes on to a tiresome extent about how EQMM didn't reprint much of anything from other crime-fiction magazines, in the course of introducing the Holly Roth story, a fairly recent (1957) reprint from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. James Holding's first story is in this issue, as well.

A hardbound presentation copy of the magazine issue

Meanwhile, one of the innovations Frederic Dannay and B. G. Davis introduced at Davis Publications in 1960 was the originally annual, then semi-annual Ellery Queen's Anthology magazine, where the (usually) reprinted contents in an issue would also be sold as a package to book publishers to be offered in hardcovers with more elaborate titles. Davis Publications would eventually extend this kind of companion magazine to its other fiction titles as they were acquired or launched.

Bestseller Mystery Magazine

EQMM had been purchased from Mercury Press, created to continue publishing The American Mercury, the skeptical right-wing politics and arts journal founded by H.L. Mencken. By 1960, Mercury Press had sold or folded all their magazines except The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which had just absorbed its short-lived companion magazine Venture Science Fiction) and Bestseller Mystery, which had absorbed Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, and became, along with a few Dashiell Hammett short story collections which Mercury Press would also offer in the early '60s, the last vestiges of their long-running newsstand/digest-sized paperback series Mercury Mysteries and Bestseller Mysteries, among others. (There had also been a short run of Bestsellers magazine in the mid-'40s, competing with Book Digest and similar magazines.)

This was the last Mercury Mystery:

London Mystery Selection
John Creasey Mystery Magazine

The two notable UK crime fiction magazines in 1960, along with UK editions of US titles, and I have a copy of one issue each I hope to read soon. The London magazine was notable for having a fair amount of horror fiction in its remit, along with the crime; the Creasey was a bit more purist but nearly as wide-ranging, and by 1960 published by Creasey himself. Ziff-Davis had published a facsimile US edition of London Mystery briefly in the mid 1950s, and Norman Kark continued to send some copies west on their own later; there had been a brief effort to import the Creasey to US newsstands in 1959.

Manhunt

The bloom was definitely off the rose for Manhunt by 1960...it, as now a bimonthly, hadn't been the bestselling crime-fiction magazine for some years by then, though it's a claim it would leave on its increasingly cheap-looking covers for at least another several years...but still publishing some good writers and some good fiction in 1960, which would be less true by its last issues in 1967. All of its stablemates had folded by the end of the '50s, though several of its downmarket imitators muddled on...as it slid downhill to join them.

The Saint Mystery Magazine
The Saint Mystery Library
Tightrope!
77 Sunset Strip

Great American Publications bought King-Size Publications' two notable fiction magazines, The Saint and Fantastic Universe, as part of an ambitious plan for expansion into fiction-magazine publishing in 1960, which also included their launch of a horror-fiction magazine, Fear!, and a US edition of the UK sf magazine New Worlds. Unfortunately, Great American's licensed television-series-tie-in pulp-sized magazines both folded quickly...though Tightrope! magazine lasted longer than the tv series did...and presumably under-capitalization led to the folding of nearly all their properties by 1961, aside from some sold to other publishers...only the Saint magazine managed to find a new publisher among the fiction titles, and the magazine ran till 1967 (as opposed to the library, in mass-market paperback format though issued as periodicals, which folded with GAP in 1960). Editor Hans Stefan Santesson had been editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club before hiring on at King-Size and continuing with The Saint till its end.

The last story in the Tightrope! issue is by Harlan Ellison (see the indices at the end of this post) and has a bad-taste twist ending that he has mentioned not being proud of.

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

Founded in 1956 in part to capitalize on the appearance of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents the same year, this was published for its first two decades by HSD Publications, then sold to Davis Publication who began publishing it in 1976. At HSD, Patricia Hitchcock, AH's daughter, usually had some title and presumably had a hand in to watch out for her father's interests. AHMM is the only other of these magazines to still be publishing, along wth its long-term stablemate EQMM; happily, the current publishers have long since given up on the often hideously-composed covers, mixed in with a few good ones, which featured some photograph or caricature of Hitchcock, the photos particularly leaning toward the poorly-cropped and awkwardly "cute"...nonetheless, AHMM rather comfortably outsold all the other cf magazines aside from EQMM, and briefly EQMM as well, over most of its run so far. A series of Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, similar to the EQA, began in 1977 at Davis.

Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine

Also founded in 1956, as Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine but going less formal by the next year, this one was also a durable title and throughout the '60s, '70s and early '80s other magazines would come and go, but the reliable US digests were EQMM (and EQA), AHMM and MSMM, till it finally folded in 1985. While all three magazines published a range of crime fiction, EQMM in the late '70s when I began reading new issues was still overseen by Frederic Dannay, and still leaned toward coziness and classic detection, though no little suspense and espionage fiction was in the mix; AHMM was a bit more noirish in general tone, certainly still prone to sardonic twist endings in its stories, while MSMM was the most hardboiled of the trio and the one least likely, till final editor Charles Fritch took over in the '80s, to mix a horror story in with straightforward crime fiction. Also notable were the levels of language policing...I noted that in 1978 someone could be "called an epithet" in EQMM, be "a stupid bastard" in AHMM, and could be a "fucking son of a bitch" in MSMM. Shayne founding publisher Leo Margulies had attempted to continue, introduce or revive a number of other fiction titles in his years with his publishing company Renown, but none other than MSMM lasted more than a few years, including mid -'60s The Man from UNCLE and The Girl from UNCLE magazines (and three Mike Shayne Annual issues in the early '70s, which reprinted short stories heavily from the UNCLE magazine back pages), the quasi-revival Zane Grey Western, Shell Scott and Charlie Chan Mystery Magazines and the first revival of Weird Tales, which Margulies had purchased the rights to in the course of buying, and publishing the last issues of, its stablemate Short Stories. Shayne, like most Margulies magazines, also paid less for fiction than the industry leaders, and the lead novellas attributed to "Brett Halliday" (originally Shayne-creator Davis Dresser) were usually written by a range of others, often younger writers such as James Reasoner. This, however, put it ahead of AHMM in transparency, where the editorials and blurbs attributed to Hitchcock were written exclusively by others.

Trapped Detective Story Magazine
Guilty Detective Story Magazine

Trapped and Guilty were also launched in 1956 (about three years after Manhunt came roaring onto the marketplace), and both were edited by W. W. Scott, whom Harlan Ellison has eulogized for his acumen at putting together intentionally rather déclassé magazines, but not bad ones (see Web Detective for bad), and particularly for Scott's ability to replace an author's story title with one more lurid, or, if that wasn't practically possible, at least with one that was punchier. Ellison was also rather happy with the magazines' mid-range pay rates and prompt payment, not always guaranteed to freelancers. While both magazines would continue till 1962, I'm guessing by the dressing-down visible between these two sequential covers and those which followed (fewer colors used, less-professional art) that the publishers were already feeling the pinch by early 1960.

Web Detective Stories

Peter Enfantino, in the course (for his critical magazine bare*bones) of reading through and rating each story in the short run of Web Detective, as it abruptly changed from Donald A. Wollheim's Saturn sf and fantasy magazine into DAW-less Saturn Web Detective, then Web Detective, and after a break re-emerged as Web Terror Stories--the last a full-on sadism-fiction magazine in the "shudder-pulp" tradition--didn't find too much to enjoy, even when, as in this issue, a young Edward Hoch has a story (though some of those stories by writers with talent were a bit of relief from the all-but-pure and clumsy sadism and nihilism that Web featured, as a very downmarket near-parody of Manhunt, striving to get a piece of the latter's audience as well as those who found the "men's sweat""true adventure" magazines a bit tame). Perhaps the worst sustained and admitted fiction magazine (as opposed to various "true"-story titles) of the late '50s and early '60s, after the Saturn/Wollheim issues. But certainly one that tried to find its niche audience (and Peter does find one 1961 issue surprisingly good--two issues before the conversion to "shudder"). Its publisher would also buy the next two magazines' titles (see below), and produce similarly atrocious magazines to sully the memory of their good, first short run.

A fairly typical example of what Peter found in reading the stories:

"You'll Die Laughing!" by Arnold Sherry * (2100 words)

Marvin, a decorated war hero, and his wife Donna are closing up the diner they own for the night when two thugs enter. The men beat Marvin and rape Donna repeatedly, all in the name of chuckles. A pointless, nasty exercise in torture and degradation. Brian De Palma would probably want to take out an option on this one.

Keyhole Mystery Magazine
Shock

Two rather good, even impressive, respectively crime fiction and horror/suspense magazines, though apparently undercapitalized and probably too wedded to cute gimmicks, such as Shock having no credited (human) editor and Keyhole featuring a cover story about singer Fabian Forte as a detective. Both were apparently edited by writer Dan Roberts. And both titles folded after three 1960 issues, only to be "revived" in traduced form as sadistic sex-crime digests, with slightly revised titles, in 1962, when they didn't last too long, either.

Double-Action Detective Magazine

Robert A. W. Lowndes was reaching the end of his long tenure at Columbia Publications in 1960, after nearly twenty years of editing all sorts of fiction magazines, pulps and digests, western, sports, sf and fantasy (those the closest to his primary interest) and crime fiction...and this was the last issue of their last cf title. Edward D. Hoch had been one of Lowndes's two big 1950s "discoveries" as an editor--the other had been Carol Emshwiller--and Hoch never forgot, and contributed stories to Lowndes's new, no-budget Health Knowledge Publications magazines in the '60s (which would also publish the first professional-magazine stories by Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson, among others) as well as contributing stories about his Simon Ark series character, which were offered as the star feature in the last issues of Double-Action. The next closest to major among the writers in this issue is Basil Wells, not too close, or a pseudonymous reprint by fellow ex-Futurian (along with Lowndes) Walter Kubilius--and one does wonder how many of the contributors might be Lowndes himself in disguise. (The last issue of Lowndes's Columbia magazine Science Fiction is somewhat more impressively staffed...thus:

Science Fiction Stories [v11 #2, May 1960] (35¢, 132pp, digest, cover by Freas)

6 · The Corianis Disaster · Murray Leinster · na
55 · Make It New · Robert A. W. Lowndes · ed
62 · This Year and No Other · David Grinnell (Donald Wollheim) · ss
72 · The Living Urn · Kate Wilhelm · ss
81 · “The Principle,” Revisited · A. Bertram Chandler · ar The Log May/Jun 1954, as “Principle II”
84 · Travelers Far and Wee · Donald E. Westlake · ss
88 · Parodies Tossed: Immortality C.O.D. · Bret Hooper · pm
92 · The Alien Vibration · Hannes Bok · ss Future Combined with Science Fiction Feb 1942
107 · The Last Word · [The Readers] · lc
130 · Reader’s Preference Coupon · [Misc.] · ms)

Ed McBain's Mystery Book

One wonders why this magazine didn't do better than it did, seeing only three undated issues in two years...given the talent boasted of in each issue, and the sharpest interior design of any of these magazines, I have to wonder if it simply was a matter of publisher Pocket Books not being sure they wanted to be in the magazine business...and if not, why start one, and so half-heartedly support it? Unlike some of the other featured titles here, I know where my copies of the first two (1960) issues are, and hope to read them soon and perhaps have more to say.

Mystery Digest

While I'm not at all sure where I set down my short stack of this relatively eccentric digest, here caught in the middle of its 1957-63 run, and featuring essentially no Big Names nor famous stories once we're past this issue's Wilkie Collins reprint (one of several over the years). Another case where I hope to have more to say later...I will note that Donald Westlake did contribute "Richard Stark"-signed stories to both earlier and later issues...wonder if this magazine was a better market for him than the more obviously "hardboiled" magazines...

Have any thoughts you'd like to share about this class of '60? Which, if any, magazines did I foolishly overlook?

For more of today's books and perhaps other non-books surveyed, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

The indices for the June bugs above:

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [v35 #6, #199, June 1960] ed. Ellery Queen (Davis Publications, Inc., 35¢, 130pp, digest, cover by Harold Bruder)
Details supplied by Douglas Greene.

5 · The Seven Deadly Virtues · Stanley Ellin · ss
12 · The Kidnaped Prime Minister [Hercule Poirot] · Agatha Christie · nv The Sketch Apr 25 1923
26 · Mystery Hardcovers of the Month · [Various] · br
27 · Something Has to Break · Norman Daniels · ss
38 · The Six Mistakes · Holly Roth · ss Argosy (UK) Oct 1957, as “The Fourth Man”
55 · Best Mysteries of the Month · Anthony Boucher · br
56 · Cui Bono · Stephen Barr · ss
61 · The Instrument of Darkness [Uncle Abner] · Melville Davisson Post · ss The Red Book Magazine Jun 1916, as “The Adopted Daughter”
73 · Death in Guatemala · Frances Crane · ss
79 · In the Fog (Conclusion) · Richard Harding Davis · na R.H. Russell 1901
91 · Mystery Paperbacks of the Month · [Various] · br
93 · The Treasure of Pachacamac · James Holding · nv; in EQMM’s “Department of First Stories”.
110 · Wally and the Three-Dollar Bill [Wally Watts] · Paul W. Fairman · ss
116 · Larceny and Old Lace · Robert Arthur · ss
130 · Index to Volume 35—January-June 1960 · Anon. · ix

Ellery Queen’s Anthology [#1, 1960] ed. Ellery Queen (Davis, $1.00, 320pp, digest)

7 · Murder in Manhattan · Hugh Pentecost · nv The American Magazine Feb 1952
37 · The Mystery of the Blue Jar · Agatha Christie · ss The Grand Magazine Jul 1924
50 · The Case of the Irate Witness [Perry Mason] · Erle Stanley Gardner · ss Collier’s Jan 17 1953
62 · Strictly Diplomatic [Colonel March] · John Dickson Carr · ss The Strand Magazine Dec 1939, as by Carter Dickson
74 · The Hunting of Hemingway [Nick & Dave Glennan] · MacKinlay Kantor · ss Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 21 1934
90 · The Man Who Knew How [Pender] · Dorothy L. Sayers · ss Harper’s Bazaar Feb 1932
100 · Little Boy Lost · Q. Patrick · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1947
118 · The Good Prospect [McCann] · Thomas Walsh · ss Collier’s Feb 20 1937
129 · Don’t Look Behind You · Fredric Brown · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1947
138 · The Dog in the Orchard · Mary Roberts Rinehart · ss Cosmopolitan Sep 1940
148 · Rehearsal for Murder · Ben Hecht · ss 1951, as “Guilty!”
156 · Murder Is Everybody’s Business · Helen McCloy · nv 1951
189 · The Yellow Jumper [Department of Dead Ends] · Roy Vickers · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1946
203 · Death on Christmas Eve · Stanley Ellin · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1950
210 · The Cat’s-Eye · John van Druten · ss The Atlantic Monthly Mar 1945
221 · Ride with the Wind [Dr. Colin Starr] · Rufus King · ss Redbook Magazine Apr 1941, as “The Case of the Jet Black Sheep”
235 · They Never Get Caught · Margery Allingham · ss Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine Nov 1934
250 · Pale Blue Nightgown · Louis Golding · ss The Story-Teller Oct 1936
257 · Invited Witness · George Harmon Coxe · ss Dime Mystery Book Magazine Aug 1933
262 · All the Way Home [Ellen Harkness] · Charlotte Armstrong · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1951
273 · The Lonely Bride [Ellery Queen] · Ellery Queen · ss This Week Dec 4 1949, as “The Lady Couldn’t Explain”
277 · The Happy Couple · W. Somerset Maugham · ss Cassell’s Magazine May 1908
287 · The Cop Killer [Nero Wolfe & Archie Goodwin] · Rex Stout · na The American Magazine Feb 1951

Bestseller Mystery Magazine [v2 #4, #222, July 1960] (35¢, digest)

Sting of Death · Shelley Smith · n. (r)
Skin-Deep · Robert Bloch · ss
Emergency Call · William G. Bogart · ss

Bestsellers [#5, August 1946] (Mercury Publications, Inc., digest s/s, cover by George Salter)
Details supplied by Joe Sokola.

The Lost Weekend · Charles Jackson · n. Farrar & Rinehart 1944; abridged.
Sub Rosa · Stewart Alsop & Thomas Braden · nb Reynal 1946; abridged.
Modern Women in Love · ed. Christina Stead & William James Blake · an Dryden Press 1945; abridged.

A Man Named Thin and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett, edited and with an introduction by Frederic Dannay as Ellery Queen
Series Title: Mercury Mysteries, no. 233 (1963).

* A Man Named Thin [Robin Thin], (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1961
* Wages of Crime, (ss) Brief Stories Feb 1923, as “The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody” by Peter Collinson; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1957
* The Gatewood Caper [The Continental Op], (ss) The Black Mask Oct 15 1923, as “Crooked Souls”; .Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1953
* The Barber and His Wife, (ss) Brief Stories Dec 1922, as by Peter Collinson; .Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1958
* Itchy the Debonair, (ss) Brief Stories Jan 1924, as “Itchy”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1958
* The Second-Story Angel, (ss) The Black Mask Nov 15 1923
* In the Morgue, (vi) Saucy Stories Oct 15 1923, as “The Dimple”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1959
* When Luck’s Running Good, (nv) Action Stories Nov 1923, as “Laughing Masks” by Peter Collinson; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1959

London Mystery Selection [#45, June 1960] (2/6d, 128pp+, digest)

7 · Metamorphosis · David Warner · ss
11 · No Vacancies · Leo Berne · vi
14 · Oasis Incident · L. P. Davies · ss
25 · The Vengeance of a Queen · A. E. Murch · ar
30 · The Wall of Time · Leslie Vardre · ss
38 · Dream of Death · A. G. K. Leonard · vi
41 · Dead Alibi · George Newcombe · ss
48 · Retribution · Richard Harriman Russ · vi
50 · The Case of the Fearful Perfume [Sollius (The Slave Detective)] · Wallace Nichols · ss
57 · The Wrong One · Morgan Evans · ss
63 · The Devil’s Violin · Euphemia Munro · ss
72 · Tiny, Willing Hands · Harry Mansfield · ss
83 · “Smith, Mark II” · Jonathan Wood · ss
90 · Davey · Robert Blake · ss
100 · The Idol of Baked Clay · Rowland Welch · ss
108 · Delayed Drop · Jonathan Wood · vi
111 · The Development of the Detective Novel [Part 7 of 7] · A. E. Murch · ar Peter Owen Ltd. 1958

John Creasey Mystery Magazine [v3 #9, June 1960] ed. John Creasey (2/6d, 128pp, digest)

ifc. · Stop This Crime! · John Creasey · ed
4 · Death Waiting · R. W. Warner · vi
6 · Gaming Bucks and Gambling Dames · Hoole Jackson · ts
12 · Mountain of the Blind [Part 2 of 4] · John Creasey · n. Star Weekly Nov 21 1959
33 · Devil’s Island Man [Part 2 of 2] · Frederick Oughton · ar Breakout, Frederick Oughton, London: Neville Spearman 1959
44 · The Lady in Number 19 · Sheila Richardson · ss
51 · Looks at New Books · John Creasey · br
54 · Great Carson · Lewis Broad · ar Advocates of the Golden Age, Lewis Broad, London: John Long 1958
70 · On the Run · John Francis · ss
84 · My First Secret Agent [Did It Happen?] · Eric Ambler · ss
90 · Murder at Bishops Runt · Roy Vickers · nv
112 · Thief at War · Donald MacKenzie · ar Fugitives, Donald MacKenzie, Elek Books 1955

Manhunt [v8 #3, June 1960] ed. John Underwood (Flying Eagle Publications, Inc., 35¢, 128pp+, digest)
Details supplied by Jerry Boyajian.

1 · Right Thing to Do · Robert Leon · ss; illustrated by G. A.
10 · Pics for Sale · Ben Satterfield · vi; illustrated by G. A.
14 · A Question of Values · C. L. Sweeney, Jr. · vi; illustrated by Highton
18 · Bodyguard · Richard Hardwick · ss; illustrated by G. A.
30 · The Faithless Woman · Carroll Mayers · vi; illustrated by G. A.
34 · Mis-Fire · Norman Struber · ss
51 · Set-Up for Two · Norman Anthony · na
106 · Nightmare · James Walz · vi; illustrated by G. A.
111 · Harmless · Mildred Jordan Brooks · ss
118 · The Loving Victim · Lotte Belle Davis · ss

The Saint Mystery Magazine [v13 #6, June 1960] ed. Hans Stefan Santesson (Great American Publications, Inc., 35¢, 128pp+, digest)

11 · The Saint and the Damsel in Distress [Simon Templar (The Saint)] · Leslie Charteris · ss Empire News Nov 19 1933, as “The Kidnapping of the Fickle Financier”
23 · Cross-Trails [Sheriff Clint Hawkins] · Lewis Kilpatrick · ss
29 · Point of Honor · George Fielding Eliot · ss
47 · Mr. Sherlock Holmes: Scholar and Scientist · Earl C. Kubicek · ar
55 · The Adventure of the Cloverdale Kennels [Solar Pons] · August Derleth · ss
73 · The Man with Two Shadows · Wenzell Brown · nv
102 · Dead or Alive · Evelyn Paige · ss
110 · Conspirators’ Paradise · Jean-Etienne St. Lo · ar
112 · Detective School · John L. Hayward · ss
121 · The Man Who Found the Body · Avram Davidson · ss

The Saint Mystery Library [#13 (#130), March 1960] ed. Leslie Charteris (Great American Publications, Inc., 35¢, pb)

Death Walks in Marble Halls · Lawrence G. Blochman · na The American Magazine Sep 1942
Premiere of Murder · Fredric Brown · nv The Saint Detective Magazine May 1955
Mimic Murder · Cornell Woolrich · ss Black Mask Jun 1937
Night of Gaiety · Robert Andrea · ss
The Seven New Saints · John Jakes · ss

Tightrope! [v1 #3, June 1960] (35¢, quarto)

Swing That Tightrope [Undercover Cop “Nick”] · Robert H. Brown · ss
The Clouded Venus [Simon Ark] · Edward D. Hoch · ss
Broken Alibi · John Boland · ss
Fish for a Murderer · Al James · ss
Friday Night · Donald Westlake · ss
The Assassins · Bob Bristow · ss; possibly “The Assassin”.
Dime a Death · Dave Leigh · ss
The Unnatural Cause · Arthur Porges · ss
Only Death Can Stop It · Harlan Ellison · ss

77 Sunset Strip [v1 #1, July 1960] ed. Jonas Carter (Great American Publications, Inc., 35¢, 92pp, quarto)
Details taken from Table of Contents.

8 · Elephant Blues [77 Sunset Strip] · Ben Christopher · ss
22 · Hidden Clue of Mei Wong · Charlotte & Dan Ross · ss
26 · Dear Murderer · C. B. Gilford · ss
38 · Strictly Off the Record · Tom Stevenson · ss
49 · The Alibi · Robert Andrea · ss
52 · Crime Student · Al James · ss
58 · Twice Temptation · Talmage Powell · ss
63 · The One of Nails · John Jakes · ss
68 · Lead to Murder · Lois Eby · ss

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine [v5 #6, June 1960] ed. William Manners (H.S.D. Publications, 35¢, 128pp+, digest)

4 · Spitting Image · Mann Rubin · ss
13 · Murder a la Davy Jones · Richard Hardwick · ss
26 · An Accident in Honiaria · James Holding · ss
42 · Half in Love with Death · C. B. Gilford · ss
54 · The Butler Who Didn’t Do It [John J. Malone] · Craig Rice · ss
63 · Granny’s Birthday · Fredric Brown · vi
66 · A Mind Burns Slowly · De Forbes · ss
76 · The Case of the Helpless Man · Douglas Farr · ss
86 · Joke on a Nice Old Lady · Henry Slesar · ss
91 · Death of Another Salesman · Donald Honig · ss
100 · The Golden Ghost · Donald Martin · ss
110 · When Buying a Fine Murder · Jack Ritchie · nv

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [v7 #1, June 1960] (35¢, digest)

Murderers Make Mistakes [Johnny Lucas] · Peter Cagney · na
The Debt of Death [Mike Shayne] · Brett Halliday (ghost written by Richard Deming) · nv
Graveside Rendezvous · Jonathan Breck · ss
A Private Eyeful · Herbert Harris · ss
Inviting Trouble · Charlotte & Dan Ross · ss
One for Old Times · Harry Dane · ss

Trapped Detective Story Magazine [v4 #6, May 1960] ed. W. W. Scott (Headline Publications Inc., 35¢, 128pp, digest)
Details supplied by Rodney Walters.

Girl in the Thunderbird · Dan Malcolm · ss
Real Tough Break · Dirk Clinton · ss
Kill for Your Woman · Art Serra · ss
Motel Girl · Mark Ryan · ss
He Won’t Talk · Robert Plate · ss
The Violent Impulse · Henry H. Guild · ss
Hard-Hearted Woman · Eric Rodman · ss; listed as by CHarles Sanders, Jr. on the cover.
Thanks for Killing Me · Jay Richards · ss
Psycho Killer · Ed Chase · ss
I’m Not Chicken · Charles D. Hammer · nv
All No Good Punks · Harrison Smith · nv

Guilty Detective Story Magazine [v4 #6, June 1960]

ed. W. W. Scott

(35¢, digest)

“I’m Not Chicken” by Dan Malcolm, “Motel Girl” by Mark Ryan" and “Thanks for Killing Me” by Richards are listed on the cover, but all appeared in the May 1960 issue of Trapped Detective Story Magazine (the first as by Charles D. Hammer).

Hot-Rod Hellcats · Alex Merriman · ss
A Hell of a Night · Leslie G. Sabo · ss
The Vandals · Dick Ellis · ss
Too Lovely to Live · Ed Chase · ss
Boy with a Gun · Mark Ryan · ss
See You in Hell · Dirk Clinton · ss
Cash in Advance for Murder · Henry H. Guild · ss
Fresh Out of Prison · Donald Westlake · ss
Convention Girl · Charles D. Hammer · ss
Motorcycle Murder · Ron Garret · ss

Web Detective Stories [v3 #1, June 1960] (35¢, 112pp+, digest)
Details taken from Table of Contents.

1 · You Can’t Escape! · Bob Shields · ss
9 · The Glory Kids! · John Block · ss
14 · Die Hard, Lovely Cheat! · Greg Burns · ss
25 · Sisters of Slaughter! · Edward D. Hoch · nv
38 · Passion Fears No Peril! · Frank Cannon · ss
51 · The Devil Is a Darling! · Hal Crosby · nv
65 · Mask of Hate! · Jay Richards · ss
72 · Lust Steals the Scene! · Art Crockett · ss
84 · You’ll Die Laughing! · Jack Kavanagh · ss
91 · Terror Trail! · Grover Brinkman · ss
99 · Madness Claims a Mate! · Bill Ryder · nv

Keyhole Mystery Magazine [v1 #1, April 1960] ed. Dan Roberts (35¢, 130pp, digest, cover by Ed Emsh)
Details supplied by Tom Lesser.

4 · The Great Elvis Presley Mystery · Will Folke & Dick Ashbaugh · ss
17 · Full Circle · Miriam Allen deFord · ss
28 · Mr. Lupescu · Anthony Boucher · ss Weird Tales Sep 1945; Author’s Choice.
33 · Cinderella and the Mob · Cornell Woolrich · nv Argosy Jun 22 1940
59 · Swan Song · Ken Murray · ss
66 · The Mugger · Harold Straubing · ss
68 · Mother Knows Best · Avram Davidson · ss
80 · The North Star Caper · Norman Katkov · ss
93 · Peeping Tom’s Scrapbook · Charles Boeckman · ss
98 · Murder on El Capitan · Hayden Howard · ss
114 · The Dog That Wouldn’t Talk · Lawrence G. Blochman · ss 1941; For Love or Money, Mystery Writers of America, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1957

Shock—The Magazine of Terrifying Tales [v1 #2, July 1960] (Winston Publications Inc., 35¢, 130pp+, digest)
Details supplied by Darren Heil.

ifc. · Dear Reader: Here’s Wishing You a Shudderful Time · [The Editor] · ed
4 · Letters to the Editor · [The Readers] · lc
7 · Bright Segment · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Caviar, Ballantine 1955
30 · Mean Mr. Murray · Avram Davidson · ss
37 · The House Party · Stanley Ellin · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1954
54 · Pin-Up Girl · Will Folke · ss
62 · 9-Finger Jack · Anthony Boucher · ss Esquire May 1951
68 · The Emissary · Ray Bradbury · ss Dark Carnival, Arkham House: Sauk City, WI 1947
75 · Baby Picture · Mort Golding · ss
79 · Laughing Moths · Miriam Allen deFord · ss
87 · Sredni Vashtar · Saki · ss The Westminster Gazette May 28 1910
92 · The Frog Prince · John Collier · ss Presenting Moonshine, New York: Viking 1941
99 · Our Feathered Friends · Philip MacDonald · ss When Churchyards Yawn, ed. Cynthia Asquith, London: Hutchinson 1931
109 · The Doll · Pat Gibbons · ss
114 · Yours Truly—Jack the Ripper · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales Jul 1943

Double-Action Detective and Mystery Stories [#22, May 1960] (35¢, digest)

The Case of the Mystic Mistress [Simon Ark] · Edward D. Hoch · ss
The Case of the Girdle Cravat · Edward Garner · pm
The Gambit of the Tranquil Fever · Koller Ernst · ss
The Case of the Vanishing Cellars [Wilbur & Stevenson] · J. S. Klimaris · ss Future Combined with Science Fiction Aug 1942
Shadow Over Shiloh · James V. Healion · ss
Murder Motel · Basil Wells · ss
The Naval Treaty · Irving L. Jaffee · ss
Death’s Practical Joker · Harlan Clay · ss

Ed McBain’s Mystery Book [#1, 1960] ed. Ed McBain (Pocket Books, Inc., 35¢, digest, cover by Harry Bennett)
Details supplied by Francis M. Nevins.

2 · Midnight Blue [Lew Archer] · Ross Macdonald · nv
22 · The Empty Hours [87th Precinct] · Ed McBain · na
25 · On a Day Unknown · Anthony Boucher · ar
36 · Assassin · Fletcher Flora · ss
42 · Film Strip [Shell Scott] · Richard S. Prather · nv
64 · Cops and Robbers · Vincent H. Gaddis · cl
66 · Confession · Helen Nielsen · ss
73 · Future File · [Various] · ms
74 · Hard Sell [John J. Malone] · Craig Rice (ghost written by Lawrence Block) · ss
81 · Reasonable Facsimile · Rex Lardner · na
140 · The Faces · Richard Matheson · ss

Mystery Digest [v4 #3, May-June 1960] ed. Rolfe Passer (Shelton Publishing Corp., 35¢, 128pp+, digest, cover by William F. Smith)
Given as v4 #2 in the Table of Contents. Details supplied by Jerry Boyajian.

2 · The Girl from Atlanta, Ga. · Rolfe Passer · ss; illustrated by William F. Smith
14 · Hot Bullets · Joseph Commings · ss
29 · The Wretches Cave · John Nicholson · ss
36 · Don’t Monkey Around with Tigers · Harry J. Preston · ss; illustrated by Neal Adams
47 · The Dummy · Monte Craven · ss
61 · The Lover’s Return · Joseph B. Rostoker · ss
69 · Poor Little Gigolo · Vittorio Amanetti · ss; illustrated by Neal Adams
81 · The Promoter · Marty Shaw · ss
91 · Two Hours to Live · Wilkie Collins · ss Miss or Mrs.? and Other Stories in Outline, Richard Bentley and Son 1873, as “‘Blow Up with the Brig!’”; revised from “The Ghost in the Cupboard Room” (All the Year Round, Christmas 1859).
105 · The Garden of Allah-Bama · Jon A. Teta · ss; illustrated by William F. Smith
118 · Doctor’s Corner · Abraham Lieberson, M.D. · cl
122 · Theatre, Book and Television Reviews · Jeff Thomas · cl
126 · The Mystery Digest Readers’ Column · [The Readers] · lc
ibc. · Did You Know That · Anon. · cl; illustrated by William F. Smith

Bonus:

Short Stories for Men [v221 #4, #2014, August 1959] (American Short Stories Corp., 35¢, 80pp+, large pulp, cover by Geoffrey Biggs)ed. Cylvia Kleinman;
assoc. ed. Frank Belknap Long. Details supplied by Steve Miller.

4 · Hell on Refrigerator Ridge · Michael Frost · ss
11 · Sixty Seconds · Jack Karney · ss Short Stories Apr 10 1946
14 · We Fought the Devil Sharks · George Harris · ss
20 · The Clown · Robert Barbour Johnson · ss
26 · Look Out for Lion · Percy Brown · ss
30 · “I’m a Virginian” · H. Bedford-Jones · ss (r)
38 · Bushranger Who Captured a Town · Eric England · ss
45 · Trapped · H. C. Wire · ss Short Stories Jan 25 1929
48 · The Bull Ring at Bliston · Elmore Leonard · ss
54 · The Marquis Was a Monster · Harold Oliver · ss
61 · Fluffy · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Weird Tales Mar 1947
65 · A Matter of Civilization · Arnold Fieldman · ss
71 · Doan Whispers · William MacLeod Raine · ss Short Stories Oct 25 1931
74 · Westbound Freight · Lemuel de Bra · vi
76 · Adventurers All: Amateur Shark Fishing · Hubert A. Moran · ts Short Stories May 10 1938
78 · Man and His Car · Keith Ayling · cl

↧

FFB: some entry points: THE COMPLETE [sic] HUMOROUS SKETCHES AND TALES OF MARK TWAIN edited by Charles Neider (Doubleday 1961); STORIES OF MARK TWAIN, recorded by Walter Brennan and Brandon de Wilde (Caedmon Records 1956); OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE FANTASTICS/FANTASTIC LITERATURE by Michael Resnick (House of Collectibles 1976)

September 15, 2017, 8:42 am

≫ Next: Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more...added links and images

≪ Previous: FFM: 1960 crime fiction magazines in English

The HarperAudio omnibus re-issue. Possibly packaged first by
Caedmon before they were bought out by HarperCollins.

Well, this week was going to be devoted to the last long fictions published by Joanna Russ and Michael Shaara, but reading about the frustrations of their later careers ended up squeezing out the rereading of the novellas in question...next week, perhaps, while I host FFB while the Abbott family gets ready for the run up, we can hope, to picking up a few Anthony Awards at Bouchercon in Toronto.

I first encountered Mark Twain in very adulterated form, I think...Sid and Marty Krofft offered a typically surreal serialized sequel to Twain's four notable Sawyer/Finn stories as a part of The Banana Splits tv series...and perhaps one or another of the televised film or tv adaptations of the actual Twain stories. But not long after I started reading anthologies, I started reading Twain, and one of the first big fat adult books I tackled was Charles Neider's remarkably foolishly titled Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales (R. Kent Rasmussen notes in his review of the Library of America volumes of Twain's short work, and their predecessors such as Neider's volumes including the sketch and story collection Mark Twain: Life as I Find It, also published in 1961: 'One wonders, incidentally, if Neider recognized the strangeness of calling his Humorous Sketches anthology "complete" while simultaneously issuing another volume [Life as I Find It] which contained sketches that the "Complete Sketches" lacked.'). Nonetheless, even given a similarly ponderous introduction, it was quite the Book of Gold:

Table of Contents:

Curing a cold
Aurelia's unfortunate young man
Info. for the million
Killing of Julius Caesar "Localized"
Lucretia Smith's soldier
George Washington's boyhood
Advice to little girls
"After" Jenkins
Answers to correspondents
Mr. Bloke's Item
From California almanac
Scriptural panoramist
Among the spirits
Sketch of George Washington
Complaint about correspondents
Re. chambermaids
Honored as a curiosity
About insurances
Literature in the dry diggings
Origin of illustrious men
The recent resignation
Washington's negro body-servant
Information wanted
My late senatorial secretaryship
Playbill
Back from "Yurrup"
Benton house
Fine old man
Guying the guides
Mental photographs
Beecher's farm
Turkish bath
George Fisher
Article
History repeats itself
John Chinaman in New York
Judge's "Spirited Woman"
Late Benjamin Franklin
Map of Paris
My bloody massacre
Mysterious visit
Note on "Petrified man"
Post-mortem poetry
Riley-Newspaper correspondent
Running for Governor
To raise poultry
Undertaker's chat
Widow's protest
Inspirations of "Two-year-olds"
About barbers
Burlesque biography.
Danger of lying in bed
Fashion item
Interview with Artemus Ward
My first literary venture
New Beecher Church
King William III
"Blanketing" the Admiral
Deception
Genuine Mexican Plug
Great landslide case
How the author was sold in Newark
110 tin whistles
Lionizing murderers
Markiss, King of Liars
Mr. Arkansas
Nevada Nabobs
What Hank said to
Horace Greeley
When the buffalo climbed a tree
Curious pleasure excursion
Rogers
Speech
Poems by Twain & Moore
Encounter with an Interviewer
Johnny Greer
Jumping frog
Office bore
"Party cries" in Ireland
Petition re. copyright
Siamese twins
Speech at the Scottish banquet
Speech on accident insurance
Facts re. recent carnival of crime in Connecticut
Letter
Punch, brothers, punch
Notes of an idle excursion
Speech on the weather
Whittier birthday speech.
About magnanimous-incident literature
O'Shah
Great revolution in Pitcairn
Speech: the babies
American in Europe
American party
Ascending the Riffelberg
Awful German language
Great French duel
King's encore
Laborious ant
My long crawl in the dark - Nicodemus Dodge
Skeleton for a Black Forest novel
Telephonic conversation
2 works of art
Why Germans wear spectacles
Young Cholley Adams
Plymouth Rock & the Pilgrims
Re. the American language
Legend of Sagenfeld in Germany
On the decay of the art of lying
Paris notes.
Art of inhumation
Keelboat talk & manners
Intro. "The new guide of the conversation in Portuguese & English"
Petition to the Queen of England
Majestic literary fossil
About all kinds of ships
Cure for the blues
Enemy conquered ...
Traveling with a Reformer
Private history of the "Jumping Frog"
Fenimore Cooper's literary offenses
Hell of a hotel at Maryborough
Indian crow
At the appetite cure
Austrian Edison keeping school again
From "London Times" of 1904
My first lie...
My boyhood dreams
Amended obituaries
Does the race of man love a Lord?
Instructions in art
Italian with grammar
Italian without a master
Petrified man
Dutch Nick massacre.

Some of the most famous items before this book was assembled were unsurprisingly among those which have stuck with me the longest, such as "Punch, Brothers, Punch" (my introduction to the notion of "buff" as a color), "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", "Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (where my family and I lived at the time) and of course the Jumping Frog, but no few others were more than fitfully amusing, even when they more thoroughly sent me scrambling to fill in data points (aside from what aide Neider provided in his notes). This one I borrowed (several times to get through it) from the Enfield library and not long after, at a yard sale, I picked up a battered copy of Neider's earlier The Complete Stories of Mark Twain (similarly misleading a title) and made my more leisurely way through that volume, as a fine complement to my reading the Sawyer/Finn/Jim stories and the single novels in the Signet Classic editions I gathered while still in elementary school...finishing most of his work in the summer before my 7th Grade matriculation into a new school in Londonderry, NH. The Enfield Central Library also had no few spoken word LPs for members to dig into, and one Caedmon item featured Brandon de Wilde narrating a couple/few chapters of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the flipside of Walter Brennan reading "Jumping Frog" and "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn"--this was one of the many I dubbed on cassette or open-reel tape and listened to repeatedly over the years...

One of the few times the HarperAudio package
is better than the Caedmon.

Here's Brennan reading "The Celebrated Jumping Frog"...which was released, despite the assertion of the WFMU blogger who posts the audio file, by Caedmon Records in 1956, the year before Brennan began his run with The Real McCoys television series.

And here's Brennan reading "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn" (from A Tramp Abroad, not "Tramps Abroad") and there's a weird little second-long glitch in this YT post recording that isn't present in this slightly scratchy WFMU post taken from a copy of the lp.

One development that came along with the relocation to New Hampshire was the discovery of how many interesting fiction magazines were still being published in 1978, and I gathered most of those I could find at a store in Derry called Book Corner, which also had a small alcove of remainders in the back, one of which was stray copy or so of this item (with one title on the cover and another on the title page), by a writer I hadn't previously encountered, before he was most likely to sign himself Mike Resnick, providing us with a price guide full of warnings that prices in this field were widely variable and extremely dependent on condition...but which, along with such other purchases as Brian Ash's The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, gave a vivid sense of the history of these fascinating magazines and their stablemates and fallen fellow-travelers over the years. Resnick also missed a trick or two, noting without explication that the great expense of the citation for The Ship That Sailed to Mars by William Timlin was no typo...no mention of the gorgeous artwork in the one published edition then extant being part of the allure. But it was useful and fun for a catalog,,,and I, not long after picking this book up for 50c, started collecting older back issues with a grab-bag from dealer and small-press publisher Gerry de la Ree at not Too much more per good-to-reading-copy items.

For somewhat less capsule, and perhaps less nostalgic, reviews of this week's books and more, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Some illustration from The Ship That Sailed to Mars:

↧

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

September 22, 2017, 8:31 pm

≫ Next: Underappreciated Music: September 2017: the links to the sounds

≪ Previous: FFB: some entry points: THE COMPLETE [sic] HUMOROUS SKETCHES AND TALES OF MARK TWAIN edited by Charles Neider (Doubleday 1961); STORIES OF MARK TWAIN, recorded by Walter Brennan and Brandon de Wilde (Caedmon Records 1956); OFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE FANTASTICS/FANTASTIC LITERATURE by Michael Resnick (House of Collectibles 1976)

This week's selections, reviews of the books and more cited below, include a few duplicates, whether due to review of reissues or announcement of them, or a couple of quick looks at a key, vintage fantasy anthology. Patricia Abbott will be back to hosting next week, before going on to see if she and her daughter Megan win the first parent-and-child duo of Anthony Awards at the world crime-fiction convention in Toronto, the Bouchercon...thanks to all the contributors, and all you readers...

Sergio Angelini: The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes

Yvette Banek: Death Has Deep Roots by Michael Gilbert

Mark Baker: Murder on Gramercy Park by Victoria Thompson

Bernadette: Plantation Shudders by Ellen Byron

Les Blatt: Cat of Many Tails by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee)

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

Ben Boulden: Project Jael by Aaron Fletcher

Brian Busby: Comeback by Dan Hill

Alice Chang: The House of God by "Samuel Shem" (Stephen Bergman)

Bill Crider: Daddy's Gone A-Hunting by Robert Skinner; ReDemolished by Alfred Bester (compiled by Richard Raucci); The Winter is Passed by Harry Whittington (unpublished)

Newell Dunlap and Bill Pronzini: Wycliffe and the Scapegoat by W. J. Burley

Martin Edwards: The Pyx by John Buell

Barry Ergang: Oh, Murderer Mine by Norbert Davis

Will Errickson: The Inquistor series by "Simon Quinn" (Martin Cruz Smith)

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: DC war comics, August/September 1970

Curtis Evans: reissue programs for Detection Club members "Christopher Bush" (Charles Christmas Bush) and Edith Caroline Rivett (aka "ECR Lorac" and "Carol Carnac")

Paul Fraser: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1962, edited by Avram Davidson

Barry Gardner: Corruptly Procured by Michael Bowen

John Grant: The Detective by Roderick Thorp

Christy H: The Bake-Off by Beth Kendrick (courtesy Kevin Tipple)

Rich Horton: The Octangle by Emanie Sachs

Jerry House: Keep the Baby, Faith by "Philip DeGrave" (William DeAndrea)

Nick Jones: Diamond Dogs by Alistair Reynolds (among other Revelation Space novellas)

Tracy K: Hammett by Joe Gores

George Kelley: Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague de Camp

Margot Kinberg: Another Margaret by Janice MacDonald

Rob Kitchin: After You Die by Eva Dolan

Richard Krauss: Suspense, Winter 1952, edited by Theodore Irwin

Kate Laity: Truth Always Kills by Rick Ollerman

B. V. Lawson: The Comfortable Coffin edited by Richard S. Prather

Evan Lewis: Bat Masterson (tv-tie-in LP spoken word album) written by Michael Avallone (read by Eddie Bracken)

Steve Lewis: Black Money by "Ross Macdonald" (Kenneth Millar); "The Holes in the System" by Marcia Muller

Gideon Marcus: Galaxy, October 1962, edited by Frederik Pohl

Todd Mason: early 1960s fantasy anthologies: The Unexpected edited by Leo Margulies; The Unknown edited by D. R. Bensen; Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague de Camp; Beyond edited by Thomas Dardis; The Fantastic Universe Omnibus edited by Hans Stefan Santesson

Karin Montin: Grand Trunk and Shearer by Ian Truman

Early one morning D’Arcy Kennedy gets a call: one of his friends reports that his brother Cillian has been found dead in the canal that serves as a border between Pointe St. Charles and the rest of the city. The very brief police investigation finds that Cillian died of drowning, with a mix of drugs in his system, along with “ammoniated bleach.” It’s an accident, in other words. End of story.
D’Arcy refuses to believe it was anything but murder. Cillian was a mixed martial arts fighter who followed a strict no-drugs policy. If the police won’t bring the killer to justice, he will. And so D’Arcy and his three loyal friends go on a mission. As they retrace Cillian’s whereabouts on his last night, they tour Montreal’s underbelly--the crack houses, the outdoor drinking spots, the afterhours clubs--talking to punk musicians, neo-Nazis, antiracist skinheads, security guards and many others who live by night.
Flashbacks paint a picture of the Point in the Kennedy boys’ youth, a time when Irish kids fought French kids, just because, and doubly because they hated being called English. Those were the good old days. Today the area is being gentrified, and the long-time residents have dead-end jobs that mean they’ll soon be priced out of the neighbourhood.
Truman has a knack for dialogue and vivid descriptions of streets. You can get to know the Point by following D’Arcy’s movements on a map and picturing the buildings he visits. He also tells a coherent story.
Unfortunately, the book is marred by dozens of errors of every possible kind, in French, English and even Irish Gaelic.
As I wrote in my review of Truman's self-published The Factory Line, I had hopes that Down & Out would have a copy editor. Apparently they don’t. And that's why I haven't given it four stars.

Neeru: A Revolutionary's Life by Bandi Jeewan

Steven Nester: Where Murder Waits by E. Howard Hunt

Juri Nummelin: Rafferty's Rules by W. Glenn Duncan

John ONeill: The Spell of Seven edited by L. Sprague de Camp

Matt Paust: Seldom Disappointed by Tony Hillerman

Mildred Perkins: Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw

James Reasoner: The Wench is Wicked by "Carter Brown" (Alan G. Yates); Exciting Western, September 1952, edited by David X. Manners

Gerard Saylor: Fender Lizards by Joe R. Lansdale

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

Kerrie Smith: The Good People by Hannah Kent

"TomCat": The Perfect Murder Case by "Christopher Bush" (Charles Christmas Bush)

Prashant Trikannad: "Booty for a Badman" by Louis L'Amour (The Saturday Evening Post, 30 July 1960; reprinted in L'Amour's War Party)

ISFDB index: (cover painting by Ed Eshmwiller)

4 • According to You ... (Fantastic, October 1962) • letter column by uncredited
5 • Editorial (Fantastic, October 1962) • [Editorial (Fantastic)] • essay by Norman M. Lobsenz
6 • The Unholy Grail • [Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser] • novelette by Fritz Leiber
6 • The Unholy Grail • interior artwork by Ed Emshwiller [as by Emsh]
32 • The Double-Timer • short story by Thomas M. Disch
32 • The Double-Timer • interior artwork by Dan Adkins [as by Adkins]
53 • Any Questions? • short story by Leo P. Kelley
53 • Any Questions? • interior artwork by Dan Adkins [as by Adkins]
61 • Nor Iron Bars a Cage • short story by Ron Goulart
63 • Nor Iron Bars a Cage • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers]
74 • Presence of Mind: Introduction • essay by Sam Moskowitz
74 • Presence of Mind • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers]
76 • Presence of Mind • (1934) • novelette by Martin Armstrong
108 • The Teachers Rode a Wheel of Fire • short story by Roger Zelazny
108 • The Teachers Rode a Wheel of Fire • interior artwork by Leo Summers [as by Summers]
113 • Autogeddon • short story by Geoffrey Wagner
113 • Autogeddon • interior artwork by George Schelling [as by Schelling]
bc • Presence of Mind [bc] • interior artwork by Leo Summers (variant of Presence of Mind) [as by Summers]

↧

Underappreciated Music: September 2017: the links to the sounds

September 28, 2017, 4:28 pm

≫ Next: FFB: Kit Reed, 1932-2017 and some of her peers

≪ Previous: Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more...added links and images

The (frequently) 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: Nightly Music

Brian Arnold: The Hollywood Palace (1966) as hosted by Adam West as Batman

Jayme Lynn Blaschke: Friday Night Videos

Paul D. Brazill: A Song for Saturday

Jim Cameron: Charles Earland's Living Black!: Recorded Live at the Key Club; Bill Saxton Quartet: Atymony; A Loud Minority: Deep Spiritual Jazzon Mainstream Records 1970-73

Sean Coleman: Elvis Costello and the Attractions: Imperial Bedroom;Black Sabbath: Paranoia;Supertramp: Paris

David Cramner: Thelonious Monk: Solo Monk

Bill Crider: Song of the Day; Forgotten Hits; Forgotten Music: Marty Robbins and more

Greg Deocampo:

Jeff Gemmill Top 5; Stephen Sills: Manassas; Linda Ronstadt: Simple Dreams; Niel Young: Hitchhiker

Jerry House: The Child Ballads; Oscar Brand; Utah Phillips; Hymn Time; Music from the Past

George Kelley: Rolling Stones: Their Satanic Majesties Request; Bob Dylan and the Band: Blonde on Blonde; NPR's best albums by women; The Best of James Ingram: The Power of Great Music

Kate Laity: Song for a Saturday

B. V. Lawson: Your Sunday Music Treat

Evan Lewis: Nick Adams

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

Todd Mason:

The Jazz Loft Radio Series: "Monk at Town Hall" (link)

Kliph Nesteroff: The Johnny Cash Christmas Special with special guest stars Roy Clark, Roy Orbison and Andy Kaufman (1977)

Andrew Orley: Nobody's Listening

Lawrence Person: Shoegazer Sunday

James Reasoner: Middle of the Night Music

Charlie Ricci: Glen Campbell: "The William Tell Overture"

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FFB: Kit Reed, 1932-2017 and some of her peers

September 29, 2017, 7:56 am

≫ Next: links to texts: 2017 Best Short Story Anthony Nominees (crossposted from Bouchercon site)

≪ Previous: Underappreciated Music: September 2017: the links to the sounds

Kit Reed died this past week; energetic up to the point where her inoperable brain tumor got the better of her over the last month or so, at age 85 she left us a final novel and a final short story (unless something turns up in papers that her kids think she might've wanted to see in print).
The New York Times obit:
Kit Reed, Author of Darkly Humorous Fiction, Dies at 85, though it manages to not mention her contemporary fiction, it does mention her work as a professor and writer in residence.

Her new novel:

And her new short story, both on sale now:

Reed, as noted here last year, started her writing career as a professional journalist, and made a mark, winning industry awards before selling her first short story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1958, "The Wait"...one rather pathetic colleague at the New Haven Register, she recounted not too long ago, would make a point of pulling her office typewriter off her desk and taking over to a corner where he would type out his own attempts at stories, and claimed, upon learning of her F&SF sale, to have sold a story to The New Yorker, which would be appearing Real Soon Now. Reed continued to place fiction with F&SF, and branched out to the Yale Literary Magazine, Robert Lowndes's Science Fiction, Joseph Payne Brennan's Macabre, and by 1960 Redbook...while her colleague had slunk off somewhere to await his further stories' appearance in equally imaginary issues of The Dial and Scribner's, no doubt.

In the previous Reed review-essay, I noted that Reed was a member of an (in the latter 1950s) emerging school of women writers not too worried about sticking within expected boundaries in their writing, whether it terms of "genre" or attitude toward their subjects, which I suggest also included Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Lee Hoffman, Joanna Russ and, starting just a bit later, Joyce Carol Oates...all were publishing in several fields at once, and impressively so. The obituarist above attempts to suggest Reed "evokes Stephen King" (as opposed to the other way around) as well as Shirley Jackson, a rather better guess, but Reed noted to me last year that Evelyn Waugh was perhaps her greatest influence.

Courtesy Kate Maruyama, who notes on FaceBook: "Mom mailed this to me, gleefully, noting 'I thought you'd enjoy this little artifact.'"

But that wasn't the only "celebratory" slight she would see in her early fiction-writing career, as the World Science Fiction Convention was moved to attempt a third award in the category best new writer...the first Hugo ceremony in 1953 bestowed Best New Writer or Artist on Philip Jose Farmer, apparently by fiat of the convention committee (though not unreasonably so); in 1956, "Most Promising New Author" was voted upon and Robert Silverberg took home the Hugo, with the rest of the shortlist composed of Harlan Ellison, Frank Herbert and a relatively obscure writer these days, Henry Still, apparently a friend of convention organizers; and in 1959, the Hugo ballot featured the following impressive set of nominees for Best New Author, listed alphabetically:

Brian W. Aldiss
Pauline Ashwell(Pauline Whitby)
Rosel George Brown
Louis Charbonneau
Kit Reed

...and the ungrateful bastards voted "No Award" the winner. Which is perhaps why there was no more attempt at Best New Author-style awards till the establishment of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, itself never officially a Hugo but voted on and awarded at the same convention ceremonies, in the early 1970s. (The voters in '59 did have the flexibility to give an sf award to Robert Bloch's humorous dark fantasy "That Hell-Bound Train" for best short story, but also chose No Award rather than favor any of the three ballot choices for best sf/fantasy film: The Fly, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and The Horror of Dracula...worse A/V presentations have won before and since.)

All five went on to notable careers, even if Brown's was cut very short by cancer fifty years ago, when she was 41; Ashwell died two years ago, and Charbonneau and Aldiss both died earlier this year. Three women and two men on a ballot in 1959 might've bothered some idiots; Aldiss and Ashwell were British, which might somehow have offended Yankee chauvinists; who knows why the voting populace was so honest and/or churlish as to not care enough about any of these reasonably new writers to vote for any (Charbonneau had written some radio drama before becoming a professional journalist, which would be his primary work while writing novels on the side; Aldiss had been the literary editor for the newspaper The Oxford Mail; Ashwell had been precocious, publishing her first short story in the British, and misleadingly titled, magazine Yankee Science Fiction at fourteen and publishing a children's fantasy chapbook at 15).

Kit Reed (when not signing her suspense novels Kit Craig and publishing one horror novel as Shelley Hyde) and Brian Aldiss have been hugely prolific, often challenging (never more to the reader than to themselves) writers in the decades since; Rosel George Brown wrote increasingly impressive short fiction and a few novels before her early death; Pauline Ashwell, sometimes publishing as Paul Ash, was not hugely prolific but published consistently impressive work--her perceived audience was such that a short novel she saw published in Analog has never been reprinted in book form, but her work is widely respected and enjoyed by those in the know; Louis Charbonneau, not the Canadian Human Rights Watch executive and bilingualism advocate (IMDb currently confuses them), went on to write several sf novels in the 1960s, novelized at least one unproduced film script and wrote the treatments for two episodes of the original series of The Outer Limits, published westerns as Carter Travis Young beginning in 1960, and eventually moved more in the direction of writing horror and particularly suspense novels in the 1970s, along with the westerns/historicals under his own name Down from the Mountain and Trail: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Novel.

Rosel George Brown, 1966

There is something to be said for honoring the work of living writers while they're living, and perhaps praising some writers too young will discourage growth, but somehow I suspect the encouragement will more often be worthwhile. I'm glad I got to meet Kit Reed and tell her how much I've enjoyed her work over the years; didn't seize what opportunity I had with the others (though of course Brown had died before I was reading much beyond Seuss and Golden Books). More to say soon.

For more typical book reviews this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

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