Friday, March 21, 2014

FFM (redux plus some new content): Renown Publications: MIKE SHAYNE, WEIRD TALES, THE MAN (and THE GIRL) FROM U.N.C.L.E., ZANE GREY WESTERN, SHELL SCOTT, CHARLIE CHAN, SATELLITE SCIENCE FICTION...and SHORT STORIES...

Cover images mostly courtesy of Galactic Central






































On March 24 of last year, I began this post thus:
Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine (which quickly grew less formal and became Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine) was the first and last magazine of what turned out to be Leo Margulies's most sustained publishing venture, Renown Publications. 

--And there was a crucial mistake...for while I think (and hope to be told if not so) I did gather all the other Renown magazines and annuals for at least citation below, I'd crucially forgotten one item which Margulies had purchased along with the rights to Weird Tales...those to its more recently folded eventual stablemate, Short Stories (Dorothy McIlwraith had edited both titles over their last decade at what became Short Stories, Inc.).  

The first new Margulies issue was not too handsome, if promising (September 1956, same cover-date as the first Michael Shane Mystery Magazine)




































--and even has a Salvatore Lombino/Ed McBain/Evan Hunter story by "Hunt Collins" within...

Margulies soon had illustrations back on the covers:




































 ...but that didn't help sufficiently, and the Margulies Short Stories folded with the August 1959 issue, by then promising "true adventures" mixed with the fiction, which in this last issue included a Theodore Sturgeon reprint from Weird Tales and a new story by Elmore Leonard...







































(And now we return you to the post as it was last year at this time...)
As did Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, it began life in 1956, when there was no lack of crime-fiction digest-sized magazines on the newsstands, in the wake of the still remarkably successful Manhunt and its offshoots and imitators--MSMM was somewhat one of Manhunt's imitators, if less ultra-hardboiled to the point of nihilism--and the steadfast and popular Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (The Saint Detective Magazine, a property that Margulies had sold his interest in to his publishing partner at King-Size Publications not long before, and its stablemate, the fantasy and sf magazine Fantastic Universe, were more or less imitations of the Mercury Press titles EQMM and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, though with their own flavor).  

Richard Moore on reading, and writing for, MSMM.
James Reasoner on writing Shayne; the Reasoner and Livia Washburn Shayne novelets.
The first issue, 1956.
A good cover...pity about the photo.


My first issue, May 1978
The last of three annual issues of a companion title.
Not long after the the sale of MSMM to the Goldsteins

Renown published the first revival of WT, 4 issues, 1973-74
Reprinting Bloch's WT story seems odd in 
context...but perhaps a portent...
Two All-American agents? 
Soviet spy, Brit actor, Brit edition, no less...
A surprisingly quick mid-'60s failure.  9 issues.



They had no Stephanie Powers photos on hand
while doing covers for the short-lived spin-off.
The first issue, 1956...Ms. "Craig Rice" didn't write much sf...

Despite MSMM being the consistent lynchpin of Renown during its existence, Margulies (and his wife, frequent editor and briefly publisher Cylvia Kleinman), had started again in 1956 with both a crime-fiction and an sf title, in this case Satellite Science Fiction, which revived a policy of a novel in each issue that worked pretty well for Startling Stories, eventually the most popular of the sf pulps and the last fiction magazine to fold in the Thrilling Group, where Margulies had worked in the 1930s and '40s...the first issue featured the (sadly least good) Algis Budrys novel, in book form as Man of Earth. But Satellite was unable to find a niche as easily as Shayne, and barely made it into its fourth year.

However, that didn't daunt the Margulieses from trying again in 1966, first with a licensed magazine devoted to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. television series, which ran for two years (the short-lived Girl [sic] from U.N.C.L.E. series inspired a correspondingly short-run magazine), and the surprisingly unsuccessful Shell Scott Mystery Magazine (where Scott creator Richard Prather had never been too enthusiastic about the project). 

Zane Grey Western Magazine had been a solid and fondly-remembered property for Dell Magazines in the 1940s and '50s, thanks to good editorial work by Don Ward (the best issues of this digest were the ones that had the least Grey reprint fiction in them), so why not revive that in the nearly empty market for western fiction magazines of the late '60s, with only the hardy Ranch Romances and Adventures barely plugging along...sadly, though, despite early work by the likes of Bill Pronzini, the quality of the new Grey magazine was rarely first-rate, and though it ran for nearly five years (1969-74), it never made too much of a splash...some excellent covers couldn't make up for mediocre fiction.

In 1973, Margulies, noting that it was the fiftieth anniversary year of the long-dead title's founding, took a flyer on a revival of Weird Tales, but probably did the magazine no favors by hiring his old friend Sam Moskowitz (who had ghosted rather dull WT anthologies for Margulies in years past) to edit...the first WT revival lasted four issues, staggering into 1974. 

For what turned out to be the last new Renown magazine, Margulies thought to again mine nostalgia and license a character, and came up with Charlie Chan Mystery Magazine, an idea whose time had probably passed by then, even given that Chan was a reasonably positive stereotypical Chinese-American character. Four issues beginning in late 1973. (Robert Hart Davis, one will note, is the most common of Renown "house names," pseudonyms used by any number of writers...much as any number of writers borrowed Davis Dresser's "Brett Halliday" tag while ghosting the Mike Shayne stories for that magazine...) Clearly, after 1974, Margulies and Kleinman were willing to let MSMM be their sole project; a few years after Margulies's death in 1975, Kleinman sold the magazine to the Goldsteins, who published it with Charles Fritch as editor until mid-1985, with a number of now-important writers in crime fiction and other fields getting their start in the magazine's last decade...thanks to editors Sam Merwin, Fritch and Cylvia Kleinman herself.





For more of today's books, stories and perhaps even other magazines, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
The last new Renown magazine...and the first appearance of a cover recycled 
above...the whole painting appearing again on the March 1980 MSMM...

21 comments:

  1. Excellent post Todd. I once collected and read all these magazines. I miss them all especially ZANE GREY WESTERN and MIKE SHAYNE. Now I can't even find a newstand except at Barnes & Noble. Lack of distribution outlets has really hurt the digest magazines.

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  2. Walker, everyone I read seems a little sheepish about the underachievement of the ZANE GREY revival...did you find it genuinely enjoyable as a reading experience? I certainly still miss the Dell group's LOUIS L'AMOUR WESTERN MAGAZINE...but it was a higher caliber of almost everything, even if the cover design could be less elegant than the Margulies GREY at its best. Or do you refer to the better original Dell/Don Ward ZANE GREY magazine? EBay has demonstrated that these seem to have been kept by families, once collected, almost as often as NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICs...and I can understand why.

    Aside from some college bookstores (many of which are B&Ns under other names...and where one's B&N card isn't recognized) and tobacco shops (where the rest of the newsstand sometimes seems an excuse to have a porn rack)(and that part of the magazine industry seems to be having at least as bad a time of it as the rest) and supermarkets and drugstores (most of which have pretty limited newsstands, though one supermarket chain for a while would carry ANALOG and AHMM more often than a lot of the B&Ns did, as they came in with the Penny Press puzzle magazines), serious newsstands are becoming very rare indeed (the hope that comics shops might carry more fiction magazines seems limited...particularly since that industry's model has the store buy all the material outright, and it becomes difficult to take a flier on any merchandise that has only a certain likelihood to be sold).

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  3. I'm really referring to the excellent Dell ZANE GREY magazine which was so much better and had a fairly long run. It's funny how at one time there were so many western magazines and now there are none at all.

    Discussing this subject makes me want to look through my Dell ZANE GREY's again. You are right about them not showing up on the collector's market that often.

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  4. Is that true at the pulp conventions and such? When I was actively using eBay, about a decade back, there were always plenty of Dell ZANE GREYs available...perhaps that lode's been mined! (That's what I meant about families or at least dedicated readers hanging onto them...they were already fifty years old when I was gathering mine...presumably, the primary conservators of them either had died or decided it was time to pass them along...).

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  5. Lots of memories in this post, Todd. It's amazing how Margulies used some of those cover paintings again and again and again. As for the two incarnation of ZGWM, I enjoy both of them, although there's no question that the Dell version consistently had better fiction. The Renown version was interesting, though, for the large number of crime writers who tried their hands at Westerns in its pages, and also because it provided some of the last jobs for long-time pulp author Tom Curry, who wrote most of the Buck Duane stories under the Romer Zane Grey house name.

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  6. And not just Margulies, but his successors...the Chan cover was repeated twice after his death (and Charles Fritch famously even managed to recycle a cover from his sf/fantasy magazine GAMMA for MSMM). Good to know those "Romer Zane Grey" stories were actually giving at least one veteran a last regular paycheck...and glad the post triggered some memories (mostly good, I hope)...glad you gave the accounts I link to over the years, as well...thanks.

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  7. That GIRL FROM UNCLE cover loosk like its from the 1920s! Wonderful stuff there (and well done on working in an Evan hunter angle - you're really not a fan, are you?

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  8. So many great magazines back then, Todd. I miss them all, especially the Margulies mags and "Doc" Lowndes' mags.

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  9. Thanks Todd, for allowing me to bathe in nostalgia. I used to enjoy James Reasoner's short stories in MSMM and I knew that the Shayne stories were house jobs,but I never put 2 and 2 together. I never realized that Mr. Reasoner was also penning many of the Shayne novellas.
    Something to think about the next time I try to play critic with a novel.
    Jim Meals

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  10. Sergio--thanks, it was amusing to see that Margulies, while not the captive creature of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency that MANHUNT's Flying Eagle Publications was,was still willing to take a package from Hunter's employers, particularly to get a new (to the US, at least) Wodehouse story. I wasn't kidding on Patti's post...I've yet to read Any Hunter/et al. story that doesn't have some aspect of stupidity integral to it, even if it's a setpiece such as in THE BLACKBOARD JUNGLE in which the jazz-fan teacher, bitter toward his teen students, brings fragile, rare discs into class to play for them, with utterly predictable results. Doesn't remotely pass the reality test. I should ask if there's a novel or story you'd recommend that might break this streak for me.

    Jerry, there are certainly a whole lot of things to miss...even if there are some new good things which come along...so they can eventually be missed!

    Jim, glad to be of service. Check James's blog for his occasional further discussion of the Renown years, his and others'....

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  11. Todd mate, I suspect that there is no Hunter / McBain title that could really pass the test - there are always contrivances, no worse than in most crime fiction books I read, but they are undeniably there. From within the 87th series, I think SADIE WHEN SHE DIED is pretty damn terrific though! Has anyone published a history on the activities of the Scott Meredith Agency? At one point they seemed to have been absolutely rampant!

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  12. Barry Malzberg has..."Tripping with the Alchemist" (F&SF, June 2003 and Nebula Awards Showcase 2005)...Mike Resnick discusses it here:
    http://osdir.com/ml/culture.sf.literature/2003-05/msg00063.html

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  13. I have a set of SATELLITE. I was quite fond of it back in the old days.

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  14. I suspect that Frank Belknap Long enjoyed working on it more than he did the other Renown magazines from his time with Margulies...though I only assume he was involved...

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  15. Wow, makes me miss the days when I HAD all these--including a LONG run of MSMM--back before my divorce, when I had to disperse my collection.

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  16. Disruptive tragedy indeed, to separate the collector from such a collection...

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  17. Todd, thanks for the links to the articles by Richard Moore and James Reasoner about writing for MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE. I wonder if James ever got around to rereading some of the novelets that he wrote for the magazine.

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  18. I know I reread one of the Mike Shayne stories a few years ago ("Book of the Dead" [7/82]), although I can't recall why. Other than that I've read bits and pieces of the Shaynes, just out of curiosity, but I don't think I've read any of them all the way through. I reread all the Markham stories when we were getting ready to publish them as e-books, and they seemed to hold up fairly well.

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  19. This is wonderful stuff, Todd. I was particularly interested by the covers of "Short Stories" including the story "Stage Hands" by P.G. Wodehouse. In fact, I discovered Wodehouse's short stories and other fiction only after I took to blogging. Until then, I was only familiar with his novels published by Penguin. The Zane Grey westerns are something else—to be able to read those magazines and the stories they inside! "The Girl From U.N.C.L.E." was a revelation. Sometimes I come across issues of "Li'l Abner" at book exhibitions although I don't know whether they're the original or reprints. Considering that the comic strip ended long ago, I think I should pick them up.

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  20. I've never seen a real copy of the CHARLIE CHAN magazine. I had a number of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. magazines and I always pick up MIKE SHAYNEs whenever I find them (which is becoming less and less frequent).

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