Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Short Story Wednesday: Margaret St. Clair, Ed Gorman, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, Ambrose Bierce, Zona Gale, Elizabeth Kostova, Eileen Pollack, Nicholas Delbanco, Laura Kasischke, Keith Taylor: GHOSTS OF THE HEARTLAND edited by Frank McSherry, M. H. Greenberg & Charles Waugh (Rutledge Hill Press 1990); GHOST WRITERS edited by Laura Kasischke and Keith Taylor (Wayne State University Press 2011)

Terror and Even More Regret at the (Northerly) Center of the Contiguous 48...

Ghosts of the Heartland ed. Frank D. McSherry, Jr.Charles G. Waugh & Martin H. Greenberg (Rutledge Hill Press 1-55853-068-1, Apr ’90, $9.95, 210pp, tp, cover by Harriette Bateman) Anthology of 18 ghost stories set in the Midwest.

  • viii · Can There Be Such Things? Here? · Frank D. McSherry, Jr. · in
  • 1 · But at My Back I Will Always Hear · David Morrell · ss Shadows #6, ed. Charles L. Grant, Doubleday, 1983 (set in Iowa)
  • 18 · Death’s Door · Robert McNear · nv Playboy Mar ’69 (Wisconsin)
  • 40 · Little Jimmy · Lester del Rey · ss The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Apr ’57 (Iowa)
  • 55 · Floral Tribute · Robert Bloch · ss Weird Tales  Jul ’49 (Illinois)
  • 67 · Stillwater, 1896 · Michael Cassutt · ss  Shadows #7, ed. Charles L. Grant, Doubleday, 1984 (Minnesota)
  • 78 · The Boarded Window · Ambrose Bierce · ss San Francisco Examiner Jul 14, 1889 (Ohio)
  • 83 · Listen, Children, Listen! · Wallace West · ss Fantastic Universe Oct/Nov ’53 (Indiana)
  • 96 · Professor Kate · Margaret St. Clair · ss Weird Tales Jan ’51 (Oklahoma)
  • 103 · The Skeleton on Round Island · Mary Hartwell Catherwood · ss Mackinac and Lake Stories, Harpers, 1899 (Michigan)
  • 113 · One for the Crow · Mary Barrett · ss Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Mar ’73 (Missouri)
  • 122 · School for the Unspeakable · Manly Wade Wellman · ss Weird Tales Sep ’37 (North Dakota)
  • 133 · Different Kinds of Dead · Ed Gorman · ss * (first appeared here) (Nebraska)
  • 140 · Deadlights · Charles Wagner · ss Twisted Tales #9 ’84 (Kansas)
  • 149 · The Bridal Pond · Zona Gale · ss The American Mercury Feb ’28; Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine Oct ’49 (Wisconsin)
  • 155 · A Wounded Knee Fairy Tale · Craig Kee Strete · ss · Dreams That Burn in the Night, Doubleday, 1982 [published earlier in translation] (South Dakota)
  • 162 · Shaggy Vengeance · Robert Adams · nv Amazing Jul ’84 (North Dakota)
  • 187 · He Walked by Day · Julius Long · ss Weird Tales Jun ’34 (Ohio)
  • 194 · Smoke Ghost · Fritz Leiber · ss Unknown: Fantasy Fiction Oct ’41 (Illinois)
Two volumes, one taking horror and fantasy fiction set in a pretty broad definition of the US midwest, the other collecting original stories set in Michigan...one focusing on veteran writers of the fantastic (with a few comparative dabblers mixed in), the other mostly devoted to those who usually write mimetic fiction (arguably amusingly, the biggest "names" in the Michigan volume are either best-known for horror--Kostova--or have written notable borderline sf--Delbanco). All original stories in the newer book, only Ed Gorman's story newly published in the elder. Not all that surprisingly, and not just because of the similarity of setting and nature of the fiction, not too much dissimilarity of approach or result...even if the first book is much more comfortable with literal ghosts than is the second.

Among the stories in Ghosts of the Heartland:
"Smoke Ghost" by Fritz Leiber is probably the most influential and, frankly, important of the stories collected in this volume...one of the founding texts of urban fantasy and what can be termed "modern horror", fully incorporating the existential horror lessons of Lovecraft (and, in a sense, Kafka) and Lovecraft's more slavish followers into a literary context more in tune with the Edwardian and subsequent horror-fiction writers in Britain and such US fellow-travelers as Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Vincent Benet and Conrad Aiken, as well as such fellow contributors to Weird Tales and Unknown as Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, H. R. Wakefield, Algernon Blackwood, Jane Rice, Catherine L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Ray Bradbury, and Margaret St. Clair, along with other continuing innovators such as Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier and John Collier. Leiber posits that the haunts of industrial Chicago, and thus the world of soot and smoke it sits in, have a new character, new demands on us, no less taxing than the ghosts of yore. The Bloch and Wellman stories are good examples of their work, as well, but less key, if also in Bloch's case from the period of his completely having moved away from writing Lovecraft pastiche and something more fully his own. The St. Clair is a consistently eerie bit of historical horror, suggesting a supernatural fate for the murderous (and mysteriously vanished shortly after discovery of their crimes) "Bender Family" of post-Civil War Kansas. The Bierce is even more a chestnut in anthologies, and for good reason (aside from public domain status), than are the Leiber, Bloch or Wellman stories. 


Less well-known are Ed Gorman's "Different Kinds of Dead", which is a suitably noirish sort of actual ghost story, and Zona Gale's interesting, allusive account of whether or not a certain couple made it past their honeymoon. I've not yet delved into the other stories in the McSherry, Greenberg and Waugh volume; McSherry, in his introduction to the book, made it clear that there were actual Benders that "Professor Kate" is about, which I didn't know till now, though I've had a copy of the January 1951 issue of Weird Tales including that story for some years, and let Prof. Kate Laity know about the story's existence shortly after purchase.

Among the stories in Ghost Writers: Elizabeth Kostova's is the story I've read so far here that most fully embraces the probable supernatural nature of its events, involving a young father and his very young kids' encounter with an avuncular man of seemingly indeterminate but variously-cited great age, who is taking full advantage of his last day of work (he notes) at a low-rent but Disney-like theme park, where every ride has its own ticket. Kostova being easily the best-known writer in the book, due to her historical horror fiction, it's somewhat unsurprising that she is least afraid of having this benevolent possible jokester and probable actual ghost lean in that direction. Nicholas Delbanco's typically eloquent prose is put in service of a consideration of historical injustice, as well as a refurbished house with raccoon squatters; Eileen Pollack's story seems likely to endorse its supernatural nature, up through a long infodump about the nature of the late, controversial priest at the heart of the narrative, but takes a turn toward the all too human monstrosities that priest both suffered and inflicted, as well as those her protagonist's family and her husband's had faced in varying ways, most tellingly during World War 2--the story so far that makes the most hay with the authoritarian "militias" arising in Michigan over the last half-century or so. 

Editors Laura Kasischke and Keith Taylor seem a bit 
more playful with the boundaries of mimetic and fantastic fiction (and Taylor with crime fiction as well); Kasischke's protagonist isn't at all sure that some very potent marijuana wasn't responsible for her vision of ghosts, one of whom is stealing one of her old dresses meant for charity donation; Taylor's involves some fairly rural and provincial teachers, in to Detroit for the day as chaperones for students on a job fair, and particularly for one a somewhat sinister passage through an art gallery and an even more sinister encounter on the drive home, shared with two colleagues. So far, in average quality in this book is at a disadvantage, not being able to tap riches going back most of a century like the other, but not so much that I won't read further in this solid anthology, as well. (Keith Taylor the co-editor isn't the Australian fantasist Keith Taylor aka "Dennis More" and other bylines, nor the English horror-adventure novelist Keith Taylor, nor even the 1940s UK fanzine editor/publisher Keith Taylor, but the Canadian-born, US writer and retired professor of English at Wayne State, I gather spoken very highly of by former student Megan Abbott, among others.)




Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Short Story Wednesday: "lost" (to water damage) Robert Bloch collections: PLEASANT DREAMS (Jove 1979 edition); BLOOD RUNS COLD (Popular Library 1963 edition)

a Short Story Wednesday lament: 


    Blood Runs Cold Robert Bloch (Simon & Schuster, 1961, $3.50, 246pp, hc, cover by Tony Palladino)
    Also in pb (Popular Library Oct ’62; 50c). [There seems to be some disagreement in various listings as to when the paperback edition was published; my soon-recycled ruined copy's edition lists only the S&S first publication dates, so no help, but paperbacks did usually appear the next year in those years, so '62 isn't unlikely. TM]
    • The Show Must Go On · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Jan 1960
    • The Cure · ss Playboy Oct 1957
    • Daybroke · ss Star Science Fiction Magazine Jan 1958
    • Show Biz · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1959
    • The Masterpiece · ss Rogue Jun 1960
    • I Like Blondes · ss Playboy Jan 1956
    • Dig That Crazy Grave! · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1957
    • Where the Buffalo Roam · ss Other Worlds Science Stories Jul 1955
    • Is Betsy Blake Still Alive? · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1958
    • Word of Honor · ss Playboy Aug 1958
    • The Final Performance · ss Shock—The Magazine of Terrifying Tales Sep 1960
    • All on a Golden Afternoon · nv F&SF Jun 1956
    • The Gloating Place · ss Rogue Jun 1959
    • The Pin · ss Amazing Dec 1953/Jan ’54
    • I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell · ss F&SF Mar 1955
    • The Big Kick · ss Rogue Jul 1959
    • Sock Finish · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1957
    Pleasant Dreams Robert Bloch (Jove 0-515-04743-0, Jun ’79, $1.75, 252pp, pb)
    Contents differ from Arkham 1960 edition, back cover lists teasers for four stories, three of which are not in this edition. [These "missing" stories are "Enoch", "Mr. Steinway" and "That Hell-Bound Train"--TM]
    • 7 · Sweets to the Sweet · ss Weird Tales Mar 1947
    • 17 · The Dream Makers · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
    • 49 · The Sorcerer’s Apprentice · ss Weird Tales Jan 1949
    • 63 · I Kiss Your Shadow · ss F&SF Apr 1956
    • 85 · The Proper Spirit · ss F&SF Mar 1957
    • 95 · The Cheaters · nv Weird Tales Nov 1947
    • 117 · Hungarian Rhapsody · ss Fantastic Jun 1958, as by Wilson Kane
    • 129 · The Light-House · Edgar Allan Poe & Robert Bloch · ss Fantastic Jan/Feb 1953; completed by Bloch from a Poe fragment.
    • 147 · The Hungry House · ss Imagination Apr 1951
    • 171 · Sleeping Beauty · ss Swank Mar 1958, as “The Sleeping Redheads”
    • 187 · Sweet Sixteen · ss Fantastic May 1958, as “Spawn of the Dark One”
    • 209 · The Mandarin’s Canaries · ss Weird Tales Sep 1938
    • 223 · Return to the Sabbath · ss Weird Tales Jul 1938
    • 241 · One Way to Mars · ss Weird Tales Jul 1945
The original edition's contents:
    Pleasant Dreams Robert Bloch (Arkham House, 1960, $4.00, 233pp, hc)
    • Sweets to the Sweet · ss Weird Tales Mar 1947
    • The Dream Makers · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
    • The Sorcerer’s Apprentice · ss Weird Tales Jan 1949
    • I Kiss Your Shadow · ss F&SF Apr 1956
    • Mr. Steinway · ss Fantastic Apr 1954
    • The Proper Spirit · ss F&SF Mar 1957
    • Catnip · ss Weird Tales Mar 1948
    • The Cheaters · nv Weird Tales Nov 1947
    • Hungarian Rhapsody · ss Fantastic Jun 1958, as by Wilson Kane
    • The Light-House · ss Fantastic Jan/Feb 1953; completed by Bloch from a Poe fragment.
    • The Hungry House · ss Imagination Apr 1951
    • Sleeping Beauty · ss Swank Mar 1958, as “The Sleeping Redheads”
    • Sweet Sixteen · ss Fantastic May 1958, as “Spawn of the Dark One”
    • That Hell-Bound Train · ss F&SF Sep 1958
    • Enoch · ss Weird Tales Sep 1946

If you wanted a representative sampling of Robert Bloch's good to best work in short fiction in the latter 1940s through the earliest '60s, these are fine books to pick up, even if a few of his most notable stories of the latest '50s and turn of the '60s, such as "The Funnel of God" and "A Home Away from Home", are not included in them. The Jove edition of Pleasant Dreams, from 1979 and not too long after Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bought the paperback publisher Pyramid Books and redubbed it Jove, was reshaped, one suspects either by Bloch himself or in consultation with him, to omit the stories then-recently collected in The Best of Robert Bloch (Ballantine/Del Rey 1977) and Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of (B/DR 1979), career retrospectives mostly mining the fantasy and sf short fiction work and the horror and suspense work respectively of Bloch to date at that time...and to add a few stories from Bloch's first hardcover collection, The Opener of the Way, a book which Bloch presumably wasn't too eager to bring back into print in toto. Some relevant confusion clearly led to the bad back-cover blurbing referred to above.

I remember my father, Robert Mason (1937-2020), buying me that Jove edition while we were on the 1979 road trip to visit our extended families on the East Coast just before the family's relocation from New Hampshire to Hawaii; he wasn't feeling too generous at the time, or was simply annoyed with me (can't imagine how that would happen), but made a weak objection to buying a paperback horror collection since the writers who wrote such things were simply delusional and believed in such things as ghosts and goblins, which I immediately, perhaps not quite gently but certainly deservedly, mocked. Perhaps in part in realizing what a nonsensical objection that was, as someone who'd read Bloch's work from time to time over the years, he relented. I'm not sure which secondhand store or library sale I'd picked up that (probably previously unread) copy of Blood Runs Cold from, sometime also in 1978 0r '79, in either New Hampshire or Hawaii, but I was glad to have it; also gathered about then by me, such contemporary collections by Bloch as Atoms and Evil (Fawcett Gold Medal 1963, and focusing on his then-recent science fiction and science-fantasy; from the Kailua Library sales-shelf in 1979 and in rough shape at time of purchase), while containing some good stories, lacked the heft of the work these two paperbacks offered ("Talent" is perhaps the best story in that volume, but it's not quite up to "The Final Performance" nor "Sweets to the Sweet") . So, it took forty-one or -two years for some small but demoralizing bad luck on my part to ruin my copies.

I think I'll replace them. They don't run too cheap these days.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for today's more prompt and less self-involved SSW entries.



Wednesday, November 11, 2020

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: CHILD'S PLOY edited by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (Macmillan, 1984)


1 * Introduction * Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini (in)
5 * The Rocking-Horse Winner * D.H. Lawrence (ss)  Harper’s Bazar Jul 1926
23 * How Pearl Button was Kidnapped * "Katherine Mansfield" (Kathleen Murray) 
(ss) Rhythm Sep 12 1912, as by Lili Heron
29 * The Beautiful White Horse * William Saroyan 
(ss)  Esquire Jun 1938; also as “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” in My Name is Aram
38 * Paul's Case * Willa Cather 
(nv)   McClure’s May 1905
61 * Little Boy Lost * Q. Patrick (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler) 
(ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1947
90 * Too Early Spring * Stephen Vincent Benét 
(ss) The Delineator Jun 1933
105 * The Threatening Three * William Campbell Gault (as "
The Threatening Trio"), (ss) 10-Story Detective Magazine Oct 1948
123 * The End of the Party * Graham Greene 
(ss) The London Mercury Jan 1932
134 * The Landscape of Dreams * John Lutz 
(ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 24 1982
143 * Fire Escape * Cornell Woolrich 
(na)  Mystery Book Magazine Mar 1947, as by William Irish (source story for The Window and its remake, The Boy Cried Murder)
191 * Ludmila * Jean L. Backus (as by "David Montross") first appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to be Read with the Lights On, edited by Harold Q. Masur, Random House 1973
198 * Day for a Picnic * Edward D. Hoch 
(ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Mar 1963, as by Pat McMahon
212 * Carnival Day * Nedra Tyre 
(ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1958
225 * Good Man, Bad Man * Jerome Weidman 
  (ss) The Saturday Evening Post Jul 1 1967
243 * Looie Follows Me * John D. MacDonald  
  (ss) Collier’s Aug 27 1949
258 * Here Lies Another Blackmailer * Bill Pronzini 
(ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1974
266 * Morning Song * Betty Ren Wright 
(vi)  Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine Nov 1982
271 * The Hedge Between * Charlotte Armstrong 
(nv) Conflict: Stories of Suspense Fll 1953, as “Meredith’s Murder”
300 * Uncle Max * Edward D. Hoch 
(ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Mar 1965 as by Pat McMahon

One of the only four? volumes of the Macmillan Midnight Library, all? anthologies by Muller and Pronzini from 1984/85 mixing with aplomb mystery, suspense, horror, fantasy, contemporary mimetic and other stories, despite the subtitle "An anthology of mystery and suspense stories", much in the manner of some of Pronzini's earlier selections, such as Midnight Specials, or the "Alfred Hitchcock"-branded anthologies for Random House Robert Arthur, Harold Q. Masur (one of whose volumes was the original source for the Jean Backus story--before today I was aware of only one original story in an AHP: anthology, Thomas Disch's "Casablanca" in the Arthur-edited volume he assisted the ailing Arthur with), and a few others had been assembling in both adult-targeted and YA-slanted series. I might have copies of all four...this one was recently unboxed in my effort to get my books back into some sort of order. All of them appear to have less than superb, but neither terrible nor conventional, cover designs and illustrations by Mary Mietzenfeid...and story headnotes from the editors. The packaging might've helped suppress sales; perhaps also the tendency for the books to turn up underappreciated (and some widely anthologized) stories from several decades previously.

My listing here seems as if it's the first online to include page numbers, and I've now added the first publication sites (contents and first publication data from WorldCat, the FictionMags Index and ISFDB). Much as I will reread the book in its entirety...but this doesn't stop me from commenting on some of my old favorites and stories I still remember well from this volume and previous encounters...at times in such similar volumes devoted to sf and fantasy stories about kids (Children of Wonder edited by Philip "William Tenn" Klass) or horror, suspense and fantasy stories likewise focused (The Little Monsters edited by Roger Elwood and Vic Ghidalia and sequels and similar efforts) and the like.

For example, the lead-off story is a mildly supernatural bit of a chestnut, the morose "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D. H. Lawrence, in which a boy takes on the burden of keeping his household financially afloat, in the wake of the collapse of his parents' marriage, by furiously riding his hobby-horse and gaining while doing so accurate prognostication of the winning horses at the local track. Graham Greene's nearly as famous "The End of the Party" is also a bit more outré than suspense fiction is usually accorded, involving twin brothers who have a rather bad time with a party game, and the unfortunate consequences that an empathy that tips over into telepathy between twins can have (even as Greene dismisses the term "telepathy" in a line in the story).

On the other end of the spectrum, "The Beautiful White Horse" is, as the editors note, a tale of nearly the most mild sort of horse-theft, or -borrowing, two young Armenian-American cousins in the early decades of the last century can get up to...it's the often-excerpted first chapter of William Saroyan's largely autobiographical and most popular book for young readers, My Name is Aram, but is by no means painfully naive reading for adults. While Stephen Vincent Benet's "Too Early Spring" is, as the editors suggest in that story's headnote, not a story of conventional crime at all...rather than one of too-conventional (and mean-spirited) outlook leading the parents of a community to blithely insist their suspicions of a sort of infraction on the part of their early-adolescent children must be true, and punished accordingly. The crime, as Muller and Pronzini suggest, is one against the kids--too often the case in human affairs...or even beyond, among other species (for we are also animals). 

Much of the rest of the book is indeed crime fiction as we usually understand it, and doesn't suffer for that. Further reportage on these stories soon!

The other three Muller/Pronzini Macmillan Midnight Library items I'm aware of are Witches' Brew (1984)--horror and supernatural fiction by women, and the 1985 duo Kill or Cure (medical crime fiction) and Dark Lessons (campus crime fiction).



The other three Macmillan Midnight Library anthologies edited by Muller and Pronzini:

Witches' Brew: Horror and Supernatural Stories by Women (1984)

Kill or Cure: Suspense Stories About the World of Medicine

(1985)

The resident patient / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --
The superfluous finger / Jacques Futrelle --
The Cyprian bees / Anthony Wynne --
Easter devil / Mignon Eberhart --
But the patient died / Lawrence G. Blochman --
The problem of the covered bridge / Edward D. Hoch --
Hurting much? / Cornell Woolrich --
The memorial hour / Wade Miller --
Guilty witness / Morris Hershman --
The doctor takes a case / George Harmon Coxe --
Miracle of the fifteen murderers / Ben Hecht --
Doctor's orders / John F. Suter --
The splinter / Mary Roberts Rinehart --
Sound alibi / Jack Ritchie --
Paint doctor / Joe L. Hensley --
The other side of the curtain / Helen McCloy.



















Dark Lessons: Crime and Detection on Campus  
(1985)

William Wilson / Edgar Allan Poe --
Murder at Pentecost / Dorothy L. Sayers --
Murder at Mother's Knee / Cornell Woolrich --
The lethal logic / Norbert Davis --
To break the wall / Evan Hunter --
When Greek meets Greek / Graham Greene --
Charles / Shirley Jackson --
The ten o'clock scholar / Harry Kemelman --
The problem of the little red schoolhouse / Edward D. Hoch --
The disappearance of Maggie / Talmage Powell --
A matter of scholarship / Anthony Boucher --
Final exam / Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg --
Broken pattern / George C. Chesbro --
Dead week / L.P. Carpenter --
Van Der Valk and the high school riot / Nicholas Freeling --
Robert / Stanley Ellin --
The turncoat journal of Marc / Milton Stearns, Barry N. Malzberg.

Friday, October 30, 2020

FFB: Robert Arthur's Young Readers' Ghosted Anthologies, Continued: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S GHOSTLY GALLERY (Random House, 1962) and ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S SPELLBINDERS IN SUSPENSE (RH, 1967): Friday Fright Night

Previous blog entries from the Random House YA anthology series:



Other volumes in the Random House YA series:

Robert Arthur, editor:
Alfred Hitchcock's Sinister Spies (1966)
Alfred Hitchcock's Daring Detectives (1969)

Robert Arthur, author:
Alfred Hitchcock's Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries (1963)
the initial AH and the Three Investigators novels (beginning 1964)

Henry Veit, editor:
Alfred Hitchcock's Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense (1973)



Contents
• Frontispiece blurb by Robert Arthur (as by Alfred Hitchcock): These are mystery-suspense stories. Some will keep you on the edge of your chair with excitement. Others are calculated to draw you along irresistibly to see how the puzzle works out. I have even included a sample or two of stories that are humorous, to show you that humor and mystery can also add up to suspense.

So here you are, with best wishes for hours of good reading.

• The Chinese Puzzle Box by Agatha Christie [Hercule Poirot], (ss) The Sketch Oct 3 1923, as “The Case of the Veiled Lady”
11 • The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell (nv) Collier’s Jan 19 1924
65 • Puzzle for Poppy by "Patrick Quentin" (Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler) (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1946
79 • Eyewitness by Robert Arthur (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Jan 28 1939; as "Eye Witness"
94 • Man from the South by Roald Dahl (ss) Collier’s Sep 4 1948; as "Collector's Item"
105 • Black Magic by Sax Rohmer [Bazarada], (ss) Collier’s Feb 5 1938
119 • Treasure Trove by F. Tennyson Jesse [aka Wynifried Margaret Tennyson Jesse] [Solange Fontaine], (ss) McCall’s Apr 1928
126 • Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper by Robert Bloch (ss) Weird Tales Jul 1943
146 • The Treasure Hunt by Edgar Wallace [J. G. Reeder], (ss) Flynn’s Nov 22 1924
162 • The Man Who Knew How by Dorothy L. Sayers [Pender], (ss) Harper’s Bazaar Feb 1932; also as “The Man Who Knew”
175 • The Dilemma of Grampa Dubois by Clayre Lipman and Michel Lipman (ss) The American Family a 1952 issue
182 • P. Moran, Diamond-Hunter by Percival Wilde [P. Moran], (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1946
Robert Arthur, having inherited the editorship of the Random House "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies aimed at adult readers either with or just after 1959's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: My Favorites in Suspense (in the spot where Arthur would be credited in his later volumes, Patricia Hitchcock under her married name is cited instead), had produced another volume in that series, 1961's AHP: Stories for Late at Night (and might also at least helped put together 1957's AHP: Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV at Simon & Schuster) before Random House decided they also might have a market for a juvenile-readers' series, and tapped veteran children's editor Muriel Fuller to assemble the nicely illustrated and designed Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful (1961). However, Fuller's book was somewhat lacking in punch; a quarter of the text was taken up with a long excerpt from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, excellent material but even better in context and while suspenseful, not exactly the kind of thing kids picking up a Haunted AH book might be looking for. A chestnut of a Doyle Sherlock Holmes story was mixed with stories a bit more on point from some good writers, such as Manly Wade Wellman, but nearly all of those stories were from young readers' magazines Boy's Life and Story Parade. This was the kiddie roller-coaster.
By the time the second AH volume for young readers was released, Arthur had the gig. None of his selections were from magazines aimed at kids, yet all were accessible to young readers. Perhaps the self-indulgence of Fuller in running the Twain excerpt for much of her book was seen as more off-putting than Arthur including three of his own stories, if good ones, as a means of presumably supplementing his take of the editorial budget (or perhaps he sold rights to himself for budget prices to allow for only two stories in the public domain to be included). This was definitely a full-strength anthology for little monster-lovers. While Arthur was never afraid to run a chestnut in his YA books as well (such as "The Upper Berth", certainly, and to a lesser extent the Burrage, Wells and Stevenson stories), he was also offering fairly recent stories for 1962, in the Kuttner and Moore (even if it was dealing in its outre manner with an early postwar situation) and most of the others.
By the time of the 1967 suspense volume, the success of both Random House series was assured, as was that of the third series Arthur had launched with them, the Three Investigators novels. Unfortunately, Arthur's health was beginning to fail by this time, even if his ability to assemble an entertaining anthology was undiminished; the mix of impressive chestnuts young readers might not've yet encountered (such as cover story "The Most Dangerous Game", probably the most plagiarized short story in the 20th Century in English; I find myself disagreeing with Friday Fright Night host Curtis Evans in his relative assessment of the original story and the first film made from it, by largely the same folks behind the first King Kong; I prefer the original text) and even slightly more "edgy" newer stories such as Roald Dahl's "Man from the South". Of course, I'd also take slight issue with the notion that Robert Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" (another remarkably widely-plagiarized story!) is a realistic mystery/suspense story so much as horror...Daphne Du Maurier's "The Birds" wanders up to the edge of that divide, as well...though including either the Dahl, which had already become one of the most famous of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: tv episodes, nor "The Birds", source story for the inferior 1963 Hitchcock film, probably wasn't too much a matter of controversy around the Random House offices. 
I certainly loved this series of anthologies as a young reader, and inhaled them along with the Random House adult-oriented volumes from about 1974 onward (and the Dell paperbacks taken from them and their similarly-packaged series of best-ofs from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine), the RH volumes as edited by Arthur up till his death in 1969, and the adult series continued by Harold Q. Masur from the next volume till the death of Hitchcock himself in 1979; Henry Veit was to produce the two YA anthologies cited above after Arthur's last.
Curtis Evans will have the links for this week's, possibly the last Friday Fright Night this year?, at his blog tonight, and I'll have a fortnight's worth of Friday's "Forgotten" Books at my blog sometime tonight as well, with others added as I find them tomorrow.