Wednesday, January 26, 2022

SSW/FFB: First Installment: WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988); THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday 1989); DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell 1993)


Some of the titles of the stories collected in these volumes use, for critical purposes, epithets.

WESTERYEAR edited by Edward Gorman (M. Evans 1988; G. K. Hall 1990)
Introduction * Edward Gorman (in) ** (**noting originally published in this volume) --and each item below with a headnote by Gorman
The Sun Stood Still * "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) (ss) The American Magazine December 1934
Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses * "Mark Twain" (Samuel Clemens) (ar) North American Review July 1895
The Return of a Private * Hamlin Garland (ss) The Arena, V.3 N.1 (January?) 1891
The Idyl of Red Gulch * Bret Harte (ss) Overland Monthly December 1869 
The Lonesome Road * "O. Henry" (William Porter) (ss) Ainslee’s Magazine September 1903
One Dash—Horses (aka Horses) * Stephen Crane (ss) The New Review #81, February 1896 (and newspaper syndication in the U.S. in January of that year)
The Streets of Laredo * "Will Henry" (Henry Allen) (ss) Western Roundup--a WWA anthology editorially attributed to Nelson Nye (Macmillan 1961)
The Hard Way * Elmore Leonard (ss) Zane Grey’s Western Magazine August 1953
Mago's Bride * Loren D. Estleman  ** 
All the Long Years * Bill Pronzini **
The Damned * Greg Tobin **
Wolf Night * Bill Crider **
Liberty * Al Sarrantonio **
Trains Not Taken * Joe R. Lansdale (ss) RE:AL: Regarding Arts & Letters Spring 1987
Whores in the Pulpit * Thomas Sullivan **
Guild and the Indian Woman * Edward Gorman **
A Cowboy for a Madam * Barbara Beman **
One Night at Medicine Tail *  Chad Oliver **
The Time of the Wolves * Marcia Muller **
Hacendado * James M. Reasoner **
The Battle of Reno's Bend * L. J. Washburn **

Index revised and corrected from the WorldCat Index, with links to ISFDB, the FictionMags Index and other databases. Page numbers differ between the two editions.



THE NEW FRONTIER edited by Joe R. Lansdale (Doubleday/Double D 1989)
(Doubleday 0-385-24569-6, May ’89, $12.95, 180pp, hc) Original western anthology of 18 stories and a poem with an introduction by Lansdale and an afterword to a “lost” "Max Brand" (Frederick Faust) story by William F. Nolan. At least four of the stories are also fantasy.
Slightly augmented from the currently offline Locus Index.


 DREAMERS AND DESPERADOES edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (Dell/Laurel 1993) 

1 * Introduction(s) * Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis (in)
15 * Sweetheart * Kathleen Alcalá (ex) Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist Calyx Books 1992
Iliana of the Pleasure Dreams / Rudolfo A. Anaya --
Heartwood / Rick Bass --
The Snowies, the Judiths / Mary Clearman Blew --
Bigfoot Stole My Wife; I am Bigfoot / Ron Carlson --
Paraiso: an Elegy / Rick DeMarinis --
Winter of '19 / Ivan Doig --
Science Meets Prophecy / David James Duncan --
Cry About a Nickel / Percival Everett --
Optimists / Richard Ford --
Girls / Tess Gallagher --
Personal Silence / Molly Gloss --
Nebraska / Ron Hansen --
Friends and Fortunes / Linda Hogan --
A Family Resemblance / James D. Houston --
Rock Garden / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston --
The Flower Girls / Lawson Fusao Inada --
Death by Browsing / Karen Karbo--
I Could Love You (If I Wanted) / John Keeble --
Why I am a Danger to the Public / Barbara Kingsolver --
Do You Hear Your Mother Talking? / William Kittredge --
Nevada Dreams / David Kranes --
Eggs ; Absences : Cicadas ; Growing Tomatoes / Alex Kuo --
Sleepwalkers / Ursula K. Le Guin --
Mint / Craig Lesley --
The Interior of North Dakota / Barry Lopez --
The Woman Who Would Eat Flowers / Colleen McElroy --
Dropping Anchor / Valerie Miner --
Idaho Man / John Rember --
Slaughterhouse / Greg Sarris --
Whitney and Tracie / Carolyn See --
Emerald City: Third & Pike / Charlotte Watson Sherman --
It's Come to This / Annick Smith --
Sea Animals / Tom Spanbauer --
The Room / Katheryn Stavrakis --
Pragmatists / Robert Stubblefield --
Migrants / Elizabeth Tallent --
Double Face / Amy Tan --
Boat People / Joyce Thompson --
Talking to the Dead / Sylvia A. Watanabe --
The Indian Lawyer / James Welch --
Buried Poems / Terry Tempest Williams

Slightly corrected (and soon to be augmented) from the WorldCat index.


***Stupid publisher tricks: 
Westeryear--the first edition jacket from M. Evans (immediately above); even G. K. Hall's generic large-print-line wrap (at top of post) is a step up.

The New Frontier--jacket copy referring to Neal Barrett, Jr. as "a new discovery" in 1989, a quarter-century or so into his career; also, a jacket at least as generic if not quite as clumsy as the Evans cover for the Gorman book or D-day's package for Lansdale's previous western originals anthology, Best of the West.

Dreamers and Desperadoes--managing to leave co-editor Stavrakis's name off nearly every aspect of the packaging, save the title page, though at least the table of contents does include her introduction. Also not quite stupid but perhaps not the best choice: the reasonably handsome cover for this trade-paperback original apparently doesn't photograph too well, at least on most of the photos and scans I've seen. Hence the current slightly blurry image above...and the cover isn't the easiest to read even in the handheld presence of the potential reader (poor color choices for legibility).

And none of these received the publisher push they deserved by any means, even if the Gorman did get a second edition for large-print readers.

Contents:
Westeryear's stories are, to say the least, an interesting mix of classics and contemporaries of classics, and new fiction from some of the best writers in western fiction (among work in other fields) active at time of assembly...a quality it shares with the Lansdale and Stavrakis/Lesley  volumes...even if each book has its own share of work that might fall on either side of the line established some years back by the Western Writers of America, porously between western fiction and fiction of the west (both of which they embraced). 

And then there's the Twain essay, perhaps the most famous KTF review in at least the US canon, and persuasive enough to me at age nine that I never sought out too much of Cooper's fiction, and what little I did seemed to conform to the Clemens assessment. Twain goes to a few lengths to ensure you can read his survey for humor, but nonetheless it tells, and enrages Cooper fans to this day. Editor Gorman himself isn't beyond pointing out the warts in the older reprints he offers here, or in the other work by their contributors, in his headnotes, but the stories do help add a certain perspective and none of them are difficult reading, and clearly are part of the development of the range of western fiction all the relatively contemporary writers included in all three volumes have drawn upon and reacted to. 

"Max Brand" (Frederick Faust)'s "The Sun Stood Still" is a good example of his graceful, tense writing; Gorman notes that its wit and appreciation of life as it was lived by the everyday people of the old West wasn't as widely shared by his peers (nor some of his successors), giving his work more of a contemporary if not quite timeless quality than that of many who wrote for the pulp magazines and higher-budget and yet still prone to tropism "slick" magazines in the first half of the previous century. For those who want even early western fiction to lack subtlety and a certain dramatic verisimilitude, even when the mythos of western fiction was already being employed (not too much in this decidedly unglamorized account of farmhand life), Brand doesn't help their case too much.

Hamlin Garland made a poor showing for himself (with the help of those hoping to Reach Yet Instruct Our Youth) with such widely-distributed work as his poem "Do You Fear the Force of the Wind?", unless one was looking for simpleminded machismo. But a similar devotion to simpleminded machismo on the part of, say Hemingway or Mailer (and far too many others, even if these two more flagrantly than most) didn't stop them from having a certain dalliance, at least, with social justice causes, and Garland particularly in his early career was throwing in with agrarian socialists, Populists, progressives and other troublemakers, and his fiction about, particularly, the travails of Civil War veterans and others trying to make a life in the hardscrabble, highly Gilded Age-distorted farming country of the Midwest (perhaps a bit too much like today's), struck a chord, and that's on offer with "The Return of a Private"; it's not subtle, but, as Gorman notes, Garland had an excellent eye for the small details and challenges of life.

"The Idyl of Red Gulch", being as it is a Bret Harte story, tries to couch itself as a fable perhaps a bit too much more than is good for it, but nonetheless gets across a fine account of how even in the far western U. S., the unfortunate prejudices can shoot through society once it asserts itself as post-pioneering country. Definitely romanticized, but also making its points. 

"The Lonesome Road", being as It is an "O. Henry" story, is also not quite a fable, but doesn't, unlike the Harte, call attention to its attempt at being of Great Import with every line, but rather more casually and mildly humorously gives the account of two old hell-raising friends, one of whom has now settled into a happy marriage and a more quiet life, finding themselves together having to deal with old adversaries. An interesting weighing of what makes for an actually good life, with a  rather straightforward account of what a chaotic, unromantic thing a gunfight tends to be. Gorman is particularly annoyed in his headnote about how readily Porter's work these years is condescended to as glib and mechanical, and this story helps make his case (and, fwiw, the Doubleday/Anchor folks are still branding their best stories of the year annual in his memory).

More to come. (More distractions as other parts of the ever-collapsing  house and life demand attention, not least the cat. Don't buy a century-old house. Just don't. Unless you have the money, skill or both to keep replacing everything.)




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Friday, January 7, 2022

FFMagazines: SPECIAL REPORT: FICTION May-July 1990: "Humor" issue; edited by Keith Bellows: contributions by Harvey Jacobs, Elizabeth Berg, Roy Blount, Jr., et al. (in progress)

Special Report: Fiction, May-July 1990, no volume nor issue numbers, Humor issue. William S. Rukeyser, editor-in-chief; Keith Bellows, editor; Elise Nakhnikian, managing editor (Whittle Communications, $3.50--though not known ever to be distributed to newsstands, individual issues were offered for sale, including postage, for that amount, with a four-issue yearly subscription for $14), 70pp plus covers, 10.5x14" full-color slick with heavier-grade slick paper covers. Cover photograph by Philip Saltonstall; another on the TOC on page 1.

2 * Letters: Ramsey Campbell, complimenting the fantastica issue, August-October 1989/"Another Dimension", which reprinted his story "Little Man" (originally in Night Cry, Winter 1986); also letters from Donna D. Vitucci, Pamela Kennedy, Lillian J. Taylor, Andrea Cirillo, Ann Shields, Lottie T. Caldwell, and Sarah Aronson
5 * In This Issue: What's So Funny? *  The Editors* ed/cs (illus. as a comic strip by Joey Waldon) 
7 * Salvation Sunday * Liz Newall * ss (illus. Laura Levine)
12 * Liz Newall * anon * bi (photo by Brian Dressler)
14 * About Men * Jay Neugeboren * vi (illus. Dudley Reed)
16 * Jay Neugeboren * anon * bi (photo by Chris Wade)
19 * The Poet Lariat * Roy Blount, Jr. * poems about Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Donne, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, Stephen King, William Faulkner * gp/hu (illus. Edward Sorel)
23 * Second Thoughts * Elizabeth Berg * ss  (illus. Cary Bartholomew)
31 * Elizabeth Berg * anon * bi  (photo by John Goodman)
33 * 3 Faces of Fiction  (Humor, Mysteries, Romance) * Walter Gurbo * cartoons
34 * Because It Was There * Harvey Jacobs * ss (illus. John Craig)
40 * Harvey Jacobs * anon * bi (photo by Patrick Harbron)
43 * Pequod II * Frank Gannon * hu (illus. Robert de Michiell)
46 * Hotline! * William Price Fox * ss (illus. Karen Kuehn)
55 * William Price Fox * anon * bi (photo by Brian Dressler)
57 * Punch Lines * gp/hu (excerpts) 
57 * Bred Men Don't Wear Checks * P. G. Wodehouse * ex (from The World of Jeeves, Harper & Row 1967) (illus. Tom Bachtell)
57 * Easy Come, Easy Go * Elmore Leonard * ex (from Labrava, Arbor House 1983) 
57 * Dinner's in the Freezer * Calvin Trillin * ex (from "Barnett Frummer Learns to Distinguish Packaged Paprika From the Real Article" The New Yorker 31 March 1967/Barnett Frummer is an Unbloomed Flower E. P. Dutton 1971) (illus. Tim Lewis)
57 * Remedies that Stink * Mark Twain * ex (from "Curing a Cold" The Golden Era 20 September 1863) (illus. Robert Andrew Parker) 
58 * Till Flirting Do Us Part * "Groucho" Marx * ex (from "Private Life" in The Groucho Letters Simon & Schuster 1967) (illus. Robert Andrew Parker)
58 * Shall We Dance? * Dorothy Parker * ex (from "The Waltz" The New Yorker 2 September 1933) 
58 * Lonely at the Top * Gracie Allen * ex ("If you don't have time to cultivate all your friendships, plow under every fifth one.") from How to Become President Duell, Sloan and Pearce 1940
58 * Children We're Stuck With * Fran Liebowitz * ex (from Metropolitan Life E. P. Dutton 1978) (illus. Tim Lewis)
58 * The Trick to Toy Assembly * S. J. Perelman * ex (from "Insert Flap A and Throw Away" The New Yorker 5 February 1944) (illus. Tom Bachtell)
60 * The Long Fly Ball * Bill Bickel * ss (illus. Steve Carver)
65 * Bill Bickel * anon * bi (photo by Joyce Ravid) ("Bickel, now 35, lives in Hillside, NJ"--thus born 1955, NYC, raised in Yonkers and spent most of his adult life in Northern NJ...thanks to Dennis Lien, I've learned he died on 16 September 2020. Obituary/remembrance on his Comics I Don't Understand site)
68 * Elsewhere in Special Reports * house ad for the other Special Report: magazines, about health, sports, etc., part of a line of quarterly magazines sold primarily to and for doctors' offices.
70 * Passages * ex from a story/article in each Special Reports: current issue * house ad

A review of the contents will be posted tomorrow (or, really, later today)...even given the relative difficulty in trying to strike a balance between the types of humorous writing, this issue is reasonably successful, even if the cover was the worst I saw on an issue of Special Report: Fiction during its brief run, if more in concept than execution. The image below is more "bleached" than my copy's front cover. 

Bickel's story is a baseball fantasy; the Jacobs story is a well-turned satire on corporate dissembling; the Newall story a gently funny account of church-based romance. More post-sleep.















images courtesy layout designer William Grimes






























Previous index and review here:

Incomplete contents of two previous issues:
Special Report: Fiction November 1989-January 1990: Growing Up Female
A Single Ounce of Good * Kaye Gibbons * ex A Virtuous Woman Algonquin Books 1989
In the Courtyard of the Five Julias * Anna Monardo * ss 
--from references in the letter column detailed above

Special Report: Fiction August-October 1989: Another Dimension
Little Man * Ramsey Campbell * ss  from Night Cry Winter 1986 (as noted above)
I Just Kept Staring at the Rock * Bill Bickel * vi --cited in his bio blurb indexed above; Bickel in ISFDB and in the Fictionmags Index

Publisher Chris Whittle standing in front of first-issue cover images from other Special Report: magazine titles: Health. Living. Family. Whittle had been publisher of Esquire.
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Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Short Story Wednesday: ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES FOR LATE AT NIGHT Robert Arthur, editor (Random House, 1961); and various paperback abridgments (Dell, Pan)

The degree to which these volumes were Robert Arthur's painless education in the joys of suspense, mystery, horror, fantasy and science fiction would be hard to overestimate, and any time I look upon them it's difficult not to be reminded that these were among the greatest of the "books of gold" in my early literate life, a phrase employed by writer Gene Wolfe in one of his essays to describe  guideposts into the range of literature available but not always accessible, particularly to young readers who might not have first-rate used bookstores nor large libraries available to them. But they might just have a decent-sized public or school library, where the librarians were sensible enough to procure and keep books such as these anthologies on the shelves. Of course, Arthur was kind to his talented friends and old colleagues in the fiction magazines of the 1930s-60s, as well as looking out for #1 (running as he does two of his own stories, one under his Pauline Smith pseudonym--reprinted, as it was, from a magazine he had edited), and there is no lack of chestnuts here--he knew who was likely to be reading these books, young readers (such as myself) or casual ones approaching these fields, or, as the marketing was meant to snare, those who simply enjoyed the television series and hoped for More of Same in prose. Only to be rewarded with a much better selection than even the good choices made for adaptation by producer Joan Harrison and co. And, also to be fair, some of these stories became chestnuts After publication in the various AHP: anthologies...and a few presumably because other editors had them drawn to their attention by Arthur (and his successor in the adult line of Random House anthologies, Harold Q. Masur). And some aren't too well known now, any more than they were then...the Ronan is not the first story one thinks of when one thinks of Unknown: Fantasy Fiction, retitled Unknown Worlds hoping to snag some sf readers as well by the time it published her story. Nor the Long story among Weird Tales reprints, even given he was more a stalwart contributor to that magazine. The Chatterton story being first published in this volume was a rarity in this series--perhaps she was having difficulty placing it elsewhere.

As you glance over the paperback reshuffles of the contents below, you can see how much better the hardcovers were to have--and not solely because the Margaret Miller novel The Iron Garden is missing, presumably because another publisher still had a paperback edition out or at least rights to have one out--often in later volumes, the paperbacks would replace Arthur's novels or long novellas with stories from his YA anthologies from Random House, leading me to wonder if Arthur was given the opportunity to make the reshuffling in the Dell paperbacks himself...or if some functionary at Dell or RH was tasked with this. (Though as noted below, the first edition Dell paperback for the second volume of reprinting Late at Night sports a cover derived from the first RH YA volume in the series, edited by YA specialist Muriel Fuller rather than Arthur, and less successfully than Arthur would approach the same tasks, as a veteran of writing and anthologizing for young readers as well as adults, himself).

The writers this volume would Not have introduced 8- or probably 9yo me to would run only to Arthur himself, Bradbury, Collier, Dahl (running in fine alphabetical sequence--oddly, it seems Arthur was arranging the stories alphabetically by author or pseudonym, except for Millar's novel as last entry as was his custom with the Long Story in his volumes, but for some reason broke his own sequencing with the Moore story), and Bixby and Moore and Jenkins, since I had read their "It's a Good Life--" and "Mimsy were the Borogoves" and "First Contact" in my father's copy of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One a few weeks or months before....the others in earlier-discovered kidlit and/or horror anthologies. One thing these anthologies lacked was headnotes for the stories, or similar addenda, so I would, for example, not learn of Robert Trout's work as as a CBS radio and early tv newsman for a couple of decades.
published in the UK under the
Max Reinhardt imprint, 1962




































for more Short Story Wednrsday entries, 
please see Patti Abbott's blog



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Saturday, January 1, 2022

FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to reviews, texts, etc. 31 December 2021

The latter fortnight's cycle of books and more, unfairly (or sometimes fairly) neglected, or simply those the reviewers below think you might find of some interest (or, infrequently, you should be warned away from); certainly, most weeks we have a few not at all forgotten titles...if I've missed your review or someone else's, please let me know in comments. Apologies for the delays this weekend--a computer that won't cooperate with Blogspot can manage to dump a Lot of data...

Patricia Abbott: "I'll Be Waiting" by Raymond Chandler, The Saturday Evening Post 14 October 1939 (as posted on the Library of America Story a Day site); "Dr. H. A. Moynihan" (from A Manual for Cleaning Women) by Lucia Berlin; "The Babysitter's Code" by Laura Lippman, Plots with Guns: A Noir Anthology edited by Anthony Neil Smith; Stephen Sondheim: A Life by Meryle Secrest

Bob Adey: A Woman Named Anne by Henry Cecil

Bonnie Armstrong: Florida by Lauren Groff

Tony Baer: novels by Dorothy B. Hughes, Barry N. Malzberg and others; books by Anna Kavan, John Rechy, Nat Turner, Nelson Algren, Agnes Smedley, Ralph Ellison and others; Eugene O'Neill; The Wrong Venus by Charles Williams; Edith's Diary by Patricia Highsmith; The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything by John D. MacDonald

Frank Babics: Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine March/April 2021, edited by Linda Landrigan; "The Phantom Coach" by Amelia B. Edwards, All the Year 'Round, Christmas 1864; "To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt" by Charles Dickens, All the Year 'Round, Christmas 1865

Brad Bigelow: Women in a Village by Louise Rayner; The Story of a Life, Volume 6: The Restless Years, by Konstantin Paustovsky  (translated by Kyril FitzLyon)

Elgin Bleecker: "The Christmas Party Murder" by Rex Stout, Collier's 4 January 1957

Joachim Boaz: Dawn by Octavia Butler; Where the Time Winds Blow by Robert Holdstock; Brave Old World by Philippe Curval (translated by Steve Cox)

John Boston: Amazing Stories, December 1966, edited by Joseph "Ross" 

Ben Boulden: A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson

John R. Breitlow: The Deep Blue Goodbye and Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald

Brian Busby: best reads of 2021: Brian Moore, Ted Allan, Grant Allen, Douglas Sanderson, and others; The Drift of Pinions by Marjorie Pickthall; The Tenants were Corrie and Tennie by Kent Thompson

Jason Cavallaro: Ten Best Horror Novels Read This Year

Marvell Cleary: Fast Company by Marco Page

Douglas Cohen: Realms of Fantasy August 1997, edited by Shawna McCarthy

Bill Crider: Flight to Darkness by Gil Brewer (original post)

Liz Dexter: best books of 2021: Anne Tyler, Alex Haley et al.; Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs; A Song Flung Up to Heaven by Maya Angelou

Susan Dunlap: In the Last Analysis by "Amanda Cross" (Carolyn Heilbrun)

Scott Edelman: José Pablo Iriarte

Martin Edwards: Scandalize My Name by Fiona Sinclair; The Marble Forest by "Anthony Boucher" (William White) and 11 others (of the Northern California MWA); The Second Shot by Anthony Berkeley

Peter Enfantino and Jack Seabrook: Batman comics, July 1983; June 1983; Warren comics, May 1976

Barry Ergang: Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Lee Goldberg

Will Errickson: 2021 in review; Living in Fear: A History of Horror in Mass Media by, and including fiction selected by, Les Daniels; Year in Review

José Ignacio Escribano: Year in Review; Campion at Christmas by Margery Allingham; Sébastien Japrisot; Helen McCloy

Curtis Evans: Blind Date with Death and Walls That Hear You by Cornell Woolrich 

"Olman Feelyus": Where the Money Was by Willie Sutton; The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy

Paul Fraser: To Follow a Star: Nine SF Stories about Christmas edited by Terry Carr; Science Fantasy August 1963, edited by John Carnell; "Fasterpiece" by Ian Creasey Asimov's Science Fiction January-February 2022; "The Santa Claus Planet" by Frank M. Robinson, originally published in The Best Science-Fiction Stories, 1951 edited by E. F. Bleiler and Ted Dikty; "Christmas on Mars" by "William Morrison" (Joseph Samachson) Thrilling Wonder Stories December 1941; "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus" by Frederik Pohl, first published in his collection Alternating Currents (Ballantine 1956); "Winter Solstice" by Mike Resnick, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction October-November 1991; "Kitemaster" by Keith Roberts, Interzone Spring 1982; "Miracle" by Connie Willis, Asimov's Science Fiction December 1991; from Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction, January/February 2022: "The Bumblebee and the Berry" by M. Bennardo; "Charioteer" by Ted Rabinowitz; "Track of a Legend" by Cynthia Felice, Omni, December 1983; from Analog: Science Fiction and Fact January/February 2022: "Splitting a Dollar" by Meghan Hyland and "Charioteer" by Ted Rabinowitz

Cullen Gallagher: The Girl with No Place to Hide by "Nick Quarry" (Marvin Albert)

Barry Gardner: The Dark Root by Archer Mayor

Ed Gorman: Fake I.D. by Jason Starr (original post)

Dana Gould: Katherine Coldiron on Plan Nine from Outer Space: A Monograph; Who Goes There? by "Don A. Stuart"/John W. Campbell, Jr.

Sue Granquist: "The Wish" by Ray Bradbury. Women's Day December 1973 (and published as a chapbook in the 2000s)

Aubrey Hamilton: The Dishonest Murderer by Frances and Richard Lockridge; Crime for Christmas by Lesley Egan; The Murder of Cecily Thane by Harriette Ashbrook; Primary Storm by Brendan Dubois; Cold Florida by Phillip DePoy 

Bev Hankins: A Surprise for Christmas edited by Martin Edwards; "The Incredible Theft" by Agatha Christie (expanded form of the serial "The Submarine Plans", from the Daily Express, April 1937); Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie; The Death at Yew Corner by Richard Forrest; Spare Time for Murder by John Gale; Murder in the French Room by Helen Joan Hultman; The Pig on the Hill by John Kelly

James Harris: stories collected in The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer: "Wives" by Lisa Tuttle, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), December 1979; "Sandkings" by George R. R. Martin, Omni August 1979; "Sporting with the Chid" by Barrington J. Bayley, from his collection The Seed of Evil; "The House of Compassionate Sharers" by Michael Bishop, Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy May 1977

Don Herron: E. R. Burroughs in newspaper syndication, among many

Rich Horton: Beer! Beer! Beer! by Avram Davidson (a recovered "lost" novel); Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho; 2021 in retrospect/posts elsewhere

Jerry House: "Mr. Wray's Cash Box, or The Mask and the Mystery" by Wilkie Collins (a "lost" novella); "The Other Woman" by "Ellen Hogue" (Eleanor Hogue Kerkhof nee Stinchclomb), All-Story Love Stories 19 and 26 January 1935 (a novelet as two-part serial); The Arkham Sampler Winter 1948, edited by August Derleth; "The Mystery of the Man Who Evaporated" by Robert Arthur, from his collection Alfred Hitchcock's Solve-Them-Yourself Mysteries Random House, 1963; "The Menace of Mastodon Valley" by Kenneth Gilbert, Action Stories September 1926; Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew; "The Striding Place" by Gertrude Atherton, The Speaker 20 June 1896; the John Hanson stories by Sewell Peaslee Wright, Astounding Stories, 1930-33; Of Worlds Beyond: The "Science" of Science Fiction Writing, A Symposium edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach; "The Firefly" comics stories by Harry Shorten and Bob Wood, from Top-Notch Comics 1940-42; The True Story of Moonshine

Kate Jackson: A Case for Solomon by Bruce Graeme; Murder in Blue by Clifford Witting; Plots and Gunpowder: A Personal Biography of Thriller Writer Gerald Verner by Chris Verner; Reprints of the Year polling; Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer

Randy Johnson: Black is the Color by John Brunner (original post)

Tracy K: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles; American Christmas Stories edited by Connie Willis; The Last Noel by Michael Malone; Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon (translated by David Howard); Six Degrees of Literary Separation

Jackie Kashian: Tess Rafferty (audio only); video; Ophira Eisenberg on crime fiction and drama

Colman Keane: Kolkata Noir by Tom Vater; Love and Bullets: Megabomb Edition by Nick Kolakowski; Many Deadly Returns edited by Martin Edwards

George Kelley: Galactic Empires edited by Brian Aldiss; Dangerous Visions and New Worlds edited by Andrew Nette and Iain MacIntyre; Great Detectives: A Century of the Best Mysteries from England and America edited by David Willis McCullough; The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Twelfth Series edited by Avram Davidson; JLA by Grant Morrison Omnibus by Morrison and divers hands

Joe Kenney: Sea Scrape by "James Dark" (J. E. MacDonnell); Total Recall by Piers Anthony (distantly inspired by "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick); The Chinese Paymaster by "Nick Carter" (in this case, Nicholas Browne); The Destroyer #17: Last War Dance by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

Rob Kitchin: On the Java Ridge by Jock Serong

K. A. Laity: Muriel Spark 

Karen Langley: 2021 in review

B. V. Lawson: A Gentleman Called by Dorothy Salisbury Davis; The Mystery of Mary by Grace Livingston Hill

Xavier Lechard: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle; Victorian and Other Novels: Complexity vs. Volume; Ten Books Read This Year: The Diehard by Jean Potts and Nine Others

David Levinson: Worlds of If, January 1967, edited by Frederik Pohl

D. F./Des Lewis: Vasterien: A Literary Journal Fall 2021, edited by Jon Padgett; By Elizabeth Bowen: Eva Trout; The Hotel; The Heat of the Day; To the North; The Death of the Heart; A World of Love. Best British Short Stories, Volumes 2011-2021 edited by Nicholas Royle

Evan Lewis: "A Scandal in Bohemia": a play by Christopher Morley adapting the Arthur Conan Doyle story, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine January 1944; Disney's The Legend of Davy Crockett newspaper comic strip; Bat Masterton newspaper strip by Howard Nostrand and Ed Herron; The Kid I Killed Last Night by "Day Keene" (Gunard Hjerstedt), collection edited by David Laurence Wilson; Anonymous: Davy Crockett and the Shawnee War Party

Steve Lewis: "You'll Always Remember Me" by Steve Fisher, Black Mask March 1938; Deep Lay the Dead by Frederick C. Davis; "Diamonds of Death" by Robert Leslie Bellem, Spicy Detective Stories July 1934; "Hell's Pay Check" by Frederick Nebel, Dime Detective December 1931; "Not My Corpse" by Carroll John Daly, Thrilling Detective June 1948; Mom Meets Her Maker by James Yaffee; Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Sara Light-Waller: The Harp and the Blade by John Myers Myers, Argosy Weekly 22 June-3 August 1940 (7 issues) 

S. E. Lindberg: Conan pastiches by John C. Hocking

Leonard Lopate: Stephen King on The Best American Short Stories 2007

Robert Lopresti:"The Search for Eric Garcia" by E. A. Aymar, Midnight Hour edited by Abby L. Vandiver; "Born a Ramblin' Man" by Michel Lee Garrett, Trouble No More edited by Mark Westmoreland

Jim McCahery: Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

Neil McRobert: Something More than Night, et al.: Kim Newman

Barry N. Malzberg: Anatomy of a Killer by Peter Rabe

Todd Mason: The Supernatural Reader edited by Lucy and Groff Conklin; Rod Serling's Devils and Demons edited by Gordon R. Dickson; "It Could Be You" by Frank Roberts, The Reporter 3 March 1962 and reprinted widely; Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories My Mother Never Told Me edited by Robert Arthur; The 1965 annuals of fiction and drama, in English; The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fifth Series edited by "Anthony Boucher" (William White); The Best Detective Stories of the Year, 1971 edited by Allen J. Hubin; Prize Stories 1962: The O. Henry Awards edited by Richard Poirier

Marcia Muller: Bloodwater by "John Crowe" (Dennis Lynds)

Neeru: In Andamans: An Indian Bastille by Bejoy Kumar Sinha; 13 books to read; Eagles of the Reich by Will Berthold (translated by F. Taylor)

John F. Norris: False Witness by Helen Nielsen; Sing Me a Murder by Helen Nielsen; The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley (Cox)

Jim Noy: John Thorndyke's Cases by R. Austin Freeman

Juri Nummelin: Born of Battle by "Robert Crane" (Con Sellers)

John O'Neill: Galactic Empires edited by Brian Aldiss; Modern Classics of Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois

On The Media: Elizabeth Hand, Max Allan Collins, Alan Dean Foster, Lee Goldberg et al. on film and other novelizations

Paperback Warrior: Rambo: FIrst Blood Part 2 by David Morrell

Mildred Perkins: Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police  Corruption and New York’s Trial of the Century by Mike Dash

J. Kingston Pierce: Shadow Boxer by Eddie Muller

James Reasoner: "No Pockets in a Shroud" by Richard Deming, Black Mask January 1949; West September 1943; Amazing Stories December 1944, edited by Ray Palmer; William G. Contento, RIP; Terror Tales by John H. Knox; Western Trails May 1936, edited by A. A. Wyn(?); Detective Novels Magazine June 1944, edited by Harvey Burns; The Gunsmith: The Jingle Bell Trail by "J. R. Roberts" (Robert Randisi); Rangeland Romances January 1952; some unsold stories; The Price of a Dime: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Ben Shaley by Norbert Davis; 2021: the Wrap Up

Richard Robinson: Renegade Swords edited by D. M. Ritalin; The Thinking Machine: Fifty Novelettes and Short Stories by Jacques Futrelle; The Best Science Fiction of E. C. Tubb; Death Threats and Other Stories by Georges Simenon (translated by Ros Schwartz); Death at Sea: Montalbano's Early Cases by Andrea Camilleri (translated by Stephen Sartarelli); The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder by Patricia Highsmith

Janet Rudolph: Winter Solstice Crime Fiction; New Year's Crime Fiction

Gerard Saylor: Brodie's Ghost by Mark Crilley; Eddie and Sunny by Stacy Cochran

Jack Seabrook: The Hours Before Dawn by Celia Fremlin; "What Frightened You, Fred?" by Jack Ritchie, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine May 1958

Victoria Silverwolf: The Nevermore Affair by Kate Wilhelm; The Monitors by Keith Laumer; Fantastic Stories, January 1967, edited by Joseph "Ross" 

Kerrie Smith: Mr. Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson; The Blood Daughter by "Barbara Vine" (Ruth Rendell); Today A Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket by Hilda Wolitzer; Bells on Her Toes by Diana J. Febry

Marina Sofia: Best of the Year: Modern Classics; Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin (translated by Andrew Bromfield); Best of the Year: New Releases; BotY: New Discoveries; Fathers and Children by Ivan Turgenev (translated by Michael Pursglove); BotY: Delving Deeper into Interesting Writers; BotY: Sheer Entertainment 

Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe:  Sheree Renée Thomas

Kevin Tipple: Shot to Death by Stephen D. Rogers; Spirit of Steamboat by Craig Johnson; Arrowmoon by George Wier; Mysterical-E December 2021 edited by J. DeMarco; Guilty Crime Story Magazine Summer 2021, edited by Brandon Barrows

"TomKat": Sable Messenger by Frances Vivian; A Tough One to Lose by Tony Kenrick; The Best and Worst of 2021; The Finishing Stroke by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee); Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie; The Wintringham Mystery by Anthony Berkeley (Cox)

David Vineyard: Run for Cover by John Welcome

Bill Wallace: Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill

Mark Yon: sf Impulse January 1967, edited by Harry Harrison and Keith Roberts; New Worlds SF January 1967, edited by Michael Moorcock 

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