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




































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8 comments:

  1. pattinase (abbott)January 5, 2022 at 1:33 PM

    What a lot of work you expend on this! Loved THE IRON GATE and can't think where it went to. I guess in one of the bags. Meant to keep that one.

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  2. Todd MasonJanuary 5, 2022 at 1:45 PM

    Thanks! Labor of love...and one which I meant to post as an FFB in 2917, but never wrote the text till this afternoon. I need to reread the novel--I remember liking it, but not much else about it. (Hence not having it in mind for the Millar week back when.)

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  3. Steve A OerkfitzJanuary 5, 2022 at 4:40 PM

    Loved these anthologies as a teenager. Not so much the later ones which were stories from his magazine.

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  4. Todd MasonJanuary 5, 2022 at 8:14 PM

    Yes, the magazine best-ofs were good, but not as diverse or impressive for the most part...Dell began publishing those as paperback originals in the earliest '60s, Dell eventually became the publisher of ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE in the '90s and then sold its magazine group...but well before that, had been publishing Dial Press hardcover versions, mostly for the library market, of the fat ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S ANTHOLOGY issues that David Publications would produce as magazines, in imitation of their ELLERY QUEEN'S ANTHOLOGY issues (there were also ISAAC ASIMOV'S ANTHOLOGY issues drawing from ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION back issues and, very briefly, ANALOG ANTHOLOGY best-of issues as well). Some of these were tagged ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS:, but the "real", Random House AHP ghosted series ended with Hitchcock's death in 1980.

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  5. GeorgeJanuary 5, 2022 at 10:17 PM

    So many of those covers bring back memories! I loved those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. Yes, in later years I learned Hitchcock really had nothing to do with the production of those books other than being on the cover and part of the title. Still, I have nothing but Good Memories of reading those wonderful stories!

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  6. Todd MasonJanuary 5, 2022 at 10:35 PM

    He was a branding excuse. At least Random House (and Dell and Simon and Schuster before them, and Dell almost indefinitely) and HSD Publications had the good sense to deftly exploit that branding well, for the anthologies and magazine issues, even if the magazine has had some lulls over the years, they produced as a result. Would that his films were as consistently good!

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  7. Mike StammJanuary 6, 2022 at 12:15 AM

    Thanks for posting this, Todd; I had forgotten just what a huge impact that first paperback made on me when I was 11 or 12. It was the first place that I read several of the writers that have since been very important to me, particularly M. R. James and William Hope Hodgson. I only finally acquired the hardcover a couple of years ago, and didn't notice that it contains the Millar novel, which now I will have to excavate from my study...

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  8. Todd MasonJanuary 6, 2022 at 1:07 AM

    Yes, as noted, the Arthur volumes often concluded with a novel (Theodore Sturgeon's SOME OF YOUR BLOOD was in the AHP: volume I did the other week...its first hardcover publication, as it was a Ballantine Books original after they gave up on their hardcover line) or a long novella...and unsurprisingly those weren't going to be slipped back into paperback format to compete with current or potential new paperback editions on their own. I'm surprised, though only slightly, that Random House was willing to pay for novels, but (among other things) getting the novels into libraries and not there solely on paperback spinner racks but in "permanent collections" was almost certainly a draw to some of the writers (and in such company).

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