SSW: early stories, by Theodore Sturgeon and Don DeLillo, and stories by Dennis Lynds and Lord Dunsany; from ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, February 1964, edited by Frederic Dannay (Clayton Rawson, Managing Editor) and EPOCH, Winter 1960, edited by Baxter Hathaway, Neil Brennan and others (with Assistant Editors Abigail Carson, Sandra Leff, C. Michael Curtis et al.): Short Story Wednesday

Epoch, v. X, #2, Winter 1960, edited by Baxter Hathaway, Morris Bishop, Walter Slatoff, James McConkey, Neil Brennan, Forrest Read; assistant editors Leigh Buchanan, Robert Gillespie, C. Michael Curtis, Abigail Carson, S. David Schacker, Sandra Leff (Epoch Associates, 75c. 64pp, + covers, tall digest, saddle-stapled)

* 66 * Contributors * uncredited * editorial/biographical blurbs

* 66 * The Stoic * Richard McDougall * pm (reprinted from previous issue due to erratum)

* 67 * At the Crossing * Jan Wahl * ss

* 78 * Wasingham * M. Travis Lane * pm

* 80 * The Laughing Picnic * Janice Vos * ss

* 93 * Two Poems * Parm Meyer * gp

    * 93 * City Rooster * pm

    * 94 * Sermon with a Purled Ending * pm

* 96 * How to Make Love * Neil Weiss * pm

* 97 * A Young Man Sat in Central Park * Dennis Lynds * ss

* 104 * To a Lady * Ralph J. Salisbury * pm

* 105 * The River Jordan * Donald R. DeLillo * ss

* 121 * Two Poems * Charles Gullans * gp

   * 121 * St. John's Hampstead * pm

   * 122 * O Saisons, O Chateaux * pm

* 123 * The Slow Harvest * David Ray * pm

* 124 * Notes, Reviews, Speculations * column

   * 124 * The Mansion by William Faulkner (Random House, 1959)                          *  Walter J. Slatoff * br

   * 125 * New Campus Writing No. 3 edited by Nolan Miller and                                    Judson  Jerome (Grove Press, 1959) 

                * Leigh M. Buchanan * br

   * 126 * Mexico City Blues by Jack Kerouac (Grove Press, 1959) *                       Baxter Hathaway * br

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [v43 #2, Whole No. 243, February 1964] ed. "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay); Clayton Rawson, Managing Editor (Davis Publications, Inc., 50¢, 164pp, digest) 
Details supplied by Douglas Greene.

• 6 · Run—If You Can · Charlotte Armstrong · ss
• 15 · The Blizzard Murder Case · Philip Wylie · na The American Magazine June 1937, as “Puzzle in the Snow”
• 36 · The Victim of Coincidence · Robert Twohy · ss
• 44 · The Adventure of the Final Problem [Schlock Homes] · Robert L. Fish · ss
• 53 · Hardcovers and Paperbacks of the Month · [Various] · br
• 54 · The Shop That Exchanged Evils · Lord Dunsany · ss The Smart Set January 1915, as “The Bureau d’Echange de Maux”
• 58 · The Motion Picture in Mrs. Leister’s Mind · Florence V. Mayberry · ss
• 67 · Holdup à la Carte · Theodore Sturgeon · ss
• 75 · The Loves in George’s Life · Holly Roth · ss
• 91 · You Never Believe Me · Davis Grubb · ss
• 99 · Long Shot [Nigel Strangeways] · Nicholas Blake · ss The Strand Magazine June 1944, as “It Fell to Earth”
• 111 · Best Mysteries of the Month · Anthony Boucher · br [capsule reviews led off by a rave for Robert L. Fish's completion of Jack London's unfinished The Assassination Bureau. TM]
• 112 · The Perfect Time for the Perfect Crime · Edward D. Hoch · ss
• 117 · The Last Man Aboard · William Baldwin · ss; in EQMM’s “Department of First Stories”. [not the actor, surprise!--TM]
• 125 · The Ring of a Telephone · William Baldwin · vi [his "Second Story", Dannay's little joke]
• 128 · The Wild Thing [unnamed inspector] · Mark Van Doren · ss
• 138 · Who Would Steal a Mail Box? · Andrew Garve · ss

Unfortunately, as far as I see, neither of these have been archived online, though at least one enterprising dealer will sell you a copy of the Epoch issue for $288, presumably excluding postage.

The early stories cited in the column header today are Don DeLillo's more formally-bylined first published story, "The Jordan River", which he has not had reprinted, and a story by Theodore Sturgeon which Frederic Dannay's blurb suggests was found mixed in with the manuscript of a very old story that Sturgeon had sold in the '40s, as he hadn't this one--which is gathered in The Sturgeon Project Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon as a 1964 story, but I can't put my hands on my copy at the moment to see if there is further explication as to its probable date of composition...John Boston has informed me that, in checking his copy of the proper Complete Stories volume, there is no documentation of this story's origin beyond quoting an edited form of the Dannay blurb)...it definitely reads like a very young Sturgeon's work, which in his first years as a selling pro writer did tend to focus on short crime-fiction stories, often with nautical background, as he was in the Merchant Marine and selling much of his work to the McClure newspaper syndicate, which David Pringle has noted (from information provided to him by Patrick Nielsen Hayden) was (cozily) owned and run, by that time, by Sturgeon's uncle Richard Waldo (though McClure would've been looking for mostly shorter stories than this one). Dannay in his blurb suggests it reminds him of the stories of the '20s, when such series as the Ellery Queen stories were first published; I'd suggest he's more accurate in suggesting it also feels like a story from the heyday of Street and Smith's Detective Story Magazine, perhaps a decade later, given the non-explicit sense of this story being set during the Great Depression. The exploration of the anxieties of its protagonist, a young waitress named Gladys McGonnigle but always called "Happy" or "Hap" by her doting boss, as she takes care of a lonely nightshift at his cafe while he's away at a local neighborhood watch meeting (a rash of robberies at small eateries of late...leaving one to wonder why she might be best left alone for a night shift); leaving that gaping plot-hole barely papered over, her cleverness in handling the eventual skullduggery is amusing enough...and the focus on her indomitability in the face of bad odds feels like the more assured Sturgeon stories to come by the early '40s and throughout his career. 

While DeLillo's first published story, "The River Jordan", is a bit more like what one might expect from its author, if not quite up to his later work (probably why he's never sought to reprint the story); the rather (to various degrees) obsessed small bunch of constituents of the Psychic Church of the Crucified Christ, essentially a quartet: Burke, the would-be prophet and chiefest advocate of the new faith, McAndrew, increasingly grudgingly willing to foot the bill for their activities; and two more or less supportive hangers-on and assistants (a woman and a man), along with Burke's rather passive wife. None of their activities manages to inspire too many converts, so much as inspiring hecklers at their impromptu attempts at outreach and pitying mild hostility on the part of those they manage to offend. As with many young writers at the turn of the '60s, DeLillo's day job was with an advertising agency; one can see how that plays into this story in few ways.

Dennis Lynds was already a few years into his remarkably productive career (mostly as "Michael Collins", but also writing under house names and publishing early fantasy, sf and cf as "Jack Douglas"--not to be confused with comedy/humor writer and memoirist Jack Douglas, most active in the '50s and '60s as well--among other personal pseudonyms as well as placing stories under his legal name) when "A Young Man Sat in Central Park" was published, and it shows a writer more fully in control of his work already than the earliest Sturgeon or DeLillo, as it slowly fills in the details of a married couple, discussing as they walk through the park the trip to Europe the husband is about to take, while the wife, taking some time to recuperate from a stress-induced breakdown, hopes to join him in a few months' time (he intends to continue his work as a studio-artist painter while on his own Over There). Among the people and things that catch their eye is the titular young man, and they speculate together about whether his outfit suggests he's a writer or simply a would-be bohemian, etc., till they briefly engage him in conversation, get what they can from that, and move on, getting down to brass tacks about what they want from each other. It's a graceful story, though not one his website features (at least not too clearly, unless the 1986 story "In the Park" is an update/revisitation of this relatively early work). 

Another crossover writer between EQMM and Epoch might be Janice Vos, whom in the Contributors' notes in the issue of the latter under discussion here is cited as reporting she had sold a story to Queen's before placing her story with Epoch, but I haven't yet found a late '50s Janice Vos story in EQMM...inasmuch as her fuller name was Janice L. Vos, I wondered idly if she might be Janice Law, but Law seems a rather younger writer than Vos, who retired from the Chicago Public School system, in the only other datum I've found so far, in 1969. 

Meanwhile, in the EQMM issue, Dannay and the Lady Dunsany between them couldn't find a previous publication credit for the fine and amusing Lord Dunsany fantasy vignette, retitled after, as Douglas Greene notes above, it appeared in the The Smart Set in 1915...a particularly ironic omission, given that to help defray the expenses of H. L. Mencken's and George Jean Nathan's The Smart Set ("the magazine of cleverness" didn't draw newsstand browsers as readily as hoped), they launched a pulp magazine called (originally) The Black Mask (after the domin0-mask in The Smart Set logo), which narrowed its focus from various adventure fiction to crime fiction (and dropped "The" from the title) and reached its greatest influence and audience with contributions from such Smart Set veterans as Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich (writing in different and pathbreaking modes)...and when Mencken, initially with Nathan's help, established a new magazine, The American Mercury, a 1941 addition to its publishers' stable was another cf magazine, EQMM...which in '64 was, as it would, off and on, throughout a number of years, make the table-of-contents claim that it Incorporated Black Mask).  The Dunsany story is a deft but not altogether surprising fable, about a shop where one can...eventually...find someone to trade one's least desired traits with...

The Smart Set issue is indexed here.

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog...