Short Story Wednesday: THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES: SERIES VII (1979), edited by Gerald W. Page

• Publication: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII
  
• Editor: Gerald W. Page
• Date: 1979-07-00
• ISBN: 0-87997-476-1 [978-0-87997-476-3]
• Catalog ID: UJ1476
• Publisher: DAW Books
• Pub. Series: DAW Collectors
• Pub. Series #: 346
• Price: 
  $1.95
• Pages: 221
• Format: 
  pb
• Type: ANTHOLOGY
• Cover: The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII by Michael Whelan
• Webpages: archive.org--however, only available thus to those with print disabilities, alas, beyond the introduction and table of contents/previous publication credits.

• Contents:
• 7 • Introduction (The Year's Best Horror Stories: Series VII) • essay by Gerald W. Page
• 11 • The Pitch • non-genre • (1978) • short story by Dennis Etchison (Whispers, October 1978)
• 20 • The Night of the Tiger • (1978) • short story by Stephen King (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1978)
• 34 • Amma • [Nyumbani Universe] • (1978) • novelette by Charles R. Saunders [as) by Charles Saunders] (Beyond the Fields We Know #1, Autumn 1978)
  
• 54 • Chastel • novelette by Manly Wade Wellman (first publication here)
• 78 • Sleeping Tiger • (1978) • short story by Tanith Lee (Dragonbane, #1, Spring 1978)
• 87 • Intimately, with Rain • (1978) • short story by Janet Fox (Collage, November 1978)
• 94 • The Secret • (1966) • short story by Jack Vance (first publication in the US; first published in Impulse:The New Science Fantasy, March 1966)
• 103 • Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose • (1978) • short story by Charles L. Grant (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1978)
• 118 • Divers Hands • [Julian • 11] • novelette by Darrell Schweitzer (first publication)
• 144 • Heading Home • (1978) • short story by Ramsey Campbell (Whispers, October 1978)
• 149 • In the Arcade • (1978) • short story by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing Science Fiction, May 1978)
• 159 • Nemesis Place • (1978) • short story by David Drake (Fantastic, April 1978)
• 173 • Collaborating • (1978) • short story by Michael Bishop (first published in the anthology Rooms of Paradise, edited by Lee Hoffman [Quartet Books Australia])
• 192 • Marriage • (1977) • novelette by Robert Aickman (first US publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1978)
• bibliographical information from ISFDB and the FictionMags Index.

I was moving around stacks of books in one of the various rooms of the house festooned with such stacks, and that's how I turned up my copy of The Eyes Still Have It the other week (see George Kelley's late review of the book, in today's list of Short Story reviews...I read it when it was newish, damned near 30 years ago, and the next book in that pile was today's subject, my copy, from 1979, of Gerald W. Page's fourth volume in The Year's Best Horror Stories, and the seventh to be published (the first three were reprints of a British annual, and Karl Edward Wagner would edit the annual for the next two decades). My first volume of the annual had been the fifth, which I discovered as a reasonably new book in '77, and it was one of the spurs that pointed me toward picking up new issues of the fiction magazines I could find on the newsstands, or even via mail order....

This was the first volume to gather fiction first published in 1978, though the only story included I had read previous to picking up this volume was the Charles Grant story, as many of his series of stories set in Oxrun Station, his haunted New England town creation, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in the first new issue I'd bought and read, March 1978. Page, unlike Wagner, would also sprinkle a few first-publication stories into his volumes, such as the Wellman and Schweitzer stories as the only examples here...but I had been reading Wellman in anthologies since I was eight years old, and was always ready for more.

I could recommend all the volumes in this DAW Books annual series, which ended, sadly, with the even sadder death of Wagner, but this one is among my very favorites. 

Among the most powerful stories, for me, was the lead-off story by Dennis Etchison, "The Pitch", which ISFDB somewhat clumsily tags as "non-genre", by which they mean it's not actually fantasy, sf, nor horror...which it isn't, but it is the kind of suspense fiction which deals with psychopathic behavior, of a sort Etchison seemed to be able to publish in the horror press more readily than in crime-fiction magazines or anthologies, perhaps because of its intensity. I think such fiction might not have as much trouble finding a cf market today. Likewise, Michael Bishop's closing story, involving a two-headed (but one body) sort of conjoined twins, runs all along the edge of the fantastic without planting a flag firmly on either side...a rather unsettling and brilliant story, particularly upon first reading.

Likewise among the better works in an impressive set, the Janet Fox story, "Intimately, with Rain"; first published in the now-obscure Collage, a West Coast university little magazine for November 1978; this below might be an earlier issue:

The weakest story in the volume was (for me, unsurprisingly) Stephen King's "The Night of the Tiger", from the F&SF issue before the first new one I bought. But even that one is better than such contemporary items as his "The Cat from Hell", which I read in Terry Carr's first volume of Year's Finest Fantasy the year before, or the Gunslinger stories, which first saw publication in F&SF beginning with the October 1978 "All-Star" anniversary issue.

Page was also not unwilling to include no little sword and sorcery/horror crossover fiction in his volumes, something that (perhaps surprisingly) Wagner was less wont to do (though horror published as horror was finding ever more markets in the decades Wagner was editing the series.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's Short Story reviews entries, and, I am somewhat disappointed this long-out-of-print volume is available in the Archive.org facsimile text at the link above if one has difficulties with standard print. I shall post links to other online texts, if time permits.

Good to Brilliant: Sitcoms: TRYING TIMES (a sitcom anthology series, PBS, 1987-89)

Trying Times (co-produced with CBC, which ran these as episodes of a previously-extant anthology series called Lies from Lotus Land)

103: "Get a Job" (1987) starring Steven Wright, Catherine O'Hara and Tim Matheson; written by Earl Pomerantz; directed by Allen Goldstein

"The Visit" (1987) starring Julie Hagerty, Jeff Daniels, Swoosie Kurtz; written by Christopher Durang; directed by Alan Arkin. Apparently ?later staged elsewhere as "Wanda's Visit"

"The Boss" (1989) starring Jean Stapleton, Alan Arkin & Corey Feldman; written by Marilyn Suzanne Miller; directed by Arkin 

"The Hit List" (1989) starring Peter Riegert and Geena Davis; written by A. R. Gurney; directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg

"Hunger Chic" (1989); starring Carrie Fisher, Danitra Vance, Griffin Dunne; written by George C. Wolfe; directed by Buck Henry.

A period of distortion, leading to less than a minute's drop-out, about five minutes in, but otherwise intact.

"A Family Tree" (1987; the PBS pilot episode); starring Rosanna Arquette, Hope Lange, John Stockwell, David Byrne; written by Beth Henley and Budge Threlkeld; directed by Jonathan Demme. Uploaded, 15 years ago, in 3 parts: part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Friday's "Forgotten' Books: the links to the reviews, 12 September 2025

Patti Abbott: please see Ron Scheer

Brian Busby: Carnac's Folly by Gilbert Parker

Martin Edwards: Safe Secret by "Harry Carmichael" (Leopold Ognall)

Eric: The Commandos by Elliott Arnold

Will Errickson: Under the Fang edited by Robert McCammon

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Death at Four Corners by Anthony Gilbert

Bev Hankins: She Came Back (aka The Traveller Returns) by "Patricia Wentworth" (Dora Amy Turnbull)

Lesa Holstine: Sandwich by Catherine Newman

Rich Horton: The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen; Victims of the Nova by John Brunner

Jerry House: The Sargasso Ogre and Fear Cay, Doc Savage novels by "Kenneth Robeson" (Lester Dent)

John Howard: Christina Alberta's Father by H. G. Wells

Kate Jackson: the TBR pile

Jackie Kashian: sf writer Kage Baker (lo-fi but enthusiastic interview); Paul Caiola (@thatagedwell podcast) on LGBTQ+ lit (in much better audio)

George Kelley: Secret Agent of Terra by John Brunner/The Rim of Space by A. Bertram Chandler (a 1962 Ace Double)

Margot Kinberg: Appointment with Death by Agatha Christie

K. A. Laity: Black Magic by Marjorie Bowen

Karen Langley: Miss Marple's Final Cases by Agatha Christie; Lowest Common Denominator by Pirkko Saisio (translated by Mia Spangenberg)

B. V. Lawson: "The Problem of Cell 13" (collected in his The Thinking Machine) by Jacques Futrelle

Steve Lewis: Worlds of If: Science Fiction, November 1967, edited by Frederik Pohl  (this issue can be read here)

Todd Mason: The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell; Devil's Scrapbook by Jerome Bixby

Neeru: Mr. Babbacombe Dies by Miles Burton

James Nicholl: Galactic Empires edited by Brian Aldiss

J. F. Norris: Puzzle for Players by "Patrick Quentin" (Hugh Wheeler and Richard Wilson Webb)

Jim Noy: The Spiral Staircase (aka Some Must Watch) by Ethel Lina White

Colman/O: The Big Bite by Charles Williams

J. Kingston Pierce: Overboard by George F. Worts (the Bill Crider Memorial PaperBack series)

James Reasoner: Rogue Cop by William P. McGivern; Longhorn Stampede by Philip Ketchum

Ron Scheer: Karnak Cafe by Naguiz Mahfouz (David Cramner on Ron Scheer) (Scheer's original post)

Scott: Professor Borges: A Course in English Literature edited (from Borges's lectures) by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis

Steven Silver: The Jewel of Bas by Leigh Brackett and Thieves' Carnival by Karen Haber (a Tor Double)

Victoria Silverwolf: Fantastic Stories, October 1970, edited by Ted White

Kevin Tipple: Beneath the Depths by Bruce Robert Coffin

"TomCat": The Case of the Curious Heel by Ken Crossen

TM

Sergio Angelini and James Harrison: Film Noir Fest 2025

Women sf and fantasy magazine editors at mid-century

John D. MacDonald: "What is Talent?"

Short Story Wednesday: "Best of the Year" stories, mostly from 1964: John D. MacDonald, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, Frank Roberts; Peter Beagle

A return to the anthologies detailed in this post: 

FFB: THE 1965 ANNUALS of fiction and drama, further augmented...some more...

In which I begin with some of my favorites, taken from the fiction volumes (I may drop in some discussion of some of the plays eventually, or in another post).

"Blurred View" by John D. MacDonald, first published in the newspaper Sunday supplement magazine This Week (a bit like a more wide-ranging version of Parade), the 23 February 1964 fiction special, and can be read as collected and headnoted here by Peter Haining in his 1996 anthology The Orion Book of Murder; first read by me in "Anthony Boucher" (William White)'s Best Detective Stories of the Year: 20th Annual Collection

"Blurred View" is a relatively brief and brisk take on how a cad finds himself blackmailed after a murder he was quite sure was well-staged as accidental death; it's deftly written and very neatly thought out, if still a bit slight. I suspect annual editor Boucher was drawn to the neatness, as well as happy to have a reason to include a MacDonald story. (Not All That) Oddly enough, Judith Merril's sf and fantasy annual for '65 has a better, supernatural story by JDM, "The Legend of Joe Lee".

Further looking into the Merril annual, the first of these volumes I was to find and read (in 1978, at the Nashua, NH library, where I would also first find several of the others indexed in the earlier post), brings to mind some stories that made a stronger impact than either of these particular two MacDonald items, such as the lead-off story, "Automatic Tiger" by Kit Reed...a fantasy that was one of her earlier contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), and perhaps the first story of hers to gain her widespread attention, as she built her career with fairly equal emphasis on crime fiction, fantasy and some sf, and contemporary/mimetic fiction over the next several decades (having been a professional newspaper reporter before beginning to publish fiction, with a good story in F&SF a few years earlier); "Automatic Tiger" the story is mostly about keeping what's most important in one's life front and center, as well as taking some nicely-aimed chill-shots at what we too often mistake for what's important. Among those also to make a strong impression on me was Mack Reynolds's canny political sf story "Pacifist", about whether sustained peace can ever be achieved through violence, no matter how "surgical" (Reynolds was particularly fascinated by this kind of question, as once a Socialist Labor Party member who had served as speech-writer and general assistant for his father Verne's presidential run as the candidate of this extremely doctrinaire Marxist party, whose founder Daniel De Leon had criticized Marx for the latter's own "deviations" in his later political writing).

Another yet was the Australian writer Frank Roberts, with the grim "It Could Be You", a dystopian slight exacerbation of how life was barely lived/survived (and sometimes not for long) in a very near-future Australia (or elsewhere in the "First World")--a more sophisticated early precursor to Mad Max, reprinted from the Oz news/analysis/arts/some fiction magazine The Bulletin, in the 3 March 1962 issue; Merril first read it in a 1964 issue of the then-new Short Story International magazine, which she loved...which folded after a couple of years, but was revived in time for me to find 1978 issues on newsstands and enjoy it for a number of years, not realizing that it hadn't been continually published when picking up my first issue. (I have belatedly realized I gave this story, and its complicated publishing history, its own SSW entry here).

As I look at the two most venerable eclectic (if mostly contemporary-mimetic fiction) US/North American Anglophone anthologies for '65, the O. Henry and the Best American Short Stories, probably the most widely-read of the stories collected in both in recent years is the fantasy short story, one of only a relative few at shorter than novel-length (and many of those gathered in the volume The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances) by Peter Beagle, "Come Lady Death"...albeit this was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, opening some doors in '64 that would be closed to fiction from more fantasy-heavy magazines. A few of the other stories might come closer some of their cohabitants to sustained audiences/readership nearly as widespread, but I doubt that any are read nearly as often over the decades as the Beagle is...even when the other contributors (many more prolific than Beagle) have among their catalogs at least a few stories at least within shouting/staged reading distance, such as Joyce Carol (or, as she signs herself in the '65 annual, J. C.) Oates and her earlier "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"...with a mythic quality, though not fantasy per se, of its own.

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

Australia's second-oldest literary magazine, Meanjin Quarterly, folds, as does the annual volume Best American Poetry:  Lit Mag News 

Adam Pearson: "The People Imagine a Vain Thing", Metropolitan Review, 9 August 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more: 5 September 2025

Patti Abbott: A Loss for Words by Lou Ann Walker

Douglas A. Anderson: The Autobiography of A. Merritt; A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool by Sam Moskowitz; 1930s omnibus anthologies of crime and horror fiction among others, edited by Dorothy Tomlinson, or John Gawsworth, or others, published by Gollancz and Hutchinson, among others; Great Stories of Sport edited by Thomas Moult, featuring E. R. Eddison; the works of Bernard C. Blake

Sergio Angelini and Aidan Brack: King's Ransom by "Ed McBain" (Salvatore Lombino/eventually legally Evan Hunter) and the films based on it

Brad Bigelow: Pick Up by Eunice Chapin

Ben Boulden: Domino Island by Desmond Bagley

Brian Busby: Carnac's Folly by Gilbert Parker

Charles Gramlich: the novels of Mike Sirota

"DforDoom": The Wicked Gnomes and The Iron God (Modesty Blaise graphic novels) by Peter O'Donnell and Enrique Badia Romero

Martin Edwards: Be Shot for Sixpence by Michael Gilbert

Eric/Paperback Warrior: When Michael Calls by John Farris; The Damagers by Donald Hamilton

Will Errickson: Under the Fang edited by Robert McCammon

Jose Ignacio Escribano García-Bosque: The Leyton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

Murray Ewing: An Echo of Children by Ramsey Campbell

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Who Killed Aunt Maggie? by Medora Field

Lesa Holstine: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Rich Horton: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky (transcriptions of Wolinsky and Richard Lupoff's Pacifica Radio/KPFA-FM San Francisco literary discussion series)

Jerry House: The Red Skull: A Doc Savage Novella by "Kenneth Robeson" (Lester Dent)

Kate Jackson: Writing the Murder: Essays on Crafting Crime Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst; A Puzzle for Fools by "Patrick Quentin" (in this case, apparently Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler): Death in the Backseat by Dorothy Cameron Disney

Tracy K: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (with a callback to a review by the much-missed "John Grant")

Kaggsy: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac

George Kelley: All Roads Lead to Rome edited by Hank Davis and David Afsharirad

B. V. Lawson: Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher (William White) edited by Francis Nevins and Martin H. Greenberg (can also be read here at Typepad...for not much longer...and we might hope Archive.org might look into preserving the older posts  in that format, as B. V. migrates her back files to her new Blogspot site, necessarily with somewhat different formatting)

Steve Lewis: Blondes Don't Cry by Merlda Mace

Gideon Marcus: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1970, edited by Edward L. Ferman; "Leviathan!" by Larry Niven (a sequel to an earlier F&SF story, "Get a Horse!"), Playboy, August 1970, edited by Hugh Hefner (in comments, I briefly note the other fiction in that issue of the skin magazine--not so much the airbrushing).

Todd Mason: Fantastic anthologies and other best-of fiction magazines anthologies

New stories by Shirley Jackson and (in English) by B. Traven, and a reprint by John Collier

Mike: The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

Neeru: Follow This Fair Corpse by Laurence Dwight Smith

J. F. Norris: Greymarsh by Arthur J. Rees

Jim Noy: podcast: Martin Edwards on his 2025 books; Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett; Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

"Puzzle Doctor": Lies and Dolls by Nev Fountain; The Final Vow by M. W. Craven

James Reasoner: Blue Book, May 1938, edited by Donald Kennicott; West on 66 by James H. Cobb; Shakedown by "Ben Kerr" (William Ard)

Stephen Silver: Tor Double 21: "Home is the Hangman" by Roger Zelazny/"We, in Some Stranger Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" by Samuel R. Delany

Kevin Tipple: Among the Shadows by Bruce Robert Coffin

Short Story Wednesday: John D. MacDonald, Robert Arthur, Anne Gibbons, Val Duncan, Margaret Atwood: more from early 1950s US magazines: REDBOOK, June 1951; BLUEBOOK, July 1953; ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, June 1953, and a new vignette by Margaret Atwood (Twitter, 2025)

John D. MacDonald:  "Nothing Must Change" (Redbook 1951); "Manhattan Horse Opera" (Black Mask 1947, as reprinted in EQMM, 1953, as "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose")

MacDonald demonstrates his mastery of various modes of short fiction between these two stories, originally published four years apart, one in Redbook, which at this point was aiming itself at younger married couples, while still broadly fitting into the dynamics of a slick magazine with a largely female readership, the other in Black Mask, not quite the birthplace of noirish crime fiction writing, but as close as any single publication came to being so. (Spell- checkers on blogging software hate the the word "noirish".) "Nothing" involves the reunion of two women friends, one now one of the key visual arts critics of the time, the other having settled in as the wife of a bohemian younger painter, a bit of a smart-ass but very devoted to his work. His wife isn't so very sure of the quality of his work. Things go better than she fears, though the degree to which she has subsumed herself into his somewhat iffy career, and unsettled by that predicament, while feeling herself, to say the least, underaccomplished in the face of both these people important to her, and afraid her old friend will and that she won't tell him he has no shot, is well drawn.

The Black Mask story  is a good, late example of what the writers for that magazine could do, and JDM was not one of the less talented ones, for all that he came in in its very last years; a relatively minor but reasonably canny functionary in the underground sports betting world of Brooklyn gets caught in the switches when smoother operators set him up for a very hard fall at the hands of much uglier thugs; things aren't going his way at all. The ending is not necessarily one you'd guess was coming, but it works. Even relatively young JDM knew how to bring a verisimilitude to his work that even some of the greater pros who were his peers could envy. 

Robert Arthur: "The Man with the Golden Hand", Bluebook 1953, was a gifted editor and a good writer, but as with this example of his Murchison Morks loose series of fantasies, could lay the shtick on a bit heavily at times. It remains an amusing story, while pushing its comic aspects a bit hard, and there are better examples among the Morks tall-tale narratives (Morks isn't so much a recurring character as a narrator to others), but one could see why this story nonetheless led off the fiction contents of this issue. Redbook and Bluebook, as the titles might suggest, had begun their long runs as stablemates, but McCall by 1956 would sell Bluebook, which  was still definitely and squarely aimed at male readers, hence the fanboy article on Hemingway's machismo in this issue, as well. But they still weren't afraid of women writers contributing by 1953, and the near-vignette "Relic" by Anne Gibbons does a relatively good job of setting up a rather grim discovery in the life of its boy protagonist, in the midst of his not terribly nurturing life. 

Likewise, what little I've turned up about Val Duncan, whose EQMM reprint story "Emerald Bait" was originally in Esquire, and its slick origins and relatively clever resolution don't give us any more clues than I've been able to turn up otherwise whether Duncan was a male or female writer, with its biter-bit plot and reasonably deft battle of the sexes execution. It, too, won't rock anyone's world, but you might get a chuckle out of the last little twist. One could see why editor Frederic Dannay, half of "Ellery Queen"'s two-cousins team on the writing side, dug it.

Redbook [Vol. 97 No. 2, June 1951] ed. Wade H. Nichols (McCall Corporation, 25¢, quarto, cover by Zoltan Farkas) [] (Full Text) 
Details supplied by Steve Scott & Joe Koomen.
• 2 · The Lion’s Roar · [uncredited] · cl
• 3 · Between the Lines · [uncredited] · cl
• 4 · Letters to the Editor · The Readers · lc
• 6 · Kids’ Haven · Bradley Smith · ar
• 8 · Pictures of the Month · [uncredited] · mr
• 10 · Four Other Fine Films · [uncredited] · mr
• 12 · Help Them to Help Themselves · Irma Simonton Black · ar
• 13 · What’s New in Records · [uncredited] · rv
• 14 · Tops in the Shops · [uncredited] · ms
• 20 · News About Medicine · [uncredited] · cl
• 21 · They Can’t Live on Air! · The Editor · ed
• 22 · ; illustrated by Edwin Georgi
• 24 · How Frightened Are Your Children? · Stanley Frank · ar
• 26 · Nothing Must Change · John D. MacDonald · ss; illustrated by Mac Conner
• 28 · The Three Lives of Janet Leigh · Lloyd Shearer · ar [Ref. Janet Leigh] [nearly lifelong media crush...]
• 31 · Let’s Abolish Report Cards! · Arthur D. Morse · ar
• 32 · Little Arthur · Rosemary Taylor · ss; illustrated by Robert Patterson
• 34 · Can Vets Save Your Pets? · Clive Howard · ar
• 36 · Second Magic · Jean Kinkead · ss; illustrated by Gwen Fremlin
• 38 · The Devil and Lynn · Selwyn James · ar
• 41 · Psychologist’s Casebook: No. 14 · Dr. John R. Martin · ar
• 42 · With This Ring · Adele S. Osherson · ss; illustrated by Al Buell
• 44 · In Our Time: No. 7—This Was It! · Collie Small · ar
• 46 · The Bippolo Seed · Dr. Seuss · ss; illustrated by Dr. Seuss
• 48 · Government Girls · William Lindsay Gresham · ar
• 50 · Young Folks at Home: When the Livin’ Is Easy · Charlotte Montgomery · ar
• 52 · Confession · Alec Rackowe · vi; illustrated by Milton Wolsky
• 54 · They Play for Pay · [uncredited] · ms
• 59 · Television · [uncredited] · cl
• 66 · We Are Proud to Announce · [uncredited] · cl
• 73 · Books · [uncredited] · rc
• 74 · Fashions · [uncredited] · cl
• 96 · Camp, School Directory · [uncredited] · ms
• 101 · Flight from Scandal · Paul Ernst · na; illustrated by Herbert Saslow

Bluebook [Vol. 97 No. 3, July 1953] ed. Maxwell Hamilton (McCall Corporation, 25¢, 128pp, quarto, cover by Robert Doares) [] Can be read here.

• ifc. · Purely Personal · The Editor · cl [Ref. John Novotny, Michael Sheridan, René Belbenoit, J. L. Bouma, Harold Mehling & Harry Kursh]; profiles and photos of John Novotny, Michael Sheridan, René Belbenoit; profiles only of J.L. Bouma, Harold Mehling, Harry Kursh.
• 1 · Coming Up · [uncredited] · cl
• 2 · Pro and Con · The Readers · lc
• _2 · [letter from Roslyn, NY] · Tom Solters · lt
• _2 · [letter from Albany, NY] · Preston M. Evans · lt
• _2 · [letter from Oslo, Norway] · Capt. Ole Bull · lt
• _2 · [letter from Auburn, CA] · J. W. Prouty · lt
• _3 · [letter from Bellevue, WA] · George Brommers · lt
• _3 · [letter from San Francisco, CA] · Duane Otis · lt
• _3 · [letter from Delta, CO] · Kenney Linn · lt
• _3 · [letter from Taylorsville, IL] · Bernard Coady · lt
• _3 · [letter from Dallas, TX] · Carl Snodgrass · lt
• _3 · [letter from Toledo, OH] · D. B. Seem · lt
• 4 · Thinking Out Loud · Maxwell Hamilton · ed
• 5 · What Next! · [uncredited] · cl
• 6 · Ernest Hemingway—Muy Hombre! · Jackson Burke · ar [Ref. Ernest Hemingway]
• 11 · The Man with the Golden Hand [Murchison Morks] · Robert Arthur · ss; illustrated by Hank Berger
• 16 · Second-Hand Dream · Frank O’Rourke · ss; illustrated by Miller Pope
• 23 · One Was a Murderer · Luther Locke · ts Exciting Western January 1949; illustrated by Harry Rosenbaum
• 28 · Wagons—Roll! · J. L. Bouma · nv; illustrated by Bob Riger
• 38 · The Biggest Small Business in the World · Harold Mehling & Harry Kursh · ar
• 45 · Cecil and Benny · John Novotny · ss; illustrated by Frank Lacano
• 50 · Relic · Ann Gibbons · vi; illustrated by Tom Edwards
• 52 · Captain Streeter vs. The City of Chicago · Horace Bailey Brown · ar
• 54 · A Song Was Born… · [uncredited] · ms
• 61 · Hair the Color of Blood [Milo March] · M. E. Chaber · ss; illustrated by Al Tarter
• 68 · Let’s Live in a Trailer · Michael Sheridan · ar
• 74 · Mountain Man · Tom Roan · ss; illustrated by Dave Stone
• 81 · America’s First Aviator · Theodore Taylor · ms
• 83 · The Big Mogul of Muscle · Pat Ryan · ar
• 88 · Wordly Wise: Ballyhoo · Webb B. Garrison · cl
• 91 · To Our Readers · The Editors · ed
• 92 · Forbidden Trails · René Belbenoit · na; illustrated by Ray Houlihan
• ibc. · Relax and Enjoy · The Editors · rv

This issue can be read here.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Vol. 21, No. 115, June 1953] ed. Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay)(The American Mercury, Inc., 35¢, 144pp+, digest, cover by George Salter) [] Details supplied by Douglas Greene. 3 · The Betrayers · Stanley Ellin · ss 17 · Winning Sequence · Margery Sharp · ss The Strand Magazine September 1936 27 · The Numbers Man · Anthony Boucher · ss Black Mask July 1945, as “The Catalyst” 38 · One Hundred in the Dark · Owen Johnson · nv The Saturday Evening Post October 21 1911 53 · Glimpses of the Moon · Leslie Bigelow · ss 65 · Inspector Appleby’s First Case [John Appleby] · Michael Innes · ss 68 · Detective Directory · Robert P. Mills · br 70 · The Panther · Browning Norton · ss 81 · A Woman Can Kill [Dion Davies] · Raoul Whitfield · nv Black Mask September 1933 105 · A Night at the Theater · Ben Ray Redman · ss 109 · Heads I Win, Tails You Lose · John D. MacDonald · ss Black Mask September 1947, as “Manhattan Horse Opera” 119 · Emerald Bait · Val Duncan · ss Esquire October 1951 123 · Doublecross · Aljean Meltsir · ss 128 · The God of the Hills [Uncle Abner] · Melville Davisson Post · ss The Country Gentleman September 1927 143 · Index to Volume 21—January-June 1953 · [uncredited] · ix

This issue can be read here.

And, this from Margaret Atwood, in response to certain school districts in Alberta, apparently the Ground Zero of her country's own MCanadaGAt efforts, banning her The Handmaid's Tale and other works from the school grounds:

Margaret E Atwood

@MargaretAtwood

Here's a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike -- we are told -- The Handmaid's Tale. (Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.): John and Mary were both very, very good children. They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits. They grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex. Although they claimed to be Christian, they paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor and the Good Samaritan and forgiving your enemies and such; instead, they practised selfish rapacious capitalism, because they worshiped Ayn Rand. (Though they ignored the scene in The Fountainhead where “welcomed rape” is advocated, because who wants to dwell, and also that would have involved sex and would de facto be pornographic. Well, it kind of is, eh?) Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk? So they lived happily ever after. But while they were doing that The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job. The end.

2:22 PM · Aug 31, 2025

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Margaret Atwood: 'Handmaid's Tale Banned in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Schools...And everyone and their pet canary wants me to "comment."' (In The Writing Burrow, Atwood's blog, 2 September)

For more of today's stories, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Piet Nel's reviews of stories from a number of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction dear to my heart and often key early reading experiences...