SSW: Bill Pronzini: new HITCHCOCK'S and QUEEN'S mystery magazine contributions: Short Story Wednesday

Today, after hearing last night the high whine and self-congratulation of our highest elected fictioneer go on at tedious, mendacious length and manage to alienate even his closest counterpart in Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, while as ever trying to fanboyishly, even slavishly, Present Himself for Putin, now we can turn to one of his unelected bureaucrats for helpful hints https://www.rawstory.com/egg-prices/:

US Sec. of Agriculture Brooke Rollins suggests "beating" egg prices by raising backyard chickens...

But we know Rollins is in for a chewing-out, at least, for not floating the notion that we should all be buying Trump Eggs, always wholesome, spray-painted for your convenience either gold or pre-cancerous burnt umber. And with easy credit terms.

And, with luck, we won't die of avian flu as a result, or as a result of it infecting our neighbors' cows...but this can be thwarted with New Trump Coops! They come with restrictive covenants that don't allow any viruses at all to move in within a thousand yards of your beautiful, sexy Trump Chickens (also available spray-painted gold or burnt umber). Should cover neighboring cattle. (Conservative Charlie Sykes, who's left the GOP for the Libertarian Party in the wake of MAGA, put it this way.)

But on to more artful short stories:

"The Back End of Nowhere" by Bill Pronzini, AHMM March/April 2025, the current issue, edited by Linda Landrigan

"Tangled Web" by Bill Pronzini, EQMM March/April 2025, edited by Janet Hutchings and Jackie Sherbow (a Jake Runyon story)

I've been reading Bill Pronzini's fiction for half a century-plus at this point, and consistently enjoying it. Unsurprisingly, he's a Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster, and has been, along with his solo work, the most assiduous fiction-writing collaborator with his similarly talented wife, Marcia Muller, and with the recently late Barry N. Malzberg. His stories in the current Hitchcock's and Queen's are both worth reading, and not atypically of his work, both take a somewhat de-mythologizing approach to, in the AHMM story, a stand-alone revenge tale, and in the EQMM insurance detective series entry...both stories are good, if the Runyon series story a bit better, in part because of more complexity and detail and a bit more heft as result. 

I first read Pronzini's work in back issues of Hitchcock's my local public library kept in the kids' wing of the collection, perhaps because there were digest-sized spinner racks for YA paperbacks there, and perhaps because of the line-drawing illustrations in early-mid '70s issues of AHMM (and for a couple/few decades going forward) misled an unwary librarian or two about their nature...or she (usually the case at Enfield Central Library in the '70s) thought the magazine might hook some young minds. It was my first exposure to it, and in it Pronzini's series of stories about the "Nameless" private eye (eventually "outed" as named Bill), "The Scales of Justice"...in the July 1973 issue. And as I quickly exhausted Robert Arthur's YA-targeted "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies from Random House, and moved on to his and, after his death, Harold Q. Masur's Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthos, in hardcover from the library or the Doubleday Book Club, or in oddly-reconfigured Dell paperback editions (usually two paperbound editions drawn from every fat volume in boards0. And nearly all featuing a Pronzini story or so.

One aspect of Pronzini's work, throughout his career, I 've noted above--de-mythologizing crime-fiction tropes...Pronzini characters often realize grand fantasies of revenge are more satisfying to their bearers as fantasies when the realities of revenge become apparent, and the day-to-details of even the more dangerous aspects of private detection work are, very often, indeed quotidian rather than heroic fantasy...necessary work done, and it can take its toll, but that's what we're here for, to help others and get the work done. An early short story title for Pronzini was "Sometimes There is Justice"...sometimes. And often because people did what they needed to do, rather than flashily Set Everything Aright with a well-timed punch to a villain's jaw, or pulling and firing a crack shot through the villain's eye. 

Two good examples here, and you'll find a number of even better ones in his collections, but you probably won't begrudge the 10-spot you'll lay down for each of these issues, perhaps the last or penultimate ones published by Penny Press, as their fiction magazines, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as noted here (and a Lot of places) recently have been purchased by a new firm, 1 Paragraph. Interesting that Pronzini gets the cover on the AHMM, and he isn't mentioned (nor is Lia Matera) on the EQMM's cover...feels almost random at times, with the Penny Press titles...

Also, a grandson of the second editor (after Hugo Gernsback) of Amazing Stories, Justin T. O'Connor Sloane, is attempting to make a go of revived Worlds of If and Galaxy Science Fiction magazines in hybrid online/paper format. Robert Silverberg gives guarded if  still interesting responses in an interview conducted by Sloane, and a few familiar names are among the contributors to the first issue of the attempted revival of Galaxy (November 2024), online for free, and the Worlds of If revival, slightly older, has a sample free issue up as well.

I might gather up the Short Story Wednesday entries again this week, as organizer Patti Abbott is probably still enjoying (we hope) her Florida vacation...