SSW: "The Frenzy" by Joyce Carol Oates, THE NEW YORKER, 24 March 2025; "The Crack of Doom" by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg, ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, October 2016: Short Story Wednesday

"The Frenzy" can be read online here.

"The Crack of Doom" was reprinted in Pronzini's collection Small Felonies 2, which can be had in print form from publishers Stark House for $7 a copy. (George Kelley reviewed the collection here.)

Two accounts of aging men, more sinning than sinned against, albeit one is more obliviously culpable than the other.

The recent Joyce Carol Oates story is the account of a late middle-aged man taking his still, if just barely, teen-aged mistress (he is careful to refer to her in his running interior monologue as very nearly 20yo) on a weekend getaway in Cape May, NJ. The somewhat older Malzberg/Pronzini  story is an account of a man perhaps a few years older, trying to make sense of his predicament as he awaits his orders to commit mayhem in NYC from an amorphous but deadly conspiracy that has him under their collective thumb. Malzberg's ultraviolet sense of humor, as frequently in their collaborations, is only augmented by Pronzini's contribution.

Both men mistake themselves for essentially benevolent, even if potential agent of chaos Elias is less certain of this than is philanderer Cassidy. 

Both have wives and children that they have grown somewhat estranged from, albeit their wives are still present in their lives and can be seen as trying to help both protagonists, however insufficiently from the point of view of both men. Oates's Cassidy first met his young mistress Brianna when she performed in the same high school Palestrina choral concert as Cassidy's daughter, who remains three years younger than his paramour. Brianna for her part is somewhat flighty and lost, floating through life haphazardly (as her affair might suggest), but still full of vigor that Cassidy draws on and enjoys controlling as best (or worst) he might.

Both stories are good examples of what their authors have been capable of. The collaboration cites the Rene Magritte painting that presumably served as partial inspiration; the Oates doesn't overplay the kind of smug self-justification its Cassidy wallows in, even as he feels a distant sense of shame for some, but by no means all, of his behavior. 

I'd been meaning to read the Oates for a week or so, since it was released on-line...I'd misplaced the book I was going to review along with the New Yorker story, but the long-buried AHMM issue had just been disinterred, so it makes an interesting counterpoint in paranoia of a different flavor...as I'd put the issue away almost a decade ago before I had a chance to read it.

For more of today's short stories (and another take on the Oates!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.

On Barry Malzberg (and a bit about his college classmate Joyce Carol Oates)

More recent Bill Pronzini stories

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, nor 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. If that doesn't work, RFK, Jr. will be hosting (blue-jeans-required) raves on the White House lawn, with mandatory ingestion of steroids and Vitamin K in irresponsible doses, and carrion BBQ to follow.

(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...

SSW: Eleanor Sullivan, editor: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S ANTHOLOGY issue 4; Spring/Summer 1979 (Davis Publications)/ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S TALES TO SCARE YOU STIFF (Dial Press 1978) simultaneous Winter '78 publication

It's a magazine, and it's a hardcover...the latter has better paper, but the same typesetting; the covers are comparably uninspiring. Dell, parent company of the Dial Press, all  just purchased in 1976 by Doubleday, continues its long history of being in the Hitchcock book business...before eventually purchasing Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and its fiction-magazine stablemates from the then-collapsing Davis Publications in the early 1990s. The Dial hardcovers were mostly aimed at the library market, though Doubleday's relatively cheap production methods meant the hardcovers weren't the most durable of volumes--the glued (rather than sewn) first signature of my copy, having already been creased severely by some previous reader (this wasn't a discard, but I did pick it up at a library sale) broke away from the binding as I rather carefully read it...I suspect the magazine form would be hardier.

FictionMags Index listing: Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology [#4, Spring/Summer 1979] ed. Eleanor Sullivan (Davis, $2.25, 348pp (352pp with ads/covers, digest) This issue was also available in hardcover (Dial 1978 as Alfred Hitchcock’s Tales to Scare You Stiff). 8 · Introduction · "Alfred Hitchcock" (presumably ghosted by Sullivan) · in 9 · Come Back, Come Back [Abe Levine] · Donald E. Westlake · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine October 1960 32 · Once Upon a Bank Floor… · James Holding · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1961 42 · Warrior’s Farewell · Edward D. Hoch · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1967 49 · Adventures of the Sussex Archers [Solar Pons] · August Derleth · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine October 1962 67 · Don’t Lose Your Cool · Dan J. Marlowe · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine April 1966 70 · Bus to Chattanooga · Jonathan Craig · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1964 80 · The Perfidy of Professor Blake · Libby MacCall · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine November 1970 92 · I Don’t Understand It · Bill Pronzini · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 1972 100 · News from Nowhere · Ron Goulart · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January 1972 109 · A Case of Desperation · Kate Wilhelm · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine October 1964 125 · The Books Always Balance · Lawrence Block · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1963 134 · The Second Debut · Arthur Porges · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1968 140 · Sea Change · Henry Slesar · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine August 1969 150 · The Green Heart · Jack Ritchie · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 1963 169 · Supply and Demand · James Michael Ullman · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1964 179 · Bird Island · Ross Brown · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 1970 188 · Daisies Deceive · Nedra Tyre · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1962 195 · Dead Duck · Lawrence Treat · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 1958 207 · Vengeance on the Subway · Patrick O’Keeffe · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1970 216 · A Very Cold Gimlet · Frank Sisk · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1965 224 · Games for Adults · John Lutz · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 1971 234 · Farewell, My Brothers · Theodore Mathieson · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine January 1970 237 · Object All Sublime · Helen W. Kasson · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine December 1964 247 · Galton and the Yelling Boys · Hillary Waugh · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine March 1970 255 · Blind Date · Charles Boeckman · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine September 1964 272 · The Blue Tambourine · Donald Olson · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine February 1971 282 · Graveyard Shift · William P. McGivern · na Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine February 1957, as “Night Extra” In the Beginning, or at least in 1945, Dell Books begat the first anthology attributed to then-young-middle-aged film director Alfred Hitchcock, in the Dell MapBack paperback series, Suspense Stories. This also began Dell's rather devious (but hardly unique) practice of obscuring the actual editor of the Hitchcock (or other famous person) volumes, who in this case was probably Dell's own Don Ward, who edited most of the early Dell "Hitchcock" paperbacks, as well as the Dell magazine Zane Grey's Western Magazine (which ran from 1946 to 1954, and which got better and better the less Grey fiction it reprinted). In 1956, HSD Publications was formed to publish Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, not at all coincidentally with Alfred Hitchcock Presents: beginning its television career in Fall 1955. Likewise, by 1957, Random House engaged fiction and script-writer and magazine editor Robert Arthur to ghost-edit a series of anthologies also entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents: [various usually darkly humorous subtitles]; by 1961, these were joined by a young readers' series, with the first volume, Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful, ghost-edited by YA specialist Muriel Fuller, but subsequent volumes, till his death in 1969, edited along with the adult-AHP: series by Arthur. (Arthur was also called to upon to devise a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew-style series devoted to Hitchcock and the youthful The Three Investigators, and he wrote the first several volumes and edited the series initially afterward.) Other tv-driven projects included the 1957 Simon & Schuster anthology Stories They Wouldn't Let Me Do on TV, possibly assembled by Arthur but definitely by the network and/or sponsor censors via refusal (and in reprint editions, often intentionally retitled "AH Presents: Stories...") and writer Henry Slesar's first collection, an Avon Books paperback A Bouquet of Clean Crimes and Neat Murders; Slesar had contributed scripts and source stories to the AHP: tv series and Hitchcock branding was much in evidence. Meanwhile, Dell was very much interested in keeping their hand in, by reprinting the older anthologies they had originated and from others, publishing paperback editions of the Random House adult books that mostly split the hardcover contents into two softcover volumes, and, in the early '60s, beginning to publish best-of volumes from AH's Mystery Magazine...all packaged as if Hitchcock was the editor, and all looking rather like one another, whatever their content's source. In the UK in the latter '60s, busy editor Peter Haining would also begin editing "Hitchcock" anthologies, mostly not seen in the US (though Dell would publish the last one, in 1971) for Four Square, then New English Library. HSD would publish the magazine till 1976, selling it in late '75 to Davis Publications, formed in the late '50s when B. G. Davis left Ziff-Davis in part because the house he co-founded was less and less interested in publishing fiction magazines; Davis started his second firm with the purchase of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from Mercury Press, and one of Davis's innovations was to begin publishing as well a reprint magazine called Ellery Queen's Anthology drawing mostly from the back pages of EQMM...by late '76, under B. G.'s son Joel Davis's direction, Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology magazine had joined the stable...and the Dial Press hardcover editions came with them. Davis Publications, having suffered an expensive failure in launching a Sylvia Porter-branded financial-planning magazine, sold its fiction titles (at that point, the sf magazines Analog and Asimov's along with the two crime-fiction titles) to Dell's magazine arm in 1991; the last Anthology issues (including those spun off from the sf magazines) had appeared in 1988 (dated 1989). In 1996, Dell sold its magazine group, by then mostly devoted to crossword/word puzzle and astrology magazines along with the four fiction titles (Dell had briefly published an impressive Louis L'Amour Western Magazine as well in the mid '90s, but that had been folded before the sale and was not revived) to word-game specialist Penny Press, which has been publishing them since, doing business as Crosstown Publications/Dell Magazines. Eleanor Sullivan had been Managing Editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from 1970 at least through 1975, and was handed the reins to AHMM when it became a Davis Publication till 1981's penultimate issue; in 1981, after the death of Frederic Dannay, she edited both monthly magazines for about a year, and then handed editorship of Hitchcock's to Cathleen Jordan, a book editor who had been recommended to Joel Davis by Isaac Asimov. Jordan was a less-sure hand at the magazine, but did publish more horror fiction than Sullivan had, so a small favor there. Sullivan also edited, as a consequence, the first ten issues/volumes of Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology magazine, and under their various titles in the Dial Press editions. AHMM, as this anthology-issue might suggest, was often among the best of crime-fiction magazines available during its run, and had certainly drawn fiction from many of the best active cf writers. EQMM had always had a bit more prestige, at least theoretically (and perhaps paid a bit more), though when Avram Davidson lampooned it in one of his fantasy stories as Quentin Queely's Mystery Museum, he wasn't alone in finding it at times a bit fusty; Manhunt and a few of its imitators in the 1950s were briefly providing even better issues, though most had folded by the turn of the '60s and Manhunt was on a severe downward slide that would continue till its folding in '68; The Saint magazine was interesting but erratic, as was the less well-funded but more consistently published Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, the only primarily hardboiled cf magazine to run from the '50s into the '80s, unless one counted the then-mostly, but not exclusively, noirish AHMM, still published today.  "Come Back, Come Back" was the second in the young Donald Westlake's short series of stories about aging, literally as well as a bit figuratively heart-sick police detective Abe Levine; they were collected, with a new story to wrap them up, in a 1984 volume. Westlake wasn't a kid by the time he was writing these, but this one was published before he was thirty; you can see him grappling with big thinks at every opportunity and not self-editing the explication of every character beat, as he would in his work not too long afterward...it probably didn't hurt that Hitchcock's paid by the word, and this story could've been a tighter short story rather than the pretty good novelet that it is (apparently, Westlake notes in the Levine collection that he stopped writing the series of novelets when AHMM rejected the penultimate one--and for decades the last--for not being sufficiently criminous; Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine picked it up for publication a few years after the last AHMM entry, with Shayne a salvage market; the new story was placed with EQMM in '84, presumably just before the book's publication). Westlake's wit and incisiveness are on display...just not his usual later concision. While Kate Wilhelm, also with one of her earlier stories, "A Case of Desperation", has her paring knife firmly in hand, and the casual bullying violence of the protagonist's kidnapper is chilling to read so plainly and concisely detailed. Worse still, for Marge, the experience of being taken at gunpoint from her bank-teller job, as hostage to help him with his robbery, has too many resonances with the rest of her life. Interesting to see the protagonist of Westlake's story and the utter, resentful, careful villain of this one both spout similar notions of How Men Are Kept From Being Men, and Don't you Want a Real Man in Your Life? Defined, apparently, as a benevolent (more or less) dictator. Contrasts slightly with the default shrewish wives and turning-worm husbands of too many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents: tv episodes.  There is a bit of oddly overemphatic foreshadowing in the story's beginning, but otherwise it's about as quietly tough and emotionally complex as one might expect from Wilhelm. More to come. The whole post is in italics because the substandard Acer laptop I'm using at the moment loves to grab not just the selected text but all the text it can just as one hits the italics button, and I'd gone through and corrected for about twenty minutes early this morning when I could've been reading more stories in this collection. So I did the faster version just now. I will soon beat the Acer to shards, or perhaps sanity will prevail. For more of today's short fiction selections,  please see Patti Abbott's blog

FFB/M: FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF THE MARVELOUS, edited by Leo P. Kelley (McGraw-Hill 1973); ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, August 1964, edited by Richard Decker, with Victoria S. and Ned Benham, G. F. Foster and Patricia Hitchcock (HSD Publications)

As with the Leo P. Kelley high-school-targeted textbook in the same Patterns in Literary Art series I dealt with last week, the Fantasy companion is an interesting mix of chestnuts and some classics, with a fair amount of relatively obscure material (in 1973 and today) including a story by Kelley himself...but even more than the Supernatural volume, or the earlier Themes in Science Fiction anthology published the previous year, this one strikes me as assembled off the top of his head, featuring as it does two stories by Gahan Wilson (wrapped around the John Collier entry, no less), no fewer than four reprinted from Harlan Ellison's notable (and in 1973 very much in-print) anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), and two stories by August Derleth (for all that one is among the "posthumous collaborations" Derleth would spin out from fragments of manuscripts left among H. P. Lovecraft's papers at the time of the latter's death--as always, Derleth writing for and as himself is superior). And exactly two folktales are included...both out of collections of Irish folklore from the third decade of the 1800s...definitely giving the impression of Kelley pulling things off his shelf and putting this together rather hastily, or at least with less considered judgment than he demonstrates with the other two volumes. Also notable is the amount of arguable science fiction in this fantasy volume, particularly given his juxtaposition of potentially opposing camps of sf and fantasy in his preface. Kelley does manage to include stories by two of the more brilliant and multifarious women writers of our time in this one, however, if only two: Carol Emshwiller and Josephine Saxton.

Meanwhile, the Hitchcock's issue, coincidentally one dated with the month I was born, is otherwise a fairly typical issue of this magazine in the shank of its time as the independent "second" magazine in the English-language crime-fiction market (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine being the best-selling and most traditionally respected in those years, and most years before and since; the second publisher of EQMM, Davis Publications, founded around the purchase of Queen's in 1958, would buy AHMM in 1976), and as such it suggests a few thoughts about the magazines in the field and AHMM's place among them.

Contents: courtesy the Contento/Locus Index to Anthologies, with links to ISFDB as well:

Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous ed. Leo P. Kelley 

(McGraw-Hill 0-07-033502-8, 1973, $3.96, 305pp, tp) 

• Publication Series: Patterns in Literary Art
• vi · Preface · Leo P. Kelley · pr
• 1 · Hickory, Dickory, Kerouac · Richard Gehman · ss Playboy Mar 1958, as by Martin Scott
• 4 · Inflexible Logic · Russell Maloney · ss The New Yorker Feb 1940
• 11 · Or All the Seas with Oysters · Avram Davidson · ss Galaxy May 1958
• 20 · The Flower Kid Cashes In · George Malko · ss F&SF [The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction] May 1969
• 27 · The Soul Cages · T. Crofton Croker · ss Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland 1825
• 38 · Dreaming Is a Private Thing · Isaac Asimov · ss F&SF Dec 1955
• 52 · Roads of Destiny · O. Henry · nv Ainslee’s Magazine Apr 1903
• 70 · The Test · Richard Matheson · ss F&SF Nov 1954
• 87 · The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be · Gahan Wilson · ss Playboy May 1967
• 98 · Evening Primrose · John Collier · ss 1940
• 109 · The Manuscript of Dr. Arness · Gahan Wilson · ss Playboy Aug 1966
• 114 · The Ancestor · H. P. Lovecraft & August Derleth · ss The Survivor and Others, Arkham House 1957
• 127 · Afternoon with a Dead Bus · David Gerrold · ss Protostars, ed. David Gerrold & Stephen Goldin, Ballantine 1971
• 133 · A Miracle of Rare Device · Ray Bradbury · ss Playboy Jan 1962
• 146 · The Wall · Josephine Saxton · ss Science-Fantasy #78 1965
• 152 · “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman · Harlan Ellison · ss Galaxy Dec 1965
• 163 · Housing Problem · Henry Kuttner · ss Charm Oct 1944
• 176 · The Cheaters · Robert Bloch · nv Weird Tales Nov 1947
• 193 · The Graveyard Reader · Theodore Sturgeon · ss The Graveyard Reader, ed. Groff Conklin, Ballantine 1958; Science-Fantasy #31 1958
• 204 · The Academy · David Ely · ss Playboy Jun 1965
• 212 · Carcinoma Angels · Norman Spinrad · ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1967
• 220 · Something in Wood · August Derleth · ss Weird Tales Mar 1948
• 232 · O’Grady’s Girl · Leo P. Kelley · ss F&SF Dec 1965
• 242 · The Legend of Fin M’Coul · William Carleton · ss Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, v1 1830
• 252 · Day at the Beach · Carol Emshwiller · ss F&SF Aug 1959
• 261 · The Doll-House · James Cross · ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1967
• 276 · Lord Randy, My Son · Joe L. Hensley · ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1967
• 287 · Auto-da-Fé · Roger Zelazny · ss Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1967
• 293 · Of Missing Persons · Jack Finney · ss Good Housekeeping Mar 1955

One can suspect the degree to which Kelley saw some of these stories in the same venues I would, aside from Dangerous Visions:  a number were collected in Judith Merril's Year's Best Science-Fantasy/Speculative Fiction anthologies of the latter '50s into the latter '60s (it's probably not altogether irrelevant that DV arose from the ashes of an anthology Ellison commissioned from Merril when he was editing the Regency Books paperback line), while others probably were, rather sapiently, plucked from other anthologies, including probably Playboy's series of books collecting their fiction. As is the John Collier classic collected here only more so, David Ely's "The Academy" is outre but not actually fantasy by most definitions, for all that it was adapted for a mildly effective Night Gallery tv series segment. Any book that includes such stories as Davidson's "Or All the Seas with Oysters" and Bloch's "The Cheaters" and Finney's "Of Missing Persons" isn't actually cheating the young readers who might've been assigned this text, and the likes of Hensley's "Lord Randy", while also barely fantasy if at all, does have a built-in appeal to young readers. That the surreal Emshwiller and the similarly edge-of-science-fiction Asimov  stories might be brought together in this context is actually pretty useful, even if this book thus doesn't become a compilation of consistently brilliant work it might've been. George Malko in, and Jack Vance or Shirley Jackson or Joan Aiken or Jorge Luise Borges or Fritz Leiber or Muriel Spark or Margaret St. Clair not in, is a somewhat eccentric choice, and one wonders what specifically drove it.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine [v9 #8, August 1964] ed. Richard E. Decker (H.S.D. Publications, 50¢, 160pp+, digest) Details supplied by Douglas Greene. ifc. · Dear Reader · Alfred Hitchcock · ed 2 · Escape Route · Richard Deming · ss; not the same as the Deming story of the same title which appeared in Manhunt, October 1959. 16 · Captive Audience · Jack Ritchie · ss 22 · Bus to Chattanooga · Jonathan Craig · ss 33 · A Model Crime [Prof. Ulysses Price Middlebie] · Arthur Porges · ss 41 · Say “Cheese” · Ed Lacy · ss 54 · A Family Affair · Richard Hardwick · ss 60 · Cost of the Casket · Fred S. Tobey · ss 69 · The Fastest Gun in the West · Peg Granger · ss 75 · The Short and Simple Annals · Dan J. Marlowe · ss 86 · Journey with a Murderer · Donald Honig · ss 93 · Lovers’ Quarrel · Richard Hill Wilkinson · ss 108 · Double Trouble · Lee Millar & Wayne Hamilton · ss 115 · Round Trip · Bob Bristow · ss 123 · No Place Like Home · J. Michael Kelly · ss 131 · The Genteel Way · Menno Walter Voth · ss 136 · Jambalaya · Douglas Craig · nv Barry Malzberg somewhere once made an offhanded joking reference to, close paraphrase, "a plot stupid enough to sell to Hitchcock's" in the HSD years, and the desire to feature twist endings as a default did lead AHMM to offer some pretty damned dense semi-idiot plots. Richard Deming's "Escape Routes" (this one, as opposed to the other one, as Douglas Greene is careful to help us distinguish) is an unfortunate example of this...a fleeing criminal accidentally hijacks another fleeing criminal's car and loot...and, knowing that the other fleeing criminal had a risky plan of escape from his own current perplex, decides to go ahead and impersonate the second criminal and steal the latter's false identity and escape plan, rather than contenting himself with stealing the considerable cash and car and making his own way to a no-extradition haven.  It's cute, and has good detail, but is indicative of a weakness for this kind of story that it's also the lead story for the issue. Jack Ritchie's "Captive Audience" is more clever, if relatively slight, in its tale of a kidnapping survivor who gets to bite back at his former captors, including supposed friends. Jonathan Craig's "Bus to Chattanooga" is rather better yet, for all that it posits a rather too stereotypical abusive situation for its backwater young woman and her adoptive, thuggish uncle...her means of getting around this, however, are reasonably well thought out and the story makes emotional sense as well, however much we might wish it didn't, even given she wins in the the end.  Arthur Porges's story is part of a series of his, and in one of his default modes--it's another update on Sherlock Holmes, and the kind of notional story Porges would also tend to write in his science-fictional work, where there is a simple but baffling problem that can be addressed by some technological know-how...an approach that can make for amusing, but usually rather light at best, fair-play detection or dealing-with-the-aliens kinds of story...Porges was usually a bit better in fantasy contexts, where his cleverness with this kind of gimmick lent itself to even greater wit and charm, as with his relatively famous deal-with-a-minor-demon story "$1.98". Ed Lacy lives down to my expectations with his story, marginally better than what I've seen from him elsewhere (in marginal magazines), but also referring to whites and "natives" in the Caribbean...when he means whites and blacks, as opposed to actual native nation folk. I somewhat idly wonder if there's any familial connection between Jonathan and Douglas Craig.  AHMM was the Other consistently good-paying short crime fiction market in the 1960s, along with Queen's; I gather The Saint Mystery Magazine as well as knowing Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and the dying Manhunt were rather less well-funded and thus less generous; not sure about the London Mystery Selection and John Creasey's, but this was also a period where crime fiction might appear, for very good money indeed, in not only The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy still, but also Cosmopolitan or The Ladies Home Journal...even if a sale to the UK Argosy or Strand were somewhat more attainable goals...one could make decent-enough money from at least AHMM and EQMM. The talent gathered in those issues, even if not always working to its fullest extent, remains pretty impressive.

FFB: ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCH'S BREW edited by Henry Veit (Random House 1977)...as opposed to ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S WITCHES' BREW edited by uncredited and unidentified folks (Dell Books 1965)

Among the manifold confusions that the branding of "Alfred Hitchcock" anthologies has engendered, between their clutch of publishers (particularly Dell Books, which was in the "Hitchcock" anthology business the longest and mostest--and the books they didn't generate they often reprinted, the long Random House hardcovers frequently broken into two volumes each and sometimes with differing contents from the original anthologies and sometimes with new titles) and ghost-editors (it's not too clear that Hitchcock himself ever did much to edit any of the books credited to him; it's utterly clear that he didn't do much more than sign off in a general way on almost all of them, along with the magazine named for him and other similar products), one of those which can even vex such careful "Hitchcock" readers as Frank Babics and the folks at The Hitchcock Zone, much less all the others more casually engaged (such as ISFDB or GoodReads, and even WorldCat), is the similarity of titles between the last of the young readers' anthologies in the series Random House would publish, Henry Veit's 1977 Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, and the early (1965) entry in the long series of Dell Books paperback original volumes of stories drawn from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, edited anonymously but presumably by the editorial staff at AHMM.  Hell, I tripped up on this when writing to George Kelley, who was trying to figure out the confusion these and other references had presented, in his post on both books a year or so back. 

The known ghost-editors of Hitchcock anthologies include: Don Ward (long-term Dell editor who did "Hitchcock" anthologies from the years before the AH Presents: tv series began and branding went into overdrive, with both the Random House anthologies and AHMM beginning along with the show in 1956; notably, later, Ward edited Zane Grey's Western Magazine for Dell), Patricia Hitchcock aka O'Connell (his daughter), most diversely and importantly Robert Arthur (the one who also wrote radio scripts as well as for a wide range of fiction magazines, and who edited such magazines as The Mysterious Traveler keyed to one of his radio series), Harold Q. Masur (who succeeded Robert Arthur as editor of Random House's anthologies aimed at adults when Arthur died rather young in 1969), Peter Haining (primarily for UK paperback line the New English Library's Four Square imprint), Muriel Fuller (a children's lit specialist who edited the first Random House YA, Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful, before Arthur took the series over till his death), and for the last two YA volumes, Veit. 

So...I remember reading Alfred Hitchcock's Witch's Brew, already a bit nostalgically as I'd gone through Robert Arthur's YA Hitchcocks several years before, while sitting in detention at what was then Londonderry Junior High School one afternoon. I'd already read through some back issues of AHMM by that time, borrowed from the library or purchased at used book sales, but was a month or so away from buying my first new issue of AHMM (January 1978) and growing as addicted as I've been since to fiction magazines generally. Following the Robert Arthur YA model rather well (though it's arguably a bit less focused an anthology than most of the Arthur YAs, more like the Arthur and Masur Alfred Hitchcock Presents: adult anthologies thus, even given the witchy theme), it's a diverse and good collection of horror, fantasy and related stories mostly by notable writers in these fields, mixed in this case with a novel excerpt (from T. H. White's Arthurian fantasy The Sword in the Stone) and another novelty for the series, an abridged version of a story, this one probably an improvement on the original by the windy Sterling Lanier. 

The contents of Witch's Brew (courtesy ISFDB and corrected with The FictionMags Index, since ISFDB incorrectly assumes several of the newer stories first appeared in the Dell anthology, which it mistakes for the first edition of this book):

• The Wishing-Well • (1929) • short story by E. F. Benson
• That Hell-Bound Train • (1958) • short story by Robert Bloch
• As Gay As Cheese • (1956) • short story by Joan Aiken
• Madame Mim • (1938) • excerpt by T. H. White (The Sword in the Stone, Chapter 6)
• Blood Money • (1975) • short fiction by M. Timothy O'Keefe •
London Mystery Selection [v26, #107, December 1975] (35p, 128pp+, pb)
• His Coat So Gay • [Brigadier Ffellowes] • (1970) • novelette by Sterling E. Lanier (1977 abridgment)
• They'll Never Find You Now • (1974) • short story by Doreen Dugdale •
London Mystery Selection [v25, #100, March 1974] (25p, 128pp+, small digest)
• The Widow Flynn's Apple Tree • (1943) • short fiction by Lord Dunsany
• In the Cards • (1951) • short story by John Collier
• Strangers in Town • (1959) • short story by Shirley Jackson
• The Proof • (1953) • short story by John Moore (1907-1967)

Illustration from AH's Witch's Brew by Stephen Marchesi; scan courtesy The Hitchcock Zone.

Meanwhile, here is the Hitchcock Zone table of contents of Alfred Hitchcock's Witches' Brew, the 1965 AHMM best-of, with the pagination of the 1978 edition added by me, and original publication info from the FictionMags Index:

1965 first edition; not solely in paperback

6. Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost-written)

9. Premonition by Charles Mergendahl Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jul 1957

19. A Shot from the Dark Night by Avram Davidson  Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1958 (incorrectly cited in the book's acknowledgments as a 1960 story)

31. I Had a Hunch, and... by Talmage Powell (ss) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1959 (incorrectly cited in the book as a 1960 story) (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #18 1984)
43. A Killing in the Market by Robert Bloch Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1958 (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #16 1983)

65. Gone as by Magic by Richard Hardwick Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1960

80. The Big Bajoor by Borden Deal Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1962 (also included in Alfred Hitchcock’s Anthology #13 1983)

91. The Gentle Miss Bluebeard by Nedra Tyre Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1959

104. The Guy that Laughs Last by Philip Tremont Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1960

112. Diet and Die by Wenzell Brown Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Sep 1962

121. Just for Kicks by Richard Marsten (Evan Hunter) Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1958

132. Please Forgive Me by Henry Kane Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1959

150. A Crime Worthy of Me by Hal Dresner Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jan 1962

169. When Buying a Fine Murder by Jack Ritchie Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine Jun 1960

Richard Decker was the AHMM editor for much of 1964, succeeded by G. F. Foster, so one or the other is probably the editor of this volume unless the Dell Books editor made the selection...or some combination...

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #13, a Davis Publications magazine issue, reprinted by the Dial Press (a Dell hardcover imprint) as Alfred Hitchcock's Death-Reach

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #16 reprinted by the Dial Press as Alfred Hitchcock’s A Choice of Evils

Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology #18 reprinted by the Dial Press as Alfred Hitchcock's Crimewatch

I don't remember if I picked up my then-new 1978 third edition or the secondhand copy of the 1965 original first, but probably the former...I don't think I have a copy of the 1975 second edition from Dell:

The AHMM best-of is very much comparable, if certainly less diverse, a reading experience to the YA anthology of a dozen years later, with a similar mix of brilliant to decent writers; the classic Robert Bloch story in the Random House volume is certainly better than the good Bloch story in the AHMM book, but that's hardly a fair comparison, as "That Hell-Bound Train" is one of the key stories in Bloch's career. The ghosted introduction to the Dell book is rather funnier, one of the best in that series...one wonders who actually wrote it (perhaps devising editorials for her father was one of Patricia Hitchcock's duties in the office of the magazine). 

For some reason, the Random House paperback editions of the YA volumes would often drop some of the stories, though I don't see that RH even ever offered a paperback reprint of Witch's Brew, though the UK saw both hardcover and paperback editions:

For more of today's books, much more promptly reviewed, 
please see the gracious and patient Patti Abbott's blog.