Showing posts with label Jr.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jr.. Show all posts

Friday, March 8, 2024

SSW/FFB: HITCHCOCK IN PRIME TIME edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg (Avon 1985)


(Avon Books, August 1985, 0-380-89673-7, $9.95, 356pp, trade pb, anthology)    Can be read here.

1  Introduction ·  Henry Slesar  · in

The 1955-56 Season 
8 · And So Died Riabouchinska · Ray Bradbury · ss The Saint Detective Magazine June/July 1953
23 · The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby · Stanley Ellin · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine #78, May 1950
44 · Momentum · Cornell Woolrich · nv Detective Fiction Weekly December 14 1940, as “Murder Always Gathers Momentum”

The 1956-57 Season
77 · The Better Bargain · Richard Deming · ss Manhunt April 1956
88 · The Hands of Mr. Ottermole · Thomas Burke · nv The Story-teller February 1929
109 · The Dangerous People · Fredric Brown · ss Dime Mystery Magazine March 1945, as “No Sanctuary”
121 · Enough Rope for Two · Clark Howard · ss Manhunt February 1957
152 · The Day of the Execution · Henry Slesar · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 1957

The 1957-58 Season
163 · The $2,000,000 Defense · Harold Q. Masur · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1958
181 · The Dusty Drawer · Harry Muheim · ss Collier’s May 3 1952

The 1959-60 Season

The 1962-63 Season
225 · Hangover · John D. MacDonald · ss Cosmopolitan July 1956
238 · Hangover · Charles W. Runyon · ss Manhunt December 1960 

The 1963-64 Season
254 · A Home Away from Home · Robert Bloch · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine June 1961
264 · Terror Town · Ellery Queen · nv Argosy August 1956

The 1964-65 Season
310 · One of the Family · James Yaffe · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1956

For whatever reason, this rather obvious project (an anthology of stories adapted by Alfred Hitchcock Presents: and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour) saw only one trade paperback edition from Avon, in 1985, toward the earlier years of the mass influx of Martin Greenberg anthologies, and coinciding with the 1985 latter-day revival of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: (one season broadcast on NBC, then three more seasons cablecast on the USA Network channel); the acknowledgements pages are misleading, and verge on useless, but, happily, along with Henry Slesar's introduction to the volume, the living and game writers (for some reason, Ray Bradbury chose not to) supplied brief but useful or at least interesting notes about the fiction and its adaptation, even when (as with Stanley Ellin), the writer in question has no clear firsthand memory of the adaptation (or, in his case, even seeing it). Co-editor Francis Nevins supplies afterwords for those writers who were already gone or unwilling (even John D. MacDonald, still ticked in 1985 that Shamley Productions had the odd idea of flanging together his story with one of the same title by Charles Runyon for that script, is game to let us know about this; Runyon not much less puzzled, but happy enough to get the check).

At least two of these stories had also made their way into "Hitchcock" anthologies I'd read in the '70s, Robert Bloch's 1961 story "A Home Away from Home" (Bloch notes that he enjoyed expanding the brief short story, an Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Poe-inspired-contest-winner, when adapting it for the AH Hour adaptation; Bloch would also employ a version of the story as the framing device for his later anthology film-script for Asylum), in Alfred Hitchcock's Noose Report (1966), one of the Dell paperbacks which were essentially best-ofs from AHMM, and Harry Muheim's "The Dusty Drawer", which leads off Robert Arthur's brilliant 1969 anthology for Random House, Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Month of Mystery (online here), as well as the Dell paperback first-volume (of 2) reprint, AHP: Dates with Death. 

A book well worth having, as well as reading, even given the odd skipping through the seasons of the original television series. One wonders if there was some intention on the part of the editors to make a more comprehensive survey of the stories adapted for the program. Additionally, it's not the worst survey of the sorts of crime fiction one could find in magazines in the (for the most part) 1950s and '60s.

Jack Seabrook corrects Muheim's memory of the previous television adaptation of his "The Dusty Drawer" in his review of the AHP: episode and, in passing, this anthology in this Bare Bones post.
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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

Short Story Wednesday: stories by Robert Bloch, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr."), David Bunch and Juan José Arreola, from the 28th Anniversary issues of FANTASTIC, edited by Elinor Mavor (July 1980) and THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Edward L. Ferman (October 1977)




6 • Prismatica • Samuel R. Delany · nv
  34 •   Review: Stolen Faces by Michael Bishop • review by Richard   Delap
  36 •   Review: A Little Knowledge by Michael Bishop • review by Richard Delap
   39 •   Review: New Dimensions 7 by Robert Silverberg • review by Richard Delap
    41 •   Review: Universe 7 by Terry Carr • review by Richard Delap
43 · What You See Is What You Get · Robert Bloch · ss
56 · The First Stroke · Zenna Henderson · ss
61 • Films: Star Wars • [Films (F&SF)] • essay by Baird Searles
64 · The Man Who Could Provide Us with Elephants [Mr. Secrett] · John Brunner · nv
95 · Brother · Clifford D. Simak · nv
113 · Caretaker · Manly Wade Wellman · ss
123 · Leaps of Faith · Michael Bishop · ss
139 · Science: The Subtlest Difference · Isaac Asimov · cl
150 · Time-Sharing Angel · "James Tiptree, Jr." (Alice Sheldon) · ss




Twenty-eight years is a slightly odd birthday for a magazine to celebrate, but as I've noted before here, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF) liked to have an "all-star" birthday issue every year, in the '70s and later not least to help soften the blow of a new newsstand price rise in some (many) years, while Fantastic was usually more blasé, even with "major" anniversary years...though this was to be the penultimate issue of the magazine, before its folding into the stablemate Amazing Stories, and not too long before the end of Ultimate Publications, which had published both titles and various spun-off magazines since 1965; Amazing (combined with Fantastic) would soon be sold to Dungeons and Dragons game publisher TSR, and would see a further cash infusion from Steven Spielberg renting title rights and options on the magazine's fiction for his (rather bad and shortlived, but guaranteed two seasons by NBC, which honored the contract) tv series Amazing Stories.  Despite title, these last few issues of Fantastic didn't feature very much sf, but the publisher was quite sure sf magazines always outsold fantasy magazines...and they usually had (I continue to suspect this is because fantasy readers were less likely to be aware there was a  literature of fantasy that could be seen as differentiated from fiction as a whole than sf or even horror readers were...at least till J. R. R. Tolkien began outselling everyone else in the '70s).

F&SF was edited and published in 1977 by Edward Ferman, who had inherited the business from his father, and by this point ran the magazine from his family's house in Cornwall, CT; younger Ferman had been editing since 1964, publishing beginning in 1970. While in 1980, Elinor Mavor was just settling in as the editor of Fantastic and Amazing, having had her first issues of the magazines assembled hurriedly after long-term publisher Sol Cohen retired at the end of 1978, and turned the reins over to his junior partner Arthur Bernhard, who had never seen eye-t0-eye with 1969-79 editor Ted White, and who replaced him with the illustrator and staff layout person Mavor, who had a certain lack of confidence going in, even more so than her most widely-hailed predecessor at the magazines when they were published at Ziff-Davis, Cele Goldsmith Lalli (Mavor even signed herself "Omar Gohagen" to begin with, thinking women editors were unlikely to be accepted in sf and fantasy circles...not particularly true ever, but particularly not by the '70s).

And for whatever reason, I'd not actually picked up either of these issues and given them a read-through, despite a good line-up of genuinely all-star contributors to the F&SF issue, and a not-bad selection of writers in the Fantastic. While the F&SF had the standard, illustration-free (except for Gahan Wilson's monthly cartoon, and the column headers Wilson had devised for the rotating-cast book-review, Asimov science-essay, and Baird Searles film and related media review columns) easy to read if a bit staid text-laden pages, Mavor was trying, as best the minimal budget she had would allow, to mix in not only illustration (White's issues had had often excellent illustrators and cover artists) but to remake the layout more in the fashion of most magazines at the turn of the '80s, with some filler nonfiction devoted to contributor biographies and (instead of the story headnotes White would provide, or Ferman, in their magazines) short ending notes that detailed what drew her to take the item the reader had just finished...author photographs included when handy. 

So, I chose for this week's entry to check out two stories in each issue, the F&SF's Robert Bloch ("What You See is What You Get") and Alice Sheldon ("Time-Sharing Angel"), still signing her work (mostly) "James Tiptree, Jr." and the Fantastic's David Bunch ("New Member") and a translation, by Marijane Osborn, of a 1952 story by Mexican fabulist Juan José Arreola, titled rendered in English as "Parable of Barter".

Consistent readers here will know that I'm a lifelong fan of Bloch's and might recall I've liked Bunch's work nearly as long...sadly, both men's entries here are not close to their best work. The Bloch is simply a misfire, a gimmick story that telegraphs its final twist (which is as at least as old as the telegraph, despite being a story about a sort of haunted Polaroid camera); the Bunch is drowning in his love of alienating small details, so much so that his usually pointed critique is all but lost. One can enjoy them as very minor examples of what these artists could do, but one will enjoy almost anything else they wrote more readily.

The "Tiptree" and the Arreola are better; the Sheldon story is not her best, but it does demonstrate the bleakness of her assessment of humanity's probable fate, as well as taking a suitably (and not atypically) off-the-wall means of staving that fate off; it's included in a couple of her key collections. The Arreola gives us a sense of why his work is compared to that of Borges, though perhaps less (at least in this translation of this story) exacting in his vision, but at least as playful, and if anything (like Sheldon!) with a somewhat dimmer view of human foibles, and the means of being (not quite literally) damned if one does or one doesn't.

There are other features and fiction that look promising (certainly more so than the killer B stories) in the two issues, even if Richard Delap is probably my least favorite of the recurring book reviewers in 1970s F&SF issues, and my interest in role-playing games is limited (nice to see this early interest from a pro fantastica magazine, even one on such a tight budget, in this then-growing field).

And then, after seeing the link to this post on a Facebook discussion group, Darrell Schweitzer was moved to comment (and graciously gave permission to reprint that comment here):

Interesting to see something of mine (the serial in FANTASTIC) showcased like this. It makes me feel like a museum piece. But it was ... yikes!... forty-three years ago. As for how stretched the budget for FANTASTIC was, Elinor Mavor asked me to cut "The White Isle" by 13,000 words, because they could not afford to pay for a 53,000 word story. I made a simpler counter-offer, that they should pay for what they could and take the rest for free. Nothing could be more attractive to the editor of a starveling magazine that the prospect of about 15 pp. of free copy. Not a comma was dropped. When Arthur Bernhard proposed to fold the magazine with the April 1980 issue, I also (from obvious self-interest) wrote to him and argued that as a fantasy magazine, FANTASTIC served a very special purpose and should be allowed to continue. So it limped on for two more issues, finished my serial, and ended with an "excerpt" (actually the first installment) of Marvin Kaye's THE AMOROUS UMBRELLA.  [I replied that, in a sense, Darrell had, as part of the staff, with George Scithers, editing the TSR Amazing Stories incorporating Fantastic, he was in a way editing Fantastic himself not too long after.]

And for more of this week's Short Story Wednesday entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.


And, just for swank, here's what quarterly Fantastic and monthly F&SF were offering at about the same time as the reviewed issues of their counterparts above:

Fantastic, December 1977, edited by Ted White

Not actually the 26th Anniversary issue (which would be the July 1978 issue)...



This might be my least-favorite David Hardy painting...even Jove nods...
A far better Hardy painting, more typical of his work.
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Friday, May 22, 2015

FFS/eB: Walter M. Miller, Jr.: "Command Performance" (GALAXY, November 1952); "Conditionally Human" (GALAXY February 1952); "MacDoughal's Wife" (THE AMERICAN MERCURY March 1950)

We consider three important stories from early in the relatively short literary career of Walter M. Miller, Jr., best remembered for the linked novelets published as a novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller stopped publishing new fiction, as far as I know, with the release of the Canticle volume in 1959; he had one notable national publication in The Nation in 1962 (an essay about the ongoing legal/investigative antagonism between Robert Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa) and, in an anthology Miller edited with Martin H. Greenberg, published in 1985, a new poem appeared.  That was all till after  Miller's suicide, when the long-stalled sequel to Canticle, completed by Terry Bisson, was published in 1997.

 "MacDoughal's Wife" was apparently Miller's first published work of fiction, though his second, "Mother of Mary" (Extension Magazine, May 1950) is mentioned in the footnote blurb in the March 1950 issue of The American Mercury and was presumably accepted/bought earlier by the Catholic outreach magazine (their current website is careful to cite contributions by Taylor Caldwell and a first sale by Mary Higgins Clark, but no mention of Miller; I've advised them of the above facts, and perhaps he isn't considered too heretical by them, though he was a RC convert who eventually strayed from the church).  Apparently, while never a particularly
doctrinaire Catholic, Miller did have some rather fixed traditionalist ideas about men and women, to judge (I suspect not quite unfairly) by their recurrence in his fiction.  MacDoughal, in this contemporary-mimetic story, fumes over his wife's consistent flirtation with other men, even as she makes some pointed comments about his tendency toward alcohol abuse, during a Sunday at the beach; he's particularly obsessed, in his interior monolog, with her miscarriage three years earlier and what he sees as her nonchalance about that, and the apparent result that she has been left infertile; their childlessness seems to bother him at least as much as her flirting and supposed shallowness, and his emotional and wedding-contractual yoke with her. 

 "Conditionally Human," Miller's first story for Galaxy, is available in ebook format with an introduction by Barry N. Malzberg, the series editor for The Galaxy Project reprints from the early years of the magazine. Here, much is made of maternal instinct as the driving force behind the breeding of hyperintelligent dogs and cats, and human-appearance chimps with tails appended to help make it clear that they are not human, since "genetically flawed" humans are constrained from reproducing. The protagonist is a latter-day animal-control agent whose bailiwick is specifically to keep tabs on these surrogate children and their keepers/"parents"...consistently, he and the other men in the story are, or seem to be, the Rational, Rule-bound characters, the women the ruled-by-emotion and -biological imperative foils to their rationalizations for the frequent extermination of very sentient creatures; even a priest, who opposes the extermination, still sees the Child/Pets as soulless and not human enough to be considered on a par with us (genocide metaphor not to be lost here). Thus, both women and men are damned, and while some of the men are allowed to make some moral choices, the women are mostly not quite allowed to demonstrate a similar intellection, so much as hopeless conformity or apparently lunatic rebellion. 

 "Command Performance" was Miller's second Galaxy contribution; slightly contrary to Barry's assertion, Miller published his first sf story with Amazing  but didn't go on to publish more or less exclusively with Astounding Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy, but would place many more stories with Howard Browne's Amazing, Fantastic, and Fantastic Adventures, and such magazines edited by old colleagues of Browne as If, initially edited by Browne's once and future assistant Paul Fairman, and Other Worlds, edited by Browne's old boss Ray Palmer, among many other magazines in the sf and fantasy fields.  The blurb on the Rosetta Books page for this one is also particularly bad, as the protagonist has no idea at the outset she's a telepath, nor that the telepath she meets will have such insanely pseudo-rational (and reproductive) designs on her.  But the introduction, by fantasy/sf/historical fiction writer David Drake, like Miller a combat veteran, is quite good in limning the shared history of combat-driven PTSD between Miller and Galaxy founding editor H. L. Gold (not completely unknown to Drake, as well), and noting how Miller's World War II bombing crew experience shaped his later life and career...though Drake also suggests that Astounding, later retitled Analog, editor John W. Campbell, Jr. is raked over the coals for his support of a variety of questionable pseudo-scientific notions, not least his obsession with telepathy and other psi powers,  while, say, Fantastic Universe and Saint Mystery Magazine editor Hans Stefan Santesson isn't faulted for his consistent use of UFO-related "nonfiction" in his f/sf magazine...when, of course, Santesson is tweaked and mocked for just that among those who remember FU under his editorship.

 Three worth seeking out; I don't quite agree that these demonstrate that Miller was the best writer in 1950s sf and fantasy at novelet or novella lengths (we did have Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon and Damon Knight, among many others, doing much of their best work at this time), but they are compellingly written, and certainly the passions and desire to tackle the tough subjects are amply present.

 For more of today's books (actual books, no less!), please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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