Showing posts with label Leo Margulies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leo Margulies. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

SSW: MIKE SHAYNE'S TORRID TWELVE edited by Leo Margulies? (and/or Cylvia Kleinman Margulies? Samuel Merwin, Jr.?), Dell Books 1961...a best-of the first four years of MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE, 1956-59; and MINK IS FOR A MINX, of similar possibly ghosted editorial responsibility, the only volume of a would-be annual series, 1964 (and taking stories from 1963 issues): Short Story Wednesday

These are the two, and only two that I'm aware of, volumes drawing expressly from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (in its first issues more formally, and with more pages, Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine), founded in 1956, the same year as its longtime "competitor" on newsstands,  Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine; by the folding of a much-diminished Manhunt and the similarly struggling US edition of The Saint Mystery Magazine in 1967, while other, short-lived crime-fiction magazines would arise, the US trio of Ellery Queen's, Hitchcock's and Shayne were the reliable (and always monthly, surprisingly--founded on a 12 issues/year basis, Shayne never dropped to bimonthly nor less-frequent) doses of their various flavors of fiction till Shayne folded with the August 1985 issue (of course, the other two continue to be published at this time, and have long been stablemates). 

If EQMM was the magazine, particularly under founding editor Frederic Dannay, devoted to attempts to encourage literary sophistication in cf (and otherwise to be a wide-spectrum magazine within that field, and a bit beyond, often running some mild horror fiction and other related fiction), and AHMM was the magazine (particularly during its independent existence, before sale to then-EQMM publisher Davis Publications in 1975) devoted, not exclusively but frequently, to twist endings and irony, and was a bit more hardboiled on average and less interested in classic detection than Queen's, MSMM was unabashedly in the hardboiled (and "medium-boiled") detective and cf mode, with (particularly in its last years, as edited by Charles Fritch) an openness to a bit of horror and related fiction as well, throughout its run. But, sadly, Shayne was also invariably the lowest-paying of the trio of US newsstand monthlies...but this meant that it both had to, and was glad to, deal with a lot of younger writers, and some such as Livia J. Washburn, James Reasoner, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Moore, and, earlier on, Bill Pronzini (who placed a lot of his work with AHMM, but would publish another considerable lot with MSMM and its stablemates, often as "Jack Foxx"), either made a notable amount of their earliest sales (James Reasoner is not alone in remembering Sam Merwin, in the first issues and for a longer term again in the '70s, as a particularly helpful editor to James as a young professional writer), or, as in the case of writers such as Talmage Powell, found their primary later market in the magazine. 

Also notable, how little the "original" "Brett Halliday", Davis Dresser, wrote for the magazine...the new "Mike Shayne" fiction in the magazine was regularly ghosted from the beginning.

Cover painting by Robert ("Bob") McGinnis, who contributed covers to the magazine, as well.

The only story I know I'd read previously to looking at these volumes is Robert Bloch's "Water's Edge" (a very good story, as I remember it), from the first issue. 


6 * Foreword * "Brett Halliday" (Davis Dresser) * fw (probably ghosted?)

7 * Death Dives Deep [Mike Shayne], "Brett Halliday" (ghost written by Robert Arthur) * ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine January 1959

62 * The Toy-Head Man · Franklin Gregory · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine August 1959

80 * The Fifth One · D. E. Forbes (DeLoris [Florine] Stanton Forbes) · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine December 1957

91 * The Rites of Death · Hal Ellson · ss Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine October 1956

108 * The Patsy [Johnny Liddell] · Frank Kane · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine August 1957

124 * Water's Edge * Robert Bloch * ss Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 1 No. 1, September 1956] ed. Sam Merwin, Jr. 

145 * Moonflower · Hope Field · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 3 No. 1, April 1958] (35¢, digest)

157 * A Hood Is Born · Richard Deming · nv Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 4 No. 4, March 1959] ed. Cylvia Kleinman (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 128pp+, digest)

191 * The Right Kind of a House · Henry Slesar · ss Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 1 No. 6, February 1957] ed. Leo Margulies (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 160pp+, digest)

200 * Three Wives Too Many · Kenneth Fearing · nv Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 1 No. 1, September 1956] ed. Sam Merwin, Jr. (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 160pp+, digest)

225 * Sunday’s Slaughter · "Jonathan Craig" (Frank E. Smith) · ss Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 1 No. 5, January 1957] ed. Sam Merwin, Jr. (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 160pp+, digest)

242 * The Musical Doll · Helen [nee Weinbaum] Kasson · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 5 No. 2, July 1959] ed. Cylvia Kleinman (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 128pp+, digest)


Can be read here.


Mink is for a Minx: The Best from Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine, 1st Annual Edition [and, apparently, last] Dell Books, 1964, cover by Robert McGinnis.


9 * Death of a Dead Man [Mike Shayne] · Brett Halliday (ghost written by Dennis Lynds) · nv Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 13 No. 1, June 1963]

47 * Partners of the Dark [Phil Egan] · Alson J. Smith · nv Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 12 No. 6, May 1963] 

61 * Truck Drivers Like Girls · Dorothy Madle · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 13 No. 5, October 1963] ed. Cylvia Kleinman (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, 128pp+, digest)

93 * Murder Slick as a Whistle · Arthur Porges · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 13 No. 4, September 1963]

100 * The Marrow of Justice [Victor Fiala] · Hal Ellson · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 12 No. 6, May 1963]

105 * Man on the Run · Dennis Lynds · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 12 No. 4, March 1963]

123 * Death, My Love · "John Douglas" (Dennis Lynds) (as Phil Stephensen-Payne notes, and Terry Zobeck reminds me to mention)  · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 12 No. 3, February 1963]

137 * Mink Is for a Minx [Chip Stack] · Tighe Jarratt · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 12 No. 4, March 1963]

152 * Murder of an Unknown Man · James Holding · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 13 No. 3, August 1963] ed. Cylvia Kleinman (Renown Publications, Inc., 35¢, digest, cover by Robert Maguire

162 * Corpus Delicti · Talmage Powell · ss Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine [Vol. 13 No. 3, August 1963] ed. Cylvia Kleinman 




The April 1963 issue of MSMM can be read here (though none of the collected stories in this volume were taken from that issue); the May issue here; the June '63 issue here.

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Friday, July 13, 2018

FFB: THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION 11th Series edited by Robert P. Mills (Doubleday 1962); THE GHOUL KEEPERS edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid 1961)

Two weeks ago, I reviewed Robert Mills's first of three annual best-of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction volumes, from his years of editorship of the magazine, whose name is usually abbreviated F&SF, and one of two Leo Margulies anthologies taken mostly from Dorothy McIlwraith's term as editor of Weird Tales (WT), including its revivals easily the next longest-running and certainly a similarly major influence on fantasy and horror (and to some extent suspense and science fiction) writing over the decades. This time, Mills's third and last annual volume, which managed to get the least ugly cover from the nonchalant Doubleday art department I recall among the whole series' run, by the talented but sparsely-employed Roger Zimmerman, and the less-elegantly, but punningly, titled other Margulies volume from Pyramid. 

 The lineup in the Margulies volume is perhaps just slightly less impressive than in the previous one, but only just so; the lineup in the Mills if anything managing to be slightly better, if, again, only by some intangible fraction. And Ace Books even let the poetry and Mills's headnotes actually be reprinted in full in their reprint of this volume, apparently...only three poems this time, the Walt Whitman classic in lieu of an editorial introduction. (In the UK, Panther was less generous in their paperback reprint, excising the Reeves poetry and the stories by Evelyn E. Smith, John Anthony West and [Ms.] Jody Scott, the latter two the younger contributors to the book; the West had been apparently first published in the UK in a 1961 collection of his short stories, Call Out the Malicia, which was the source of West's three F&SF stories before Dutton reprinted his collection in the US in 1963.) The least well-known writers in the WT book are Harry Altschuler, later the literary agent who made such a famously bad deal for Robert Bloch with the purchasers of dramatic rights to Psycho for Alfred Hitchcock's production company (and was fired by Bloch soon after), and Helen W.(einbaum) Kasson, the sister of the short-lived but highly influential sf and fantasy writer Stanley G. Weinbaum, one of small cadre of siblings of more famous writers who made their own mark, such as also Mary Pangborn or to some extent Jane Aiken Hodge (one could probably also, perhaps unfairly as with Hodge, cite Hugh and Robert Benson, E. F. Benson's bothers, but that's more like a Bronte Sisters situation).
The most famous stories in each volume: an easy choice for the Mills, as "Harrison Bergeron" has almost certainly passed "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" as Kurt Vonnegut's single most famous and widely-reprinted story, and this account of a human world where all people are artificially restrained if they demonstrate any greater talent or attractiveness than anyone else is the close correspondent in familiarity to Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" in Mills's first volume, the Ninth. In the Margulies, it's a bit closer, but the Robert Bloch lead-off story "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is probably the champion by a hair, and it's a clever and very hardboiled sort of suspense story, not supernatural horror except from the point of view of its benighted protagonist, who thinks he's been rescued from his homeless, abandoned state by an angelic woman and a generous but Satanic man, and how things go very wrong for everyone involved. It's appeared in a large number of Bloch's own collections, and in at least four anthologies which have seen multiple editions, including this one.  The lead story in the Mills is Avram Davidson's very funny "The Sources of the Nile", in which a busy but underpaid writer (not a situation unfamiliar to Davidson himself) stumbles across a family who anticipate trends to a fabulous degree, and almost grabs a brass ring of fame and fortune with them...but an underestimated villain manages to snatch them away...and marry the writer's neglected womanfriend, to boot. Plot is not the strong point in this story, as with many of Davidson's best, so much as often hilarious, acutely observed detail and anecdote, obscure references deftly woven in...and, as with the Bloch story, a beautiful blond woman as the protagonist's obsession, though in the Davidson story understood all too well by her would-be swain as opposed to misunderstood almost completely.

The remarkable balance of the contributors to both books deserves some quick annotation, at least: in the F&SF book, Jay Williams was best known then and probably remains so for his young-readers' novels about Danny Dunn; Evelyn Smith was a contributor to most of the fantasy magazines, and number of sf magazines particularly in the 1950s, and particularly to, initially, Anthony Boucher's F&SF before Mills. Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak need little introduction to most readers of fiction from sf and fantasy magazines; Anderson and Dickson notably collaborated early on (particularly on the humorous "Hoka" stories), and Simak was one of the primary models that Asimov patterned his fiction after, in the latter's early career. "Cordwainer Smith" was the pseudonym Paul Linebarger, and eventually his wife Genevieve Linebarger as well if mostly in collaboration, used for their speculative fiction writing, most of it within a series called the "Instrumentality of Mankind". Charles G. Finney, best remembered for his novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, which has been influential on a number of writers, ranging from Ray Bradbury through Jonathan Lethem (Pyramid editor D. R. Bensen prominently blurbed their edition of Finney's The Ghosts of Manacle as "The damnedest book you ever read"); Jody Scott, whose first story this was, went on to write at least four novels, with one published only recently, a decade after her death, as a part of a loose, bitterly satirical series of science-fantasies, and one, a recent-past historical novel set during the Free Speech Movement activism at UC Berkeley, published only so far as an edited novella in an issue of Escapade magazine. John Anthony West, who died in February, and devoted much of his later life to speculative Egyptology, was one of several writers over the decades mostly to publish a few stories over a stretch of years mostly in F&SF, albeit all his F&SF stories were reprints from a UK collection and his three later short fictions in the field were sold to Damon Knight, and to Ben Bova at Omni; Rosser Reeves was one of the more important innovators in advertising in the '60s and '70s, who contributed three poems to F&SF at the turn of the '60s, and one short story to the last, April 1960, issue of Robert Lowndes's Future Science Fiction. And this John Berry, as opposed to the large handful of other literary John Berrys who lived and published through the latter half of the 20th Century, is perhaps best-known for his Macmillan Prize-winning first and only novel, Krishna Fluting (1959).

 While in the WT volume, along with Bloch, stalwarts of the Dorothy McIlwraith years of the magazine Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury have stories in, as they did in the previous one, Sturgeon's the one sf story in the book; this was usually Edmond Hamilton's bailiwick in WT, as the primary contributor, along with (to some extent) H. P. Lovecraft, of what earlier editor Farnsworth Wright liked to call the "weird-scientific" stories in the magazine; his story here is more in dark fantasy mode. One of the Gavagan's Bar club/pub-stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, accomplished fantasists and historians both, is included, as well as one of the Jules de Grandin psychic investigator stories by Seabury Quinn, throughout the pulp years apparently the most popular feature of Weird Tales with readers. Henry Kuttner is represented, and represents the heroic fantasy tradition in the magazine, with one of his Elak of Atlantis stories, not quite as famous as his eventual wife Catherine L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry" stories, nor Robert E. Howard's several series featuring Conan, or other adventurers, but still notable. Weinbaum Kasson and, perhaps oddly, Altshuler (with his only story in the fantastic press, apparently, perhaps his only published story) round out the book.  Thus, The Ghoul Keepers is perhaps a shade less impressive than its predecessor, as noted before (though the Bloch story here is certainly a better one), the 11th Best from F&SF at least as good as the 9th (and easier to find in an unabridged edition). 


























































































For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog
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Friday, June 29, 2018

FFB: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid 1961); THE BEST FROM FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION 9th Series (aka FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON AND OTHER STORIES) edited by Robert P. Mills (Doubleday 1960)

In English, and probably in any language, the most consequential and certainly the most sustained fantasy-fiction magazines have been Weird Tales (or WT), running for 31 years in its first form and revived multiply since (the most recent revival having run for 26 years, if some of them very lean indeed) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), soon to enter its 7oth year of continuous publication. In the earliest 1960s, Robert P. Mills was editing F&SF (and therefore the annual best-of anthologies drawn from it), which had absorbed his magazine Venture Science Fiction shortly beforehand, and while publisher Joseph W. Ferman was the credited editor of Bestseller Mystery Magazine, the last remaining crime-fiction magazine at publisher Mercury Press after they sold Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (where Mills had been Managing Editor since 1948) and Mercury Mystery had been folded, I suspect Mills had an editorial  hand in there, as well. Leo Margulies had purchased the assets of Short Stories, Inc., the publishers of Short Stories and the folded Weird Tales...Margulies continued to publish Short Stories for a while, and though his one consistent title in the last couple decades of his life was Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine,  he hoped to revive Weird Tales...and did so, for four issues in 1973-74. But in 1961, Margulies published two
anthologies drawn from Weird Tales, the first such to be published explicitly as anthologies from Weird Tales,  though they didn't advertise that fact on their covers: The Unexpected and The Ghoul Keepers, both almost exclusively drawn from the issues edited by Dorothy McIlwraith, who had edited both Short Stories and Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s.  And so, today's books...the first of three  Robert Mills annual volumes from F&SF, and the first McIlwraith-issues volume (aside from Wellman's story) Margulies put together from WT...two impressive sets of contributors, and not a few notable stories between them...

 In a sense, Mills and McIlwraith were both "third editors" of their respective groundbreaking magazines ...Mills followed the four-year solo editorship of Anthony Boucher (legally William White, but known even to friends mostly as "Tony") and Boucher and J. Francis "Mick" McComas's founding stint as co-editors of the magazine for its first five years of publication (and several years of development before that). Mills had been managing editor since the launch in 1949, as well, but even with that and his excellent work at Venture, there was a certain amount of pressure in the new gig. If not nearly the audience resistance that Dororthy McIlwraith faced at Weird Tales, when she succeeded long-term second editor Farnsworth Wright (first editor Edwin Baird did little of note beyond get the magazine out for the first year, and publish WT's first "scandalous" and always most notorious story, "The Loved Dead" by C. M. Eddy, and first contributions by H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith). Wright's magazine had been a receptive market to Lovecraft, Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Edmond Hamilton, Manly Wade Wellman, the magazine's most popular contributor Seabury Quinn, and such younger writers as Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Catherine L. Moore, Henry Kuttner (these last two would soon marry and collaborate heavily and constantly), Carl Jacobi and Mary Elizabeth Counselman; he also favored purple prose and exoticism, and had some peculiar crotchets...he consistently rejected Leiber's "Fafhrd and Gray Mouser" sword and sorcery fantasies, which found their early home with Unknown Fantasy Fiction instead, as did "Smoke Ghost", Leiber's best early horror story. McIlwraith brought a greater modernism and broader appeal to the magazine, and published Ray Bradbury, Margaret St. Clair, Richard Matheson, Joseph Payne Brennan, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Jim Kjelgaard (best remembered now as the author of Big Red and its sequels) and all the previously-mentioned contributors who were still willing and able to contribute, and reprinted some of the others' work...and was roundly condemned by such staunch fans of the Wright magazine as Donald Wollheim, who founded The Avon Fantasy Reader in part to publish something more reminiscent of what Wright's WT had been.
    The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: Ninth Series ed. Robert P. Mills (Doubleday LCC# 52-5510, 1960, $3.95, 264pp, hc)
    Also as Flowers for Algernon and Other Stories (Ace, 1966); British editions omit Feghoots [pun vignettes], Ace pb editions omit Feghoots and the poetry by Schenck, Buck, Belkin and Brode; retained are the Lewis, Aldiss and McClintic poems; Mills's headnotes also removed.
    • 7 · Introduction · Robert P. Mills · in
    • 9 · Flowers for Algernon · Daniel Keyes · nv F&SF Apr 1959
    • 41 · Me · Hilbert Schenck, Jr. · pm F&SF Aug 1959
    • 42 · A Different Purpose · Kem Bennett · ss F&SF Nov 1958
    • 62 · A Vampire’s Saga · Norman Belkin · pm F&SF May 1959
    • 63 · Ralph Wollstonecraft Hedge: A Memoir · Ron Goulart · vi F&SF May 1959
    • 67 · Sportsman’s Difficulity · Doris Pitkin Buck · pm F&SF Mar 1959
    • 68 · “All You Zombies—” · Robert A. Heinlein · ss F&SF Mar 1959
    • 81 · An Expostulation · C. S. Lewis · pm F&SF Jun 1959
    • 82 · Casey Agonistes · Richard M. McKenna · ss F&SF Sep 1958
    • 94 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XI · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Feb 1959
    • 95 · Eastward Ho! · William Tenn · ss F&SF Oct 1958
    • 113 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XIV · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF May 1959
    • 114 · Soul Mate · Lee Sutton · ss F&SF Jun 1959
    • 130 · Call Me Mister · Anthony Brode · pm F&SF Feb 1959
    • 131 · What Rough Beast? · Damon Knight · nv F&SF Feb 1959
    • 156 · Classical Query Composed While Shampooing · Doris Pitkin Buck · pm F&SF Jul 1959
    • 157 · Far from Home · Walter S. Tevis · ss F&SF Dec 1958
    • 161 · Space Burial · Brian W. Aldiss · pm F&SF Jul 1959
    • 162 · Invasion of the Planet of Love · George P. Elliott · ss F&SF Jan 1959
    • 173 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: X · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Jan 1959
    • 174 · Dagon · Avram Davidson · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 184 · Pact · Winston P. Sanders (Poul Anderson) · ss F&SF Aug 1959
    • 200 · To Give Them Beauty for Ashes · Winona McClintic · pm F&SF Sep 1959
    • 201 · No Matter Where You Go · Joel Townsley Rogers · nv F&SF Feb 1959
    • 222 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XII · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Mar 1959
    • 223 · The Willow Tree · Jane Rice · ss F&SF Feb 1959
    • 233 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XIII · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Apr 1959
    • 234 · The Pi Man · Alfred Bester · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 252 · The Man Who Lost the Sea · Theodore Sturgeon · ss F&SF Oct 1959
    • 264 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot: XV · Grendel Briarton · vi F&SF Jun 1959
The Ace paperback edition contents, as a result, under both titles:
The offerings in both books are impressive--check out these sets of contributors, and the most key stories in each, even in the pointlessly dressed-down Ace and UK editions of the Mills (though the Ace movie tie-in edition pictured at the top has the amusing distinction of seeming to have three titles). The WT volume surveys eleven stories from a dozen years of the magazine, with only the Wellman and Leiber stories likely to have been the purchases of Wright rather than McIlwraith; the F&SF volume surveys issues from 1958 and '59, with a number of stories almost certainly purchased by Boucher as editor. Margulies dedicates his book to Donald R. Bensen, the publisher's editor at Pyramid, and quite likely all but a collaborator in the editorial selections as well as clerical/rights work Margulies definitely credits him with: "To Don Bensen, without whom these stories were written, but without whom they would not be in this book"; on the first edition, back cover, "H. H. Holmes" (Boucher as book reviewer for The New York Herald-Tribune, while also reviewing as Boucher for the NY Times) has a praiseful pull-quote (in a sense praising his own work in part); Margulies would dedicated his next WT anthology (reviewed here soon) to Holmes/Boucher, "who asked for more"...Mills dedicates his volume to Boucher and McComas, "who are truly responsible for this book's existence...and to Anne, Alison and Freddie, who contribute so much to the editor's."

The first story in the Margulies, and the last (non-joke story) in the Mills are both by Theodore Sturgeon, the only writer shared by both books, and, till now not having read them within more than several years of each other, I'm struck by how even more similar they are than might be expected...yet the later story, "The Man Who Lost the Sea", is not in any way a retread (and is Sturgeon's one story included by Martha Foley in her annual Best American Short Stories volumes), a science fiction story that nonetheless does in its more non-linear way recapitulates several of the key aspects of the far more unnerving horror story "The Professor's Teddy-Bear".  Both stories deal rather directly with the notion of the boy being the father of the man, and of how the man, coming to understand the full import of his experience in the present, comes to a fuller understanding of the strangeness of his earlier experiences...whether in the context of dealing with a literal psychic vampire creature in the form of a young child's teddy bear, or in the understanding of the full import of early experiences of near-death in exploring new and dangerous environments, in the ocean and elsewhere. Sturgeon's literary grace and deftness in putting across sensory experience in fiction is on full display, as is his fascination with bits of arcane knowledge that he will use as another anchor, along with his exploration of the emotional states of his characters, and their legacies of trauma, in their usually extreme or at least very strange circumstances, to build his stories around. He wants to show you several kinds of wonders simultaneously, and in his many best stories, the integration of these desires is utterly effective. There's a reason he was Ray Bradbury's chiefest literary model, and such an inspiration and goad to writers ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to Judith Merril to Isaac Asimov. 

And Daniel Keyes. "Flowers for Algernon" is, rather obviously, the most famous story in the F&SF volume as things were in 1966, and still, along with Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and Stephen King's "The Gunslinger", still among the more famous stories the magazine has published so far. It, and Robert Heinlein's "'All You Zombies-'" and perhaps still Richard McKenna's first story, "Casey Agonistes", are probably the most widely-read stories in Mills's anthology ...the Heinlein a key late short story in his career, and also a further mining of a key trope for him, notably less emotionally explored in his earlier story "By His Bootstraps", involving a very peculiar sort of time paradox and its results, and the McKenna a very powerful yet gentle sort of horror/fantasy, though McKenna's early death didn't allow him to capitalize much on the enormous popular success of his first and only fully-finished novel The Sand Pebbles, an autobiographical recent-historical story dealing in part with his experiences in East Asia as a seaman in the years before WW2.  Likewise, Walter Tevis, more widely known (or at least his novels are, as sources for films) for The Hustler and its sequel The Color of Money (you might think of Paul Newman), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (and David Bowie), has a particularly charming and resonant vignette, "Far From Home", for which he also titled his one powerful collection of short fiction. But "Flowers for Algernon," the tale of a mentally challenged man who undergoes an experimental medical procedure which makes of him a genius, and the joys and dangers this offers him emotionally and otherwise, is a story which has a visceral appeal particularly to the kind of person drawn to science fiction, but which also has almost as strong a hold on less sf-prone readers, particularly as delicately but straightforwardly told, in the form of diary entries by the protagonist Charly, about his experiences and those of the lab mouse Algernon who has also undergone an earlier test of the procedure.
Among the familiar stories (at least since their early reprint in the Margulies book)  in The Unexpected are Fredric Brown's "Come and Go Mad", Fritz Leiber's "The Automatic Pistol" and Manly Wade Wellman's "The Valley Was Still", an historical fantasy set during the waning days of the US Civil War, later adapted, with a slightly heavy hand but still effectively, for an episode of  the first version of the tv series The Twilight Zone, "Still Valley"; such stories as Margaret St. Clair's "Mrs. Hawk" and Ray Bradbury's "The Handler" (not to be confused with Damon Knight story of the same title) in the WT book, and Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man", "William Tenn"'s "Eastward Ho!", Knight's "What Rough Beast" and Avram Davidson's "Dagon" in the Mills book are all very good examples of what their authors could do, if not the first stories one might think of from them or the magazines, and the other stories in the books are at least more than simply worth preserving, in 1960 and '61 when these books were first issued, and today--and the openness of Dorothy McIlwraith and Robert Mills to writers whom one might not think of as "typical" for their magazines, such as Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov in WT, or George P. Elliott (who was, like John Ciardi and others, a lifelong enthusiast of and occasional contributor to fantastic literature, as well as Barry Malzberg's mentor of sorts in the latter's university career) and Joel Townsley Rogers in F&SF, are on display here as well. I suspect I'll have more to say about them, soon.

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

 Below, earlier-edition covers for the Mills volumes--Doubleday rarely did better than providing merely functional at best covers for the hardcover editions of the series over the decades, and the UK reprint isn't notably better in this case--and the full view of the second-edition package of the Margulies...Pyramid had adopted a sort of semi-uniform "look" for its anthologies drawn from fantasy magazines that the newer covers reflected...it was certainly easier to read while browsing a paperback rack, if less splashily colorful.






















































































































Photo by Bill Crider
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Tuesday, April 11, 2017

1962/63: Three fantasy fiction anthologies from Pyramid Books: THE UNEXPECTED edited by Leo Margulies, THE UNKNOWN edited by D. R. Bensen, SWORDS AND SORCERY edited by L. Sprague de Camp (and, from other publishers about then, BEYOND and THE FANTASTIC UNIVERSE OMNIBUS)


















In 1962, Pyramid Books was widely considered a second-string publisher of paperbacks, but had, in Donald R. Bensen, an intelligent and innovative editor, who among other things was commissioning (or editing himself) some impressive anthologies. The Unexpected was the first of four anthologies he'd buy from Leo Margulies (although the veteran pulp editor/publisher apparently farmed out the editing of at least the latter two to Sam Moskowitz), the first anthologies drawn from the pages of Weird Tales since the magazine folded in 1954, and, first published in 1961, it sold well enough to have a new edition, with a different cover reflecting the new standardized Pyramid design, the next year. Concentrating as it does on the later years of Weird Tales, it featured some of the most innovative and influential writers in fantasy and related fields still active at the time...with stories that were good to brilliant examples of the kind of new horror Dorothy McIlwraith's WT featured in the 1940s and into the 1950s, moving away from the neo-gothic work that the Farnsworth Wright issues had specialized in. 




In 1963, Bensen himself offered a companion, the first anthology (eventually of two Bensen would edit) drawn from Unknown Fantasy Fiction, later Unknown Worlds, to appear since the magazine's publisher had produced a magazine-format best-of, From Unknown Worlds, after World War II to test the waters for possible revival of the magazine. Unknown had folded in 1943 as a victim of relatively low sales during wartime paper restrictions. But while McIlwraith's WT was innovating in modern horror and fantasy, so, too, was Unknown featuring a lot of the kind of modern or "low" fantasy that Thorne Smith and John Collier, or Noel Coward, were writing or had written...nowadays, this kind of fiction is often considered "urban fantasy". The two magazines overlapped in appeal and shared many of their star contributors, even more after Unknown dropped off the market. Editor John Campbell apparently never completely got over the loss of the magazine, and even though his more durable science fiction magazine Astounding, later Analog, was famous for being the primary home for "hard" or scientifically rigorous sf, Campbell would slip at least some borderline fantasy into the mix for the rest of his time as editor.

 Though Weird Tales was best known for horror, and Unknown for contemporary fantasy, both featured no little adventure fantasy of the kind that had been tagged, in the early '60s by notable innovator Fritz Leiber, "sword and sorcery" fiction (in part after the model of "sword and sandal" historical drama, often with some fantasy and/or religious elements); L. Sprague de Camp, a writer of historical fantasy and one of those "completing" fragmentary Conan stories and pages left unfinished when creator Robert Howard committed suicide, put together the first anthology to feature the new term in its title...gathering a defining set of classic and more recent stories in the mode. De Camp would go on to do several more anthologies for Pyramid and eventually others. While Lancer Books had the collected Conan stories in the '60s, and Ballantine was publishing most of the more classic epic fantasy in the market, with some items of similar interest published by Avon, Ace and Berkley, among others, Pyramid had these widely-loved antholgies in its catalog.

The first, 1961 edition of The Unexpected:


One of the Berkley anthologies of similar interest is still the only anthology so far drawn exclusively from Beyond Fantasy Fiction, the first fantasy companion to Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, and in many ways a successor to Unknown, edited by one of that magazine's star contributors, H. L. Gold--for no obvious reason, the anthology was edited anonymously, and saw only one edition--which misidentifies its content as sf: 
    Beyond ed. Anon. (by Thomas A. Dardis) (Berkley Medallion F712, Jan ’63, 50¢, 160pp, pb)
    • 7 · The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse · Ray Bradbury · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Mar 1954
    • 15 · The Ghost Maker · Frederik Pohl · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Jan 1954
    • 27 · Can Such Beauty Be? · Jerome Bixby · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953
    • 40 · The Real People · Algis Budrys · na Beyond Fantasy Fiction Nov 1953
    • 94 · The Beautiful Brew · James E. Gunn · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 117 · I’d Give a Dollar · Winston K. Marks · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction May 1954
    • 130 · The Root and the Ring · Wyman Guin · nv Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954
    • 150 · Double Whammy · Fredric Brown · gp Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1954; Naturally, vi; Voodoo, vi
    • 153 · Talent · Theodore Sturgeon · ss Beyond Fantasy Fiction Sep 1953

And one of the magazines Leo Margulies founded, in 1953, the same year that Beyond launched, Fantastic Universe, was for its seven-year run one of the few consistent markets for both sf and fantasy on U.S. newsstands, along with The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and the more erratic Fantastic...which saw its own best-of published in hardcover in 1960, edited by its final editor, Hans Stefan Santesson, and reprinted in paperback in 1968 in the US (the UK edition appeared in 1962)...oddly, Santesson chose to ignore stories from the period before he edited FU, which made for a somewhat less representative...and less good...anthology. Also, the volume lacked what was probably Santesson's own translation of a Jorge Luis Borges story, the first published in a U.S. fantasy magazine...which appeared in a late issue of FU, offered about the same time the anthology was...





































































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