Showing posts with label Robert Bloch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Bloch. Show all posts

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Robert Bloch: "The Clown At Midnight", ROGUE, March 1960; collected in ROBERT BLOCH: APPRECIATIONS OF THE MASTER, edited by Richard Matheson and Ricia Mainhardt (Tor Books, 1995)

As reprinted in this fine anthology: (<a link to the essay in this volume online)

the paperback edition, 1995

Meanwhile, Ted White (writer and editor) notes that while Hamling credited himself as editor as well as publisher, he wasn't the one doing the editing, in his experience as a contributor:

Hamling was ROGUE's *publisher* but not its editor. In 1960 Frank Robinson was ROGUE's editor.  I know this because I sold my first article ("Riot at Newport") to ROGUE that year, and Frank whipped it into much better shape than I'd written it. Easily the best editor I've ever worked with. ("They're all your words, Ted. I just rearranged them.")  In 1959 Harlan Ellison was also an editor, but I think Frank was his superior. (In 1960 Harlan left ROGUE and moved back to NYC.)

As one can see below, the masthead of the magazine labeled Robinson and Ellison as "associate editors"...Hamling and Ms. Hamling were given supervisory titles...

Some folks, such as Eric Jamborsky, first saw the essay as reprinted in Forrest J Ackerman's Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, apparently broken into two parts (over two issues?) in 1962, which "Garson O'Toole" notes at his Quote Investigator site.





















Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Sunday, July 6, 2025

Friday's Books: the least of Robert Bloch's novels, PSYCHO HOUSE (Tor Books 1990)...and your much better Bloch choices.

The worst of Bloch's novels I've read by some distance; one can see why he introduced the twist that is the story's most redeeming feature, but it doesn't redeem enough of the weight of bad feeling that had attached to others making ever more foolish films of his characters (and more money from their foolishness) that one senses while reading it. It's not a fully worthy sequel to the novel Psycho II, much less the brilliant short novel that was the original. You won't suffer too greatly, to be sure, but keep your expectations low if you pick it up, and certainly don't use it to gauge whether you want to any of Bloch's other fictions, few of which are as ultimately dispirited as this one. American Gothic (which anticipated The Devil in the White City by more than some years--see also Bloch's novella-length nonfiction "Doctor Holmes' Murder Castle" [1983]), The Scarf and any number (in fact, essentially all) of his other novels are better (even his most minor sf novel, Sneak Preview, though I've only read the 1959 novella version; perhaps the 1971 expansion for book publication is better), and reading his short fiction is always recommended (however, one edition to avoid is the trade paperback reprint of sorts of The Selected Stories of RB, retitled for no good reason The Complete Stories of RB, which is riddled with typos and other distractions, aside from the false advertising of the retitle). The Best of Robert Bloch (a 1977 Ballantine Book mixing fantasy, horror, and sf) and its companion Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of  (Ballantine/Del Rey 1979, mostly devoted to horror and crime fiction) are among the best bets in introductions to his work, along with the original edition of the Selected Stories volumes. Or, for fine selections from the shank of his short fiction career, the largely crime fiction Blood Runs Cold (Simon and Schuster, 1961--with another cover, after his cover for Psycho with that distinct font, by Tony Palladino) and the largely fantasticated, leaning mostly but not exclusively to horror fiction, Pleasant Dreams (in several configurations, originally Arkham House, 1960). I had the 1963 Popular Library paperback of Blood and the Jove Books 1979 version of Pleasant...




























Posted by at 3 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

SSW: Robert Bloch: "The Movie People" THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, (F&SF), October 1969, edited by Edward Ferman; Jorge Luis Borges: "The Gospel According to Mark" in translation in THE NEW YORKER, 23 October 1971, edited by William Shawn; Marcelle Dubé: "Sky Lanterns" THE SATURDAY EVENING POST, November/December 2024, edited by Patrick Perry; Carl Jacobi: "Phantom Brass" RAILROAD STORIES, August 1934 (editor uncredited); Joyce Carol Oates: "The Maker of Parables" KENYON REVIEW, Spring 1990, edited by David H. Lynn; Wilma Shore: "A Bulletin from the Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Research at Marmouth, Massachusetts" F&SF, August 1964, edited by Avram Davidson: Short Story Wednesday

Bloch: can be read gratis from the paperback edition of his collection Cold Chills at this site.

Borges: can be read gratis at this teacher's aid site, from the US Bantam paperback edition of the Borges collection Dr. Brodie's Report (as translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in consultation with Borges); originally in the newspaper La Nación, 2 August 1970

Dubé; can be read gratis at The Saturday Evening Post site.

Jacobi: can be read gratis online in his collection Revelations in Black at this link.

Oates: can be read online at the Kenyon Review site (free account access).

Shore: can be read gratis from the online posting of Robert Silverberg's anthology Voyagers in Time


Robert Bloch's "The Movie People" (first published in the issue above and very widely reprinted) is one of his best-remembered late '60s stories, and with good reason...Bloch, who was a film fan from his childhood in the silent era, who grew up to be the man who wrote the novel Psycho among much else in prose (including a nonfiction account of "H. H. Holmes"/"Herman W. Mudgett" decades before The Devil in the White City), as well as becoming a notable screenwriter and, before that, a radio scripter, posits a sort of afterlife in film, in a charming manner that I think I remember being filmed, but I don't see noted here. 



One of the better later Borges stories, and better read this way than in the clumsy translations by Andrew Hurley that are foisted on us these years by Penguin Books, an ironic not-quite-uncanny tale of perhaps too much piety, "The Gospel According to St. Mark" is a well-turned kind of philosophical crime fiction. one of the kinds of work, along with straightforward if cosmic fantasies and mythic gaucho westerns, that Borges loved to write. 


Marcelle Dubé is one of only two living writers cited in this week's installment, with a story, "Sky Lanterns" in a recent issue of The Saturday Evening Post, not hardly weekly any longer, but too easy to forget as a source of magazine fiction (and income for writers). A deft tale of regret and lifelong debt, by a writer who usually publishes more straightforward fantasy and crime fiction


Carl Jacobi is best-remembered these years for his contributions to Weird Tales, the hugely influential horror and fantasy fiction magazine, but he was a veteran writer before he started publishing there, and inspiring younger writers, such as Bloch. This one, "Phantom Brass" is a bit of historical horror, set in the pre-radio days when railroads depended on telegraph operators for traffic control warnings. I hadn't reread Jacobi for decades, before George Kelley's recent piece on his most famous collection.

The other writer still with us is Joyce Carol Oates, whose highlighted contribution is a vignette verging on a parable, a fantasy that reminds me far too much of me, if I had achieved a bit more in these directions...I suspect it reminds Oates of herself in some senses as well: "The Maker of Parables"

While our last selection for this week is by Wilma Shore, of whom I've written before here, with her first story of two for F&SF, toward the end of an impressive and diverse career writing in a number of venues, not least the slick women's magazines of the '40s through the '60s, as well as leftist magazines and more than one volume of Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards annuals...this was the first and for many years the last story by her I was to read, a charming and funny time travel tale of sorts. I read it when I was very young, in a battered copy of Robert Silverberg's anthology for young readers, Voyagers in Time--a copy my father might've picked up out of a shady bookdealer's collection of stripped paperbacks (their front covers sent back for store credit) in Boston, where he picked up a number of earliest '70s paperbacks for a dime each on his way home from the office...this one definitely caught my eye, and I've been able to thank Silverberg for this collection (though I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned to him that his fine time travel novel Hawksbill Station was the first adult sf novel I read by a living writer--as opposed to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley or Edward Bellamy).




Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

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.
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

Wednesday, October 18, 2023

20th Anniversary Issues: THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION October 1969, edited by Edward Ferman, and FANTASTIC August 1972, edited by Ted White: Short Story Wednesday

Perhaps unsurprisingly for 20th Anniversary issues of fantasy/sf magazines, or for any gathering of fiction, considerations of time (and, often, loss) loom large in the stories in these two issues. Slightly odd that two magazines which have been, at times at least in their previous histories, famous as homes for women writers in fantastica should produce "all-stag" anniversary celebration issues, albeit in the case of Fantastic, Alice (at conventions, going by nickname "Racoona") Sheldon was still hiding behind the "James Tiptree, Jr." pseudonym, and cover artist Jeff Jones was eventually to transition to womanhood and take on the name Jeffrey Catherine Jones in 1998; "Ova Hamlet" as the pseudonym Richard Lupoff used for his parody stories for Fantastic, mostly, was a Very open non-secret (part of the gag was that Lupoff was serving as interlocutor for the eccentric "Hamlet"). 

That said, these are impressive issues, helping to kick off good decades artistically for both magazines, and eventually financially for F&SF, at least.

The best stories in either issue are, I'd say at this hour, Robert Bloch's time-travel (of a sort) and definitely afterlife fantasy "The Movie People", which incorporates his love for film and his experiences as both youthful film fan and eventual professional screenwriter, and Tiptree's "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket", very much a time-travel story and yet also deeply encoding some of her lived experience as a young debutante (and, to a much lesser extent, her later life as an OSS/CIA staffer). I haven't yet read the Conan pastiche by de Camp and Carter, nor this part of the eventual Ursus of Ultima Thule by Avram Davidson, but the introduction to the first part of the serial, giving some of the events in the previous segment published as a standalone story in the sf magazine Worlds of If, is indicative of Davidson in one of his favorite modes, writing about the origins of the mythology he's mining for the story, and the sort of thing he eventually would write at length in the essays collected as Adventures in Unhistory...which is highly recommended.

Barry Malzberg, the editor of Fantastic and stablemate Amazing before White, as well as contributor to this issue, would later collect the Tiptree story in his 2003 anthology The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time, as well as it being first collected in Sheldon/Tiptree's first, widely-hailed collection, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Bloch's "The Movie People" has also been widely collected, in his The Best of Robert Bloch and many other volumes, in translation as well as the original.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more complete considerations of their objects of discussion and review, and a fine new poem she's composed commemorating the birthday of her late husband, the political science professor and historian Philip Abbott (whose favorite short story was E. M. Forster's seminal sf story, "The Machine Stops")...



Posted by at 9 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , ,

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.

Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)