Showing posts with label Short Story Wednesday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Short Story Wednesday. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: "Best of the Year" stories, mostly from 1964: John D. MacDonald, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, Frank Roberts; Peter Beagle

A return to the anthologies detailed in this post: 

FFB: THE 1965 ANNUALS of fiction and drama, further augmented...some more...


In which I begin with some of my favorites, taken from the fiction volumes (I may drop in some discussion of some of the plays eventually, or in another post).

"Blurred View" by John D. MacDonald, first published in the newspaper Sunday supplement magazine This Week (a bit like a more wide-ranging version of Parade), the 23 February 1964 fiction special, and can be read as collected and headnoted here by Peter Haining in his 1996 anthology The Orion Book of Murder; first read by me in "Anthony Boucher" (William White)'s Best Detective Stories of the Year: 20th Annual Collection

"Blurred View" is a relatively brief and brisk take on how a cad finds himself blackmailed after a murder he was quite sure was well-staged as accidental death; it's deftly written and very neatly thought out, if still a bit slight. I suspect annual editor Boucher was drawn to the neatness, as well as happy to have a reason to include a MacDonald story. (Not All That) Oddly enough, Judith Merril's sf and fantasy annual for '65 has a better, supernatural story by JDM, "The Legend of Joe Lee".

Further looking into the Merril annual, the first of these volumes I was to find and read (in 1978, at the Nashua, NH library, where I would also first find several of the others indexed in the earlier post), brings to mind some stories that made a stronger impact than either of these particular two MacDonald items, such as the lead-off story, "Automatic Tiger" by Kit Reed...a fantasy that was one of her earlier contributions to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), and perhaps the first story of hers to gain her widespread attention, as she built her career with fairly equal emphasis on crime fiction, fantasy and some sf, and contemporary/mimetic fiction over the next several decades (having been a professional newspaper reporter before beginning to publish fiction, with a good story in F&SF a few years earlier); "Automatic Tiger" the story is mostly about keeping what's most important in one's life front and center, as well as taking some nicely-aimed chill-shots at what we too often mistake for what's important. Among those also to make a strong impression on me was Mack Reynolds's canny political sf story "Pacifist", about whether sustained peace can ever be achieved through violence, no matter how "surgical" (Reynolds was particularly fascinated by this kind of question, as once a Socialist Labor Party member who had served as speech-writer and general assistant for his father Verne's presidential run as the candidate of this extremely doctrinaire Marxist party, whose founder Daniel De Leon had criticized Marx for the latter's own "deviations" in his later political writing).






























Another yet was the Australian writer Frank Roberts, with the grim "It Could Be You", a dystopian slight exacerbation of how life was barely lived/survived (and sometimes not for long) in a very near-future Australia (or elsewhere in the "First World")--a more sophisticated early precursor to Mad Max, reprinted from the Oz news/analysis/arts/some fiction magazine The Bulletin, in the 3 March 1962 issue; Merril first read it in a 1964 issue of the then-new Short Story International magazine, which she loved...which folded after a couple of years, but was revived in time for me to find 1978 issues on newsstands and enjoy it for a number of years, not realizing that it hadn't been continually published when picking up my first issue. (I have belatedly realized I gave this story, and its complicated publishing history, its own SSW entry here).








































As I look at the two most venerable eclectic (if mostly contemporary-mimetic fiction) US/North American Anglophone anthologies for '65, the O. Henry and the Best American Short Stories, probably the most widely-read of the stories collected in both in recent years is the fantasy short story, one of only a relative few at shorter than novel-length (and many of those gathered in the volume The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances) by Peter Beagle, "Come Lady Death"...albeit this was first published in The Atlantic Monthly, opening some doors in '64 that would be closed to fiction from more fantasy-heavy magazines. A few of the other stories might come closer some of their cohabitants to sustained audiences/readership nearly as widespread, but I doubt that any are read nearly as often over the decades as the Beagle is...even when the other contributors (many more prolific than Beagle) have among their catalogs at least a few stories at least within shouting/staged reading distance, such as Joyce Carol (or, as she signs herself in the '65 annual, J. C.) Oates and her earlier "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"...with a mythic quality, though not fantasy per se, of its own.

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday posts, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Australia's second-oldest literary magazine, Meanjin Quarterly, folds, as does the annual volume Best American Poetry:  Lit Mag News 

Adam Pearson: "The People Imagine a Vain Thing", Metropolitan Review, 9 August 2025



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Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Short Story Wednesday: John D. MacDonald, Robert Arthur, Anne Gibbons, Val Duncan, Margaret Atwood: more from early 1950s US magazines: REDBOOK, June 1951; BLUEBOOK, July 1953; ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, June 1953, and a new vignette by Margaret Atwood (Twitter, 2025)

John D. MacDonald:  "Nothing Must Change" (Redbook 1951); "Manhattan Horse Opera" (Black Mask 1947, as reprinted in EQMM, 1953, as "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose")

MacDonald demonstrates his mastery of various modes of short fiction between these two stories, originally published four years apart, one in Redbook, which at this point was aiming itself at younger married couples, while still broadly fitting into the dynamics of a slick magazine with a largely female readership, the other in Black Mask, not quite the birthplace of noirish crime fiction writing, but as close as any single publication came to being so. (Spell- checkers on blogging software hate the the word "noirish".) "Nothing" involves the reunion of two women friends, one now one of the key visual arts critics of the time, the other having settled in as the wife of a bohemian younger painter, a bit of a smart-ass but very devoted to his work. His wife isn't so very sure of the quality of his work. Things go better than she fears, though the degree to which she has subsumed herself into his somewhat iffy career, and unsettled by that predicament, while feeling herself, to say the least, underaccomplished in the face of both these people important to her, and afraid her old friend will and that she won't tell him he has no shot, is well drawn.

The Black Mask story  is a good, late example of what the writers for that magazine could do, and JDM was not one of the less talented ones, for all that he came in in its very last years; a relatively minor but reasonably canny functionary in the underground sports betting world of Brooklyn gets caught in the switches when smoother operators set him up for a very hard fall at the hands of much uglier thugs; things aren't going his way at all. The ending is not necessarily one you'd guess was coming, but it works. Even relatively young JDM knew how to bring a verisimilitude to his work that even some of the greater pros who were his peers could envy. 

Robert Arthur: "The Man with the Golden Hand", Bluebook 1953, was a gifted editor and a good writer, but as with this example of his Murchison Morks loose series of fantasies, could lay the shtick on a bit heavily at times. It remains an amusing story, while pushing its comic aspects a bit hard, and there are better examples among the Morks tall-tale narratives (Morks isn't so much a recurring character as a narrator to others), but one could see why this story nonetheless led off the fiction contents of this issue. Redbook and Bluebook, as the titles might suggest, had begun their long runs as stablemates, but McCall by 1956 would sell Bluebook, which  was still definitely and squarely aimed at male readers, hence the fanboy article on Hemingway's machismo in this issue, as well. But they still weren't afraid of women writers contributing by 1953, and the near-vignette "Relic" by Anne Gibbons does a relatively good job of setting up a rather grim discovery in the life of its boy protagonist, in the midst of his not terribly nurturing life. 

Likewise, what little I've turned up about Val Duncan, whose EQMM reprint story "Emerald Bait" was originally in Esquire, and its slick origins and relatively clever resolution don't give us any more clues than I've been able to turn up otherwise whether Duncan was a male or female writer, with its biter-bit plot and reasonably deft battle of the sexes execution. It, too, won't rock anyone's world, but you might get a chuckle out of the last little twist. One could see why editor Frederic Dannay, half of "Ellery Queen"'s two-cousins team on the writing side, dug it.


















Bluebook [Vol. 97 No. 3, July 1953] ed. Maxwell Hamilton (McCall Corporation, 25¢, 128pp, quarto, cover by Robert Doares) [] Can be read here.

This issue can be read here.



This issue can be read here.


Margaret E Atwood
@MargaretAtwood
Here's a piece of literature by me, suitable for seventeen-year-olds in Alberta schools, unlike -- we are told -- The Handmaid's Tale. (Sorry, kids; your Minister of Education thinks you are stupid babies.): John and Mary were both very, very good children. They never picked their noses or had bowel movements or zits. They grew up and married each other, and produced five perfect children without ever having sex. Although they claimed to be Christian, they paid no attention to what Jesus actually said about the poor and the Good Samaritan and forgiving your enemies and such; instead, they practised selfish rapacious capitalism, because they worshiped Ayn Rand. (Though they ignored the scene in The Fountainhead where “welcomed rape” is advocated, because who wants to dwell, and also that would have involved sex and would de facto be pornographic. Well, it kind of is, eh?) Oh, and they never died, because who wants to dwell on, you know, death and corpses and yuk? So they lived happily ever after. But while they were doing that The Handmaid’s Tale came true and Danielle Smith found herself with a nice new blue dress but no job. The end.
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Margaret Atwood: 'Handmaid's Tale Banned in Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) Schools...And everyone and their pet canary wants me to "comment."' (In The Writing Burrow, Atwood's blog, 2 September)

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

Piet Nel's reviews of stories from a number of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction dear to my heart and often key early reading experiences...
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