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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

SSW: June 1943: UNKNOWN WORLDS;; July 1943: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, SCIENCE FICTION (previously FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION); September 1943: FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES--stories from 1943 US fantasy fiction magazines:

A snapshot/slice of a time long past...notable that the most famous story in this issue of Weird Tales would be the most famous and among the most influential stories to be published in any of the issues cited here, one which posits that "Jack the Ripper" has found a means of achieving literal immortality through his crimes. Got a top-line banner, though not the cover illustration (albeit, to be fair, the story is not so very much Newsstand Illustration-friendly for the times). 





The most famous story here, I'd say, is the Wellman. I've certainly seen it collected and anthologized the most. Though the Sturgeon is probably a not too distant second...

This issue can be read here.  ISFDB index here. (Bloch's light-hearted, pun-laden "Lefty Feep"-series story might well be the best-remembered story in this issue.)


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Catherine L. Moore story would be the best remembered of the new fiction in this issue...even if by default. Chambers has had a spike in interest in part from television taking elements from his fiction and/or name-checking it in such series as True Detective, From, and Good Omens, the last in its turn based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore which also pays homage to Chambers, and apparently also Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which I have yet to see.


This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Bloch story is (just barely) the most widely-reprinted here.

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Friday, September 19, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: links to the reviews and more: 19 September 2025

Patti Abbott: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder)

Douglas A. Anderson: The Smoking Leg and Other Stories by John Metcalfe

Brian Busby: A Fair Affair by Paul Champagne

"Dead Yesterday": Sleep Long, My Love by Hillary Waugh

Eric: Crash Course by Kathryn Johnson

Martin Edwards: Dead Men at the Folly by John Rhode

Will Errickson: Night Visions: In the Blood: stories by Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee and Steven Rasnic Tem, edited by Alan Ryan

Michael Gonzalez: Richard Prince prose and film-scripting, not least Sea of Love: Donald Westlake's Parker novels and their films, set in Harlem and elswhere

Charles Gramlich: the Sword and Planet fiction of Leigh Brackett

Bev Hankins: Panic in Paradise by "Alan Amos" (Kathleen Moore Knight)

Lesa Holstine: A New Lease on Death by Olivia Blacke

Rich Horton: "It Opens the Sky" among the stories of Theodore Sturgeon; The Blighted Stars by Megan  O'Keefe: Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Jerry House: Kill Now, Pay Later by Robert Terrall (aka "Robert Kyle"); Steve Lewis in 2023

Aubrey Hamilton: The Seven Black Chessman by John Huntingdon

Kate Jackson: The Jealous One by Celia Fremlin

George Kelley: Quicksand and The Book of John Brunner by John Brunner

Karen Langley: Mapping the North by Charlotta Forss; Jasmine Tea by Eileen Chang

B. V. Lawson: Thorne in the Flesh by Rhona Petrie

Todd Mason: Fantastic, August 1976, edited by Ted White, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August and September 1976, edited by Edward Ferman

Neeru: Exit John Horton by J. Jefferson Farjeon

James Nicoll: The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Moike, translated by Deborah Bolivar Boehm; Geodesic Dreams: The Best Short Fiction of Gardner Dozois by (and presumably selected by) Gardner Dozois

J. F. Norris: Greymarsh by Arthur J. Rees; Death at Ash House aka The Undesirable Residence by Miles Burton

Jim Noy: The Secret of the Downs by Walter S. Masterman

Colman/Ohlman: A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul

J. Kingston Pierce: Ordinary Bear by C. B. Bernard

James Reasoner: Climb a Broken Ladder by Robert Novak

Steven H. Silver: A Tor Double: novellas Riding the Torch by Norman Spinrad and Tin Soldier by Joan D. Vinge

Kevin Tipple: Beyond the Truth by Bruce Robert Coffin

"TomCat": "Death at the Porthole" (1938) and "The Eye" (1945) by Baynard Kendrick

David Vineyard:  Who He? aka The Rat Race by Alfred Bester

A. J. Wright (III): Petrochemical Nocturne and Nobody Knows When It Got This Good by Amos Jasper Wright IV; 3 generations of A. J. Wrights' books at the University of Alabama at Birmingham's Sterne Library



Todd Mason

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Sunday, September 7, 2025

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: the links to the reviews and more: 5 September 2025

Patti Abbott: A Loss for Words by Lou Ann Walker


Douglas A. Anderson: The Autobiography of A. Merritt; A. Merritt: Reflections in the Moon Pool by Sam Moskowitz; 1930s omnibus anthologies of crime and horror fiction among others, edited by Dorothy Tomlinson, or John Gawsworth, or others, published by Gollancz and Hutchinson, among others; Great Stories of Sport edited by Thomas Moult, featuring E. R. Eddison; the works of Bernard C. Blake

Sergio Angelini and Aidan Brack: King's Ransom by "Ed McBain" (Salvatore Lombino/eventually legally Evan Hunter) and the films based on it

Brad Bigelow: Pick Up by Eunice Chapin

Ben Boulden: Domino Island by Desmond Bagley

Brian Busby: Carnac's Folly by Gilbert Parker

Charles Gramlich: the novels of Mike Sirota

"DforDoom": The Wicked Gnomes and The Iron God (Modesty Blaise graphic novels) by Peter O'Donnell and Enrique Badia Romero

Martin Edwards: Be Shot for Sixpence by Michael Gilbert

Eric/Paperback Warrior: When Michael Calls by John Farris; The Damagers by Donald Hamilton

Will Errickson: Under the Fang edited by Robert McCammon

Jose Ignacio Escribano García-Bosque: The Leyton Court Mystery by Anthony Berkeley

Murray Ewing: An Echo of Children by Ramsey Campbell

Aubrey Nye Hamilton: Who Killed Aunt Maggie? by Medora Field

Lesa Holstine: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Rich Horton: Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky (transcriptions of Wolinsky and Richard Lupoff's Pacifica Radio/KPFA-FM San Francisco literary discussion series)

Jerry House: The Red Skull: A Doc Savage Novella by "Kenneth Robeson" (Lester Dent)

Kate Jackson: Writing the Murder: Essays on Crafting Crime Fiction edited by Dan Coxon and Richard V. Hirst; A Puzzle for Fools by "Patrick Quentin" (in this case, apparently Richard Webb and Hugh Wheeler): Death in the Backseat by Dorothy Cameron Disney

Tracy K: The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout (with a callback to a review by the much-missed "John Grant")

Kaggsy: And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac

George Kelley: All Roads Lead to Rome edited by Hank Davis and David Afsharirad

B. V. Lawson: Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher (William White) edited by Francis Nevins and Martin H. Greenberg (can also be read here at Typepad...for not much longer...and we might hope Archive.org might look into preserving the older posts  in that format, as B. V. migrates her back files to her new Blogspot site, necessarily with somewhat different formatting)

Steve Lewis: Blondes Don't Cry by Merlda Mace

Gideon Marcus: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1970, edited by Edward L. Ferman; "Leviathan!" by Larry Niven (a sequel to an earlier F&SF story, "Get a Horse!"), Playboy, August 1970, edited by Hugh Hefner (in comments, I briefly note the other fiction in that issue of the skin magazine--not so much the airbrushing).

Todd Mason: Fantastic anthologies and other best-of fiction magazines anthologies

New stories by Shirley Jackson and (in English) by B. Traven, and a reprint by John Collier

Mike: The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

Neeru: Follow This Fair Corpse by Laurence Dwight Smith

J. F. Norris: Greymarsh by Arthur J. Rees

Jim Noy: podcast: Martin Edwards on his 2025 books; Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett; Poirot Investigates by Agatha Christie

"Puzzle Doctor": Lies and Dolls by Nev Fountain; The Final Vow by M. W. Craven

James Reasoner: Blue Book, May 1938, edited by Donald Kennicott; West on 66 by James H. Cobb; Shakedown by "Ben Kerr" (William Ard)

Stephen Silver: Tor Double 21: "Home is the Hangman" by Roger Zelazny/"We, in Some Stranger Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" by Samuel R. Delany

Kevin Tipple: Among the Shadows by Bruce Robert Coffin

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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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