Rather sad.

The current issue of Fitness (sic) knows what you XX sorts should and often do aspire to...anorexia. But this model, with stick-thin arms, fat-and muscle-lite belly, and a face that (not so clearly in this image, the best electronic one I could find for the current issue, but very clearly on the magazine's cover on paper) shows the typical results of starvation...the skull outlined in sunken facial contours...is unusually blatant in the illustration of what this magazine and its competitors are trying to reinforce in women...skeletal is Healthy Beauty. 

Why, she's the fittest famine-survivor we know!

At least, we hope she survives all this fitnessing...

FFB: Robert Arthur: EPITAPH FOR A VIRGIN (in MERCURY MYSTERY, September 1956)

The editorial work of Robert Arthur has been extraordinarily influential on my reading life, as the ghost editor of most of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents: anthologies and the "Hitchcock" anthologies aimed at younger readers published in the latter 1950s through his death in 1969 (he didn't quite make it to 60, though he left a fair amount of work behind him, having first published in sf magazines with an entry in Wonder Stories in 1931 and perhaps having published professionally even earlier). These were among the most eclectic and engaging anthologies I read in my youth, augmented by the occasional anthology Arthur would edit under his own name (he also ghosted one for Red Skelton, of all people).

His collections Ghosts and More Ghosts and Mysteries and More Mysteries were also early favorites (particularly the first), and while drawn from such magazines as Argosy and Bluebook (and EQMM and F&SF) were marketed as kids' books, which was fine by me at the time...but it remains a pity they have been only such collections of his work published. And while I've been enjoying his various radio and television and film scripting over the years since reading those two collections in my first decade, this novella is the first new-to-me fiction I've read by him for quite some time. Several years after the publication in Mercury Mystery, a slightly longer version was published as half of an Ace Double Novel as Somebody's Walking Over My Grave (1961), and this stands as the only novel aimed at adults he would publish that I'm aware of. (I never did much care for the Three Investigators novels for young readers, which he either wrote or eventually had ghosted from his outlines; yet more were written completely by others after his death.)

Since it's a Robert Arthur fiction, it's slickly written, playful and witty for the most part...he was clearly having some fun writing a post-Jonathan Latimer/Mickey Spillane sort of relatively explicit, if not so much as to get too many blue noses out of joint, hardboiled story, with cocksure private detective Max London as heedless of consequences of tangling with crooked police chiefs and well-connected mafiosi as anyone this side of the Destroyer, the Lone Wolf, and other later vigilante antiheroes. Nonetheless, at least in first form, it's sadly relatively minor work, dependent on even more coincidence than the story itself mocks in other similar stories (London eventually sees through some reported coincidences in the testimony of others that strain credulity, but the eventual truth he uncovers doesn't strike me as any more plausible), and the sexual politics of the story, not altogether atypically for its field or era, seem also to straddle the line between knowing parody and blithe exploitation of the prevalent stereotypes...not only do the manful characters occasionally express their confusion in the face of women's inscrutability, but one technician, noting that the cigaret butt of a woman suspect lacks any trace of lipstick, wonders what kind of woman is she, anyway? (Meanwhile, there are certainly implications that one of the two apparent virgins in the novella might be a lesbian, but a round of manful kisses soon puts that woman straight.)

I have to wonder if the later version of the novel doesn't improve on this draft (Kevin Burton Smith says no), but I would certainly send the curious reader onto a good episode of The Mysterious Traveler or Murder By Experts, or the short fiction, or one of his entries in the Thriller or Alfred Hitchcock tv series, before recommending this novel...which is nonetheless a smooth and relatively diverting read. You certainly aren't going to find too many other hardboiled novels where the motivating factors include patents on color television broadcasting technology.

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

the balance of this issue's contents (at this point, I think Mercury Mystery was constrained from potentially "stealing" too many short stories from EQMM, so concentrated on shorter true-crime essays and you-solve-it puzzle games for its shorter content):

Cover: Photo by Bill Stone. Model, alas, uncredited.

"Mystery Puzzle: Miami Murder" by J. A. Kripper
(which is a very poor choice of minute mystery to immediately follow the Arthur novella, as it depends on a gimmick that was much the topic of opening-pages discussion in "Epitaph")

"The Knockout Bullet" by Erle Stanley Gardner (not bad if not too compelling account of an early 20th Century boxer and his murder)

"Memo from the Underground" by André Maurois (amusing account from his memoirs of his service as potential counterespionage mail censor)

"Proof Negative" by Paul Steiner (slight puzzle story)

"Once Aboard the Lugger" by Stuart Palmer (a rather interesting premise, particularly in an historical article...a married couple of tramp sailors who book adventure tours supposedly in search of various sorts of loot, in a set of circumstances that wouldn't've been out of place in a B. Traven story...sadly, told in a most windy and redundant fashion, by a retired newspaper guy as well as a popular crime-fiction writer who really should've known better...)

This issue can be read at Unz.org.

The fine cover of the Mercury Mystery issue recycled from an earlier  cover for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and some Bettie Page covers for EQMM, among other matters...

Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links

Shirley Eaton in Carry On Nurse

This week's selections for (usually) unfairly overlooked or obscure audio/visual presentations (including at least two John Sturges films) at the links below...and the probability of a few more to be added over the course of the day. As always, thanks to all you who read as well as those who contribute these...and if I've overlooked your or someone else's review or citation, please let me know in comments...and thanks to Bill Crider, one of our regular contributors here, for the name-check of Tuesday's A/V in his column, "Blog Bytes," in the current issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine...


Bill Crider: Carry On Nurse [trailer]

Brian Arnold: A Christmas Carol (1969 API animation);
Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas

BV Lawson: Media Murder

Dan Stumpf: Man at Large

David Vineyard: Big Jim McLain

Ed Gorman: John Ford: paper-thin melodrama

Police Python 357

Ed Lynskey: The Glass Web; 13 West Street

Elizabeth Foxwell: Blackwell's Island; Police Python 357

Evan Lewis: Captain Kidd (1945 film)

George Kelley: The Jack Ryan Collection

Iba Dawson: 100 Must-See Films

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: The Crooked Web; Movies; TV/DVDs

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "A Crime for Mothers" (by Henry Slesar)

Jackie Kashian: Leean Olsen on Doctor Who (and Watership Downton Abbey)

Jake Hinkson: film noir and blacklisting

James Reasoner: Last Train from Gun Hill

Jerry House: Banned Cartoon Collection 1

John Charles: Kung Fu: "The Way of the Tiger, The Sign of the Dragon"; Starsky & Hutch: Pilot

Juri Nummelin: Finnish Cannon novelizations

Kate Laity: "Krampus"

Kliph Nesteroff: Chrysler Theater: "No Time for Elizabeth" (with Groucho Marx); The Steve Allen Show: Jack Kerouac/William Bendix; The Garry Moore Show: Bill Dana/Peter Lawford

Laura: Good Morning (aka Ohayo); Letter from an Unknown Woman; Eleanor Parker

Eleanor Parker

Lawrence Person: San Antonio WorldCon photos

Lucy Brown: The Velvet Touch

Martin Edwards: Taggart: "Nest of Vipers"

Martin Schneider: Ingmar Bergman's soap commercials

Marty McKee: Blood Beach; Fists of Steel; Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry

Mystery Dave: The To Do List

Patti Abbott: The Mary Tyler Moore Show: "Rhoda the Beautiful"

Pearce Duncan: Cat o' Nine Tails

Prashant Trikannad: True Lies, Richie Rich; The Parent Trap (1998)

Randy Johnson: Brother Orchid; The Silent Stranger (aka Lo straniero di silenzio aka The Horseman and the Samurai)

Rick: The Gene Autry Show; 1949 in film

Rod Lott: The Penny Dreadful Picture Show; The Mad Bomber

Ron Scheer: The Law and Jake Wade

Scott Cupp: Read or Die (and Mesa of Lost Women)

Sergio Angelini: Callan (1974 film)

Stacia Jones: Her Twelve Men

Stephen Bowie: Naked City (tv series)

Stephen Gallagher: Ripper Street, Copper and BBC foolishness

Steve Lewis: Kaleidoscope

Walter Albert: A Tale of Two Cities (1917 film)

Yvette Banek: Death Takes a Holiday 

Alexey Kljatov's snowflake photography

A whole lot of these in the Philadelphia area in the last 24, if not quite as many as fell in the middle and western US recently...

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/snowflake-photos-alexey-kljatov/20716778
http://500px.com/chaoticmind75

FFB: Sheila Kohler: STORIES FROM ANOTHER WORLD (Ontario Review Press 2003); Barry Malzberg: THE MAN WHO LOVED THE MIDNIGHT LADY (Doubleday 1980)

Well, we've lost Doris Lessing and Nelson Mandela within a brief time, and if that doesn't mark at least an easy sort end-of-year/reaching the end of an era summing for South Africa and the rest of the world, nothing much does. Rather than reach for a Lessing or a Nadine Gordimer or Alan Paton or Stuart Cloete or J.M. Coetzee (all pale SAers, one notes), or Mandela's memoirs, another SArfrican comes to mind, Sheila Kohler, whose short stories and novels have given her a solid but not large, sustained audience, very much including me, after reading fine contributions to Ontario Review, Boulevard, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and others (the EQMM citation--and quite a stellar issue it was--oddly missing from her site). Meanwhile, I was rereading some stories by Ron Goulart, Barry Malzberg and others last night, and Malzberg's particularly were even more pointed and funny to me now than in 1978, the year I turned 14 and thought that I had as much handle on the world as most adults do...sadly, I was correct.

I don't know Kohler; I've met Malzberg on a couple of occasions, corresponded with him, and he's not only been kind enough to contribute directly to this site but has personally bucked me up on an occasion or three; I fear I've been less useful, but one does what one can, or at least what one chooses to do from that set of potential actions.

The affinity between Joyce Carol Oates and Kohler is pretty strong, and I can see why she became a particularly favored writer between Oates and her late husband Raymond Smith, the editor of the Review and co-proprietor of their publishing activities. She has a rather more offhanded approach than Oates tends to, however, and can take a lighter tone than Oates often seems comfortable with; and while some of these are set in her native South Africa and others in her adopted US, she gets around in this world, not quite truly Another no matter how it can feel. "Baboons" and "Lunch with Mother" were both particularly good reads, though at this remove I'm having difficulty sorting out the specific details for each...a book I need to pick up, since I've read only half the contents so far, it's Kohler's third collection.

(details from WorldCat)
Stories from Another World 
By Sheila Kohler 
Ontario Review Press 2003; 152 pp

Casualty 1
Paris by Night 14 
Underworld 25
The Mask 33
Death in Rome 49
Rain Check 69
The Adulterous Woman 75
Baboons 85
Lunch with Mother 98
Youth 116
Poor Cousins 124
All the Days of My Life 137

Meanwhile, the Malzberg collection is perhaps problematic, at least as tagged "Doubleday Science Fiction" and given the typically uninspired packaging that line was known for (at least the Kohler, above, has the weak but real excuse of having been produced by a small press), to say nothing of the lack of promotion DSF books were given (Malzberg has noted that their releases were expect to sell a few thousand copies to libraries and the barest minimum of any other sort of sale, except perhaps as remainders; this one never had a paperback reprint). Problematic at least in that only so much of this book is sf by any stretch:

(details from ISFDb)

The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady

Barry N. Malzberg
Year: 1980-04-00
Pages: xiv+201
xi • Introduction (The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady) • essay by Barry N. Malzberg
1 • On the Air • (1976) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
9 • Here, For Just a While • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
16 • In the Stocks • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
25 • The Fifties • (1978) • essay by Barry N. Malzberg
34 • The Man Who Married a Beagle • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
45 • Big Ernie, the Royal Russian and the Big Trapdoor • [Writers' Heaven] • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
51 • Ring, the Brass Ring, the Royal Russian, and I • [Writers' Heaven] • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg (variant of Ring, The Brass Ring, the Russian and I)
57 • Of Ladies' Night Out and Otherwise • [Writers' Heaven] • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
63 • The Annual Once-a-Year Bash and Circumstance Party • [Writers' Heaven] • (1979) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg (variant of The Annual Bash and Circumstance Party)
70 • The Appeal • (1979) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
77 • Yahrzeit • (1973) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
80 • Another Burnt-Out Case • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
92 • I'm Going Through the Door • (1976) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
97 • Cornell • (1972) • shortfiction by Barry N. Malzberg
100 • On Account of Darkness • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
106 • Impasse • (1976) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
114 • Varieties of Technological Experience • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
120 • Varieties of Religious Experience • (1979) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
125 • Inside Out • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
130 • Line of Succession • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
136 • Reaction-Formation • (1979) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
140 • Indigestion • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
148 • A Clone at Last • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini
150 • Backing Up • (1978) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
154 • September 1958 • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
159 • Into the Breach • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
165 • On "Revelations" • (1976) • essay by Barry N. Malzberg
171 • Thirty-Six Views of His Dead Majesty • (1980) • novelette by Barry N. Malzberg
190 • The Trials of Sigmund • [Sigmund Freud] • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
195 • The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg

The first story I reread last night was "Backing Up" from the November 1978 Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (another stellar issue in terms of contributors), which is as succinct an indictment of the decline of the quality of American life by the 1970s, and an indictment of such indictments simultaneously, as is possible to pack into a crime-fiction vignette (well, perhaps a bit long for that classification, at four pages); it's hardly alone as either crime fiction or otherwise non-sf among the fiction gathered here. The Writer's Heaven stories collected here are consistently funny, demonstrating the kind of cheerful despair that marked particularly some of the later writing of Kurt Vonnegut as well, as opposed to the purer writer's hell that "Cornell" (as in Woolrich) portrays so vividly. While, as mentioned on this blog before, his more broadly comic collaboration with Bill Pronzini, "A Clone at Last", is a bagatelle, the essentially simultaneously published similar work "Another Burnt-Out Case" more than makes up for that, being far richer as well as longer. There are slight factual bobbles in the essay "The Fifties" as I recall, but, having buried my copy of this collection (and of its source,  Malzberg and Pronzini's The End of Summer anthology of 1950s sf), I can't quite pick those bits of chaff currently...and, as Malzberg once said to someone of whom it was less true, Even when you're wrong, you're right. The only way this anthology might've been improved in its literary content, I speak not solely out of nostalgia, would've been for (the actual vignette) "Prowl" (1978 Fantastic) to have also been included, the kind of horror that a parent of a teen (and who presumably remembers his own parents' state when he was a teen) might find it necessary to write.  

...with Sheila Kohler, too...(and Bill Crider)...

A decade has gone by since the Kohler was published, a quarter-century since the Malzberg...Kohler has had one of her novels filmed, and been shortlisted or included in Best American Mystery Stories and Best American Short Stories, Malzberg is awaiting, no doubt with some mixed emotions, the likelihood of being one of the next people to be tagged as a Grand Master by the SFWA, the SF and Fantasy Writers of America guild, since Samuel Delany will be so Knighted next year and Kate Wilhelm and Malzberg seem the likeliest contenders for the next round.  I suspect you not only will be entertained by these slim volumes, but will gain some valuable perspective. Thus, art, with the chewy bits left in.  

For more art and craft for this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Saturday Music Club on Wednesday: some rarish tracks by the Zombies in the late 1960s...

I suspect this is a sort of electronic bootleg album, though it includes some tracks (by the post-breakup Zombies, temporarily back from the dead, as the band Argent was forming?) that I haven't heard elsewhere, including the cover of "Never My Love"...which turns out to have been a Colin Blunstone solo-career release, which makes sense. ("Unhappy Girl", "Telescope", "I Could Spend the Day", "I'll Keep Trying" and the "acid" remix of "Sometimes" are the other new ones for me...possibly this recording [demo?] of "Girl Help Me" as well.) 

00:00:00 Never My Love
00:02:39 I Know She Will
00:05:27 Smokey Day
00:07:52 Unhappy Girl
00:10:19 I'll Keep Trying
00:12:47 Conversation Off Floral Street
00:15:25 Walking in the Sun
00:18:10 If It Don't Work Out
00:20:42 Sometimes (Acid)
00:22:13 Telescope (Mr Galileo)
00:24:54 Girl Help Me
00:27:19 I Could Spend the Day
00:29:59 Imagine the Swan