Showing posts sorted by relevance for query John Creasey Mystery Magazine. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query John Creasey Mystery Magazine. Sort by date Show all posts

Monday, January 9, 2017

some crime fiction magazines on the newsstands for August 1964

All indices and images courtesy The FictionMags Index at Galactic Central.

 If one was to go to a theoretical newsstand that somehow had all the US, UK and Australian crime-fiction magazines in late July/early August 1964, these are the issues you'd probably find.  Considering how many (mostly down-market) Manhunt imitators you'd've found a few years before, this is both a pretty good selection and surprisingly thin on the racks. Manhunt itself was already well into its long decline...and Chase was almost stillborn. But most of the established titles had at least a fair amount of life in them, even if sometimes only a few more years. The magazines are arrayed below by the first issue date of the primary edition of each title, with obvious groups of magazines gathered together.  Thus, EQMM is the oldest magazine of this group (and barely old enough to vote in 1964), while the brand new Edgar Wallace is the youngest, though barely younger than Chase, originally meant to be published by the same folks who published sf/fantasy/horror/suspense magazine Gamma; they couldn't come up with the money, so their distributor (Acme) and publisher of such titles as the Magazine of Horror (Health Knowledge) took it on as a three-issue project...perhaps certain commitments were already in place, or simply the material was already purchased. Life on the fringes of publishing...which EQMM and AHMM at least were far less than they might be seen as being today. (And among the appended titles, British Argosy and Ranch Romances were both much older than EQMM, and even the attempt at "shudder pulp" revival in digest form, Web Terror Tales, had roots in a decent fantasy/sf magazine called Saturn, edited by Donald A. Wollheim, from several years before several of these other magazines.)

The mothership EQMM is pretty impressive...Avram Davidson, Dorothy B. Hughes, Gerald Kersh, Françoise Sagan, Allen Lang (the last all but forgotten but doing often very impressive work particularly in the early '60s)...and Anthony Boucher reviewing...

...while the February issue of the US magazine as redeployed in Australia might've been even more impressive, even without a Davidson, Hughes or Kersh story...

....and the April issue was pretty spookily impressive, too, as repackaged in the UK, with a Davidson, a Cornell Woolrich as William Irish, and another slew of major writers...

...and the reprint magazine not that much more overqualified...

L. P. Davies would be the big draw for me, though Phil Stephensen-Payne notes that a fair amount of each issue is actually fantasy and horror. 
While Edward Wellen would be the big draw in this issue from Manhunt's waning years...EQMM was almost certainly outselling it by '64, and not EQ alone...
    Interesting how the material is juggled between the US and UK editions at this point...with the UK issue reprinting from "outside" US sources, and the US from UK magazines...and variant "Saint" stories, as well...Robert Bloch and to a lesser extent Hal Ellson the big draws, Dan Sugrue the forgotten writer...
    No image available....Zoë Fairbairns being the draw along with Creasey for me in this issue...

    A pretty brilliant choice of reprints this issue...certainly the Sturgeon, and probably the Burnett, might well outshine even the Perowne and Hoff originals.

    Hitchcock's then as now seemed to be the second-best-selling crime fiction magazine, and the lineup, particularly the early pages in this issue, indicates why, in part, quite aside from the gimmick of having Hitchcock all over the package (while not even actually writing the brief editorial).

    And even more AHMM favorites in this rebound set: Clark Howard, C. B. Gilford, Lawrence Block, Lawrence Treat, Nedra Tyre, August Derleth for the hell of it...and Jack Ritchie, Richard Deming, and Arthur Porges popping up again...


    Robert Lowndes rather than Gamma's Jack Matcha or Charles Fritch editing this third and last issue of Chase is demonstrated most clearly by Lowndes "discovery" Ed Hoch having a reprint story...but Jack Vance, Ed Lacy and Fletcher Flora are all notable writers to cluster around the low-budget project. 

    Wallace himself the only writer whose work I know I know here...though Arthur Kent, house name or no, sounds familiar...




    And...two extremes of periphery to the CF titles:
    One of the magazines I rather envy the British, to have continued in this manner into the 1970s, though the US Short Story International was pretty comparable; reprints one of the stories I loved from Joan Aiken from my youth; Dahl, Thomas, Kersh and Hemingway do add some obvious marquee value...

    While the most lurid things in the Manhunt or the Wallace magazines are almost certainly tame in comparison to this s&m-driven magazine...an FB correspondent notes that this was the saddest magazine he'd ever read, and in the most literal even more than the most obvious way. No contributors I've heard of, and even by the standards of this magazine in this last stage of its run, this is a particularly inept cover. 

    And this one a bit more like Argosy in quality....

    So much western fiction is also crime fiction that the heavy writer crossover between the two fields isn't too surprising...given the romance angle in this magazine, fading toward the end of its run, it might have a little less (but not much less) criminous content. Only the reprint contributors are the writers I'm most familiar with...by the end, RR was all reprints.

    And I suppose I could attempt to include all the "true adventure" and "true confessions" magazines from this month...but, well, no. 

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    Thursday, September 7, 2017

    FFM: 1960 crime fiction magazines in English (augmented)

    Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
    Ellery Queen's Anthology
    Bestseller Mystery Magazine
    London Mystery Selection
    John Creasey Mystery Magazine
    Manhunt
    The Saint Mystery Magazine
    The Saint Mystery Library
    Tightrope!
    77 Sunset Strip
    Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
    Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine
    Trapped Detective Story Magazine
    Guilty Detective Story Magazine
    Web Detective Stories
    Off Beat Detective Stories
    Two-Fisted Detective Stories
    Keyhole Mystery Magazine
    Shock
    Double-Action Detective Magazine (on the cover)
    Ed McBain's Mystery Book
    Mystery Digest

     ...and most of them good or good enough...
    Most issues pictured below cover-dated June 1960 or as close as could be found, courtesy the FictionMags Index.

     Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
    Ellery Queen's Anthology
    ...EQMM was in 1960 a couple of years into its ownership by B. G. Davis and his still relatively new Davis Publications, founded in 1958 after he left Ziff-Davis, after the death of his cofounding partner William Ziff. Davis Publications would continue until 1992, buying Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1975, launching Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (shortened after the Dell purchase to the current Asimov's Science Fiction) in 1977, and buying Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in 1978; when losses on a personal finance magazine led Joel Davis, B. G. Davis's son and heir, to fold or sell his magazines to various other publishers, Dell Magazines bought the Davis fiction magazines, briefly added Louis L'Amour Western Magazine to their number, and then sold their magazine group to current publishers Penny Press in 1996. 

     Stefan Dziemianowicz thinks the cover model on this issue is Robert Arthur, and he might be right (the angle is rather different from those of the few other photographs of Arthur I've seen)--no mention is made in the magazine itself, if so. Frederic Dannay, the half of "Ellery Queen" the writing duo of cousins who edited the magazine from founding till his death, goes on to a tiresome extent about how EQMM didn't reprint much of anything from other crime-fiction magazines, in the course of introducing the Holly Roth story, a fairly recent (1957) reprint from Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. James Holding's first story is in this issue, as well.
    A hardbound presentation copy of the magazine issue
    Meanwhile, one of the innovations Frederic Dannay and B. G. Davis introduced at Davis Publications in 1960 was the originally annual, then semi-annual Ellery Queen's Anthology magazine, where the (usually) reprinted contents in an issue would also be sold as a package to book publishers to be offered in hardcovers with more elaborate titles. Davis Publications would eventually extend this kind of companion magazine to its other fiction titles as they were acquired or launched. 

    Bestseller Mystery Magazine

    EQMM had been purchased from Mercury Press, created to continue publishing The American Mercury, the skeptical right-wing politics and arts journal founded by H.L. Mencken. By 1960, Mercury Press had sold or folded all their magazines except The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which had just absorbed its short-lived companion magazine Venture Science Fiction) and Bestseller Mystery, which had absorbed Mercury Mystery Book-Magazine, and became, along with a few Dashiell Hammett short story collections which Mercury Press would also offer in the early '60s, the last vestiges of their long-running newsstand/digest-sized paperback series Mercury Mysteries and Bestseller Mysteries, among others.  (There had also been a short run of Bestsellers magazine in the mid-'40s, competing with Book Digest and similar magazines.)

    This was the last Mercury Mystery:

     London Mystery Selection
    John Creasey Mystery Magazine
    The two notable UK crime fiction magazines in 1960, along with UK editions of US titles, and I have a copy of one issue each I hope to read soon. The London magazine was notable for having a fair amount of horror fiction in its remit, along with the crime; the Creasey was a bit more purist but nearly as wide-ranging, and by 1960 published by Creasey himself. Ziff-Davis had published a facsimile US edition of London Mystery briefly in the mid 1950s, and Norman Kark continued to send some copies west on their own later;  there had been a brief effort to import the Creasey to US newsstands in 1959.

     Manhunt

     The bloom was definitely off the rose for Manhunt by 1960...it, as now a bimonthly, hadn't been the bestselling crime-fiction magazine for some years by then, though it's a claim it would leave on its increasingly cheap-looking covers for at least another several years...but still publishing some good writers and some good fiction in 1960, which would be less true by its last issues in 1967. All of its stablemates had folded by the end of the '50s, though several of its downmarket imitators muddled on...as it slid downhill to join them.

     The Saint Mystery Magazine
    The Saint Mystery Library
    Tightrope!
    77 Sunset Strip
    Great American Publications bought King-Size Publications' two notable fiction magazines, The Saint and Fantastic Universe, as part of an ambitious plan for expansion into fiction-magazine publishing in 1960, which also included their launch of a horror-fiction magazine, Fear!, and a US edition of the UK sf magazine New Worlds. Unfortunately, Great American's licensed television-series-tie-in pulp-sized magazines both folded quickly...though Tightrope! magazine lasted longer than the tv series did...and presumably under-capitalization led to the folding of nearly all their properties by 1961, aside from some sold to other publishers...only the Saint magazine managed to find a new publisher among the fiction titles, and the magazine ran till 1967 (as opposed to the library, in mass-market paperback format though issued as periodicals, which folded with GAP in 1960). Editor Hans Stefan Santesson had been editor of the Unicorn Mystery Book Club before hiring on at King-Size and continuing with The Saint till its end.

     The last story in the Tightrope! issue is by Harlan Ellison (see the indices at the end of this post) and has a bad-taste twist ending that he has mentioned not being proud of.


    Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine

    Founded in 1956 in part to capitalize on the appearance of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents the same year, this was published for its first two decades by HSD Publications, then sold to Davis Publication who began publishing it in 1976. At HSD, Patricia Hitchcock, AH's daughter, usually had some title and presumably had a hand in to watch out for her father's interests. AHMM is the only other of these magazines to still be publishing, along wth its long-term stablemate EQMM; happily, the current publishers have long since given up on the often hideously-composed covers, mixed in with a few good ones, which featured some photograph or caricature of Hitchcock, the photos particularly leaning toward the poorly-cropped and awkwardly "cute"...nonetheless, AHMM rather comfortably outsold all the other cf magazines aside from EQMM, and briefly EQMM as well, over most of its run so far. A series of Alfred Hitchcock's Anthology, similar to the EQA, began in 1977 at Davis. 

     Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine
    Also founded in 1956, as Michael Shayne Mystery Magazine but going less formal by the next year, this one was also a durable title and throughout the '60s, '70s and early '80s other magazines would come and go, but the reliable US digests were EQMM (and EQA), AHMM and MSMM, till it finally folded in 1985. While all three magazines published a range of crime fiction, EQMM in the late '70s when I began reading new issues was still overseen by Frederic Dannay, and still leaned toward coziness and classic detection, though no little suspense and espionage fiction was in the mix; AHMM was a bit more noirish in general tone, certainly still prone to sardonic twist endings in its stories, while MSMM was the most hardboiled of the trio and the one least likely, till final editor Charles Fritch took over in the '80s, to mix a horror story in with straightforward crime fiction. Also notable were the levels of language policing...I noted that in 1978 someone could be "called an epithet" in EQMM, be "a stupid bastard" in AHMM, and could be a "fucking son of a bitch" in MSMM. Shayne founding publisher Leo Margulies had attempted to continue, introduce or revive a number of other fiction titles in his years with his publishing company Renown, but none other than MSMM lasted more than a few years, including mid -'60s The Man from UNCLE and The Girl from UNCLE magazines (and three Mike Shayne Annual issues in the early '70s, which reprinted short stories heavily from the UNCLE magazine back pages), the quasi-revival Zane Grey Western, Shell Scott and Charlie Chan Mystery Magazines and the first revival of Weird Tales, which Margulies had purchased the rights to in the course of buying, and publishing the last issues of, its stablemate Short Stories. Shayne, like most Margulies magazines, also paid less for fiction than the industry leaders, and the lead novellas attributed to "Brett Halliday" (originally Shayne-creator Davis Dresser) were usually written by a range of others, often younger writers such as James Reasoner. This, however, put it ahead of AHMM in transparency, where the editorials and blurbs attributed to Hitchcock were written exclusively by others. 

     Trapped Detective Story Magazine
    Guilty Detective Story Magazine
    Trapped and Guilty were also launched in 1956 (about three years after Manhunt came roaring onto the marketplace), and both were edited by W. W. Scott, whom Harlan Ellison has eulogized for his acumen at putting together intentionally rather déclassé magazines, but not bad ones (see Web Detective for bad), and particularly for Scott's ability to replace an author's story title with one more lurid, or, if that wasn't practically possible, at least with one that was punchier. Ellison was also rather happy with the magazines' mid-range pay rates and prompt payment, not always guaranteed to freelancers. While both magazines would continue till 1962, I'm guessing by the dressing-down visible between these two sequential covers and those which followed (fewer colors used, less-professional art) that the publishers were already feeling the pinch by early 1960. 

     Web Detective Stories
    Off Beat Detective Stories

    Peter Enfantino, in the course (for his critical magazine bare*bones) of reading through and rating each story in the short run of Web Detective, as it abruptly changed from Donald A. Wollheim's Saturn sf and fantasy magazine into DAW-less Saturn Web Detective, then Web Detective, and after a break re-emerged as Web Terror Stories--the last a full-on sadism-fiction magazine in the "shudder-pulp" tradition--didn't find too much to enjoy, even when, as in this issue, a young Edward Hoch has a story (though some of those stories by writers with talent were a bit of relief from the all-but-pure and clumsy sadism and nihilism that Web featured, as a very downmarket near-parody of Manhunt, striving to get a piece of the latter's audience as well as those who found the "men's sweat" "true adventure" magazines a bit tame). Perhaps the worst sustained and admitted fiction magazine (as opposed to various "true"-story titles) of the late '50s and early '60s, after the Saturn/Wollheim issues. But certainly one that tried to find its niche audience (and Peter does find one 1961 issue surprisingly good--two issues before the conversion to "shudder"). Its publisher would also buy the next two magazines' titles (see below), and produce similarly atrocious magazines to sully the memory of their good, first short run.

     A fairly typical example of what Peter found in reading the stories:

    "You'll Die Laughing!" by Arnold Sherry * (2100 words)

    Marvin, a decorated war hero, and his wife Donna are closing up the diner they own for the night when two thugs enter. The men beat Marvin and rape Donna repeatedly, all in the name of chuckles. A pointless, nasty exercise in torture and degradation. Brian De Palma would probably want to take out an option on this one.


     And one I did forget: the even less notable companion to Web Detective, Off Beat Detective, which began its run as as Sure-Fire Detective. Pontiac Publishing hacks predominate, with the previous issue to this one featuring an Edward Hoch story and a Talmage Powell appearing a couple of issues later, being among the rare contributions from a writer of any consequence. One gathers they hope, with the consistent cover blurb "All New Sock Stories," to give the sense of fiction with punch, but one can't help but wonder if the masturbatory pun was intentional.

     Two-Fisted Detective Stories
    Another yet I'd forgotten, that might or might not actually have been published by another firm, or just the Pontiac people doing business as Reese...every story title, at least in the table of contents features an exclamation point. Or ! 

    Keyhole Mystery Magazine
    Shock
    Two rather good, even impressive, respectively crime fiction and horror/suspense magazines, though apparently undercapitalized and probably too wedded to cute gimmicks, such as Shock having no credited (human) editor and Keyhole featuring a cover story about singer Fabian Forte as a detective. Both were apparently edited by writer Dan Roberts. And both titles folded after three 1960 issues, only to be "revived" in traduced form as sadistic sex-crime digests, with slightly revised titles, in 1962, when they didn't last too long, either.

     Double-Action Detective Magazine
    Robert A. W. Lowndes was reaching the end of his long tenure at Columbia Publications in 1960, after nearly twenty years of editing all sorts of fiction magazines, pulps and digests, western, sports, sf and fantasy (those the closest to his primary interest) and crime fiction...and this was the last issue of their last cf title. Edward D. Hoch had been one of Lowndes's two big 1950s "discoveries" as an editor--the other had been Carol Emshwiller--and Hoch never forgot, and contributed stories to Lowndes's new, no-budget Health Knowledge Publications magazines in the '60s (which would also publish the first professional-magazine stories by Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson, among others) as well as contributing stories about his Simon Ark series character, which were offered as the star feature in the last issues of Double-Action. The next closest to major among the writers in this issue is Basil Wells, not too close, or a pseudonymous reprint by fellow ex-Futurian (along with Lowndes) Walter Kubilius--and one does wonder how many of the contributors might be Lowndes himself in disguise. (The last issue of Lowndes's Columbia magazine Science Fiction is somewhat more impressively staffed...thus:
    Ed McBain's Mystery Book
    One wonders why this magazine didn't do better than it did, seeing only three undated issues in two years...given the talent boasted of in each issue, and the sharpest interior design of any of these magazines, I have to wonder if it simply was a matter of publisher Pocket Books not being sure they wanted to be in the magazine business...and if not, why start one, and so half-heartedly support it? Unlike some of the other featured titles here, I know where my copies of the first two (1960) issues are, and hope to read them soon and perhaps have more to say. 

     Mystery Digest
    While I'm not at all sure where I set down my short stack of this relatively eccentric digest, here caught in the middle of its 1957-63 run, and featuring essentially no Big Names nor famous stories once we're past this issue's Wilkie Collins reprint (one of several over the years). Another case where I hope to have more to say later...I will note that Donald Westlake, who would very briefly serve as a young editor of the magazine, did contribute "Richard Stark"-signed stories to both earlier and later issues...wonder if this magazine was a better market for him than the more obviously "hardboiled" magazines...

     Have any thoughts you'd like to share about this class of '60? Which, if any, magazines did I foolishly overlook? (Two added from initial post.)
    For more of today's books and perhaps other non-books surveyed, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

     The indices for the June bugs above:
    A Man Named Thin and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett, edited and with an introduction by Frederic Dannay as Ellery Queen 
    Series Title: Mercury Mysteries, no. 233 (1963).

      * A Man Named Thin [Robin Thin], (nv) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1961
     * Wages of Crime, (ss) Brief Stories Feb 1923, as “The Sardonic Star of Tom Doody” by Peter Collinson; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1957
    * The Gatewood Caper [The Continental Op], (ss) The Black Mask Oct 15 1923, as “Crooked Souls”; .Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine May 1953
    * The Barber and His Wife, (ss) Brief Stories Dec 1922, as by Peter Collinson; .Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Apr 1958
    * Itchy the Debonair, (ss) Brief Stories Jan 1924, as “Itchy”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Nov 1958
    * The Second-Story Angel, (ss) The Black Mask Nov 15 1923
    * In the Morgue, (vi) Saucy Stories Oct 15 1923, as “The Dimple”; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Aug 1959
    * When Luck’s Running Good, (nv) Action Stories Nov 1923, as “Laughing Masks” by Peter Collinson; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1959

      Guilty Detective Story Magazine [v4 #6, June 1960] ed. W. W. Scott (35¢, digest) “I’m Not Chicken” by Dan Malcolm, “Motel Girl” by Mark Ryan" and “Thanks for Killing Me” by Richards are listed on the cover, but all appeared in the May 1960 issue of Trapped Detective Story Magazine (the first as by Charles D. Hammer).
    Bonus:



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