SSW Part 1: Robert Arthur, Robert Bloch, Algis Budrys, "T. P. Caravan" (Charles Carroll Muñoz), Miriam Allen deFord, August Derleth, Shirley Jackson, Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore, Allen Kim Lang, Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, Frederik Pohl and Isaac Asimov, Mack Reynolds, Mann Ruben, Margaret St. Clair, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, Manly Wade Wellman, Cornell Woolrich: 1949-54 magazine short stories--Across Six Aprils (Short Story Wednesday)

Not quite random picks from the US fantasy(+) magazines of that half-decade (subtitle phrase inspired by Irene Hunt).

1949: Fritz Leiber: "The Man Who Never Grew Young" (first mass-market reprinting from original 1947 publication in the Arkham House small-press collection Night's Black Agents); and Robert Bloch: "The Unspeakable Betrothal" Avon Fantasy Reader #9 (February?), edited by Donald A. Wollheim

1950: Mack Reynolds: "Isolationist" Fantastic Adventures April 1950, edited by Howard Browne; Robert Arthur: "The Flying Eye" (reprinted from Argosy 18 May 1940); and Cornell Woolrich: "Speak to Me of Death" (reprinted from Argosy 27 February 1937) Fantasy Fiction May 1950, edited by Curtis Mitchell; Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl (as James MacCreigh): "The Little Man on the Subway" Fantasy Book  early/January? 1950, edited by Margaret and William L. Crawford

1951: Margaret St. Clair (as Idris Seabright): "Brightness Falls from the Air"; and Richard Matheson: "Through Channels"; and Manly Wade Wellman: "Larroes Catch Meddlers" The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction April 1951, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas; Allen Kim Lang: "An Eel by the Tail" Imagination April 1951, edited (and packaged almost insanely poorly) by William Hamling; Theodore Sturgeon: "Ghost of a Chance" Suspense Spring 1951, edited by Theodore Irwin (reprinted, for the first time, from Unknown Worlds June 1943, edited by John W. Campbell, where it appeared as "The Green-Eyed Monster"); C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner (as by "C. H. Liddell"): "Golden Apple" Famous Fantastic Mysteries March 1951, edited by Mary Gnaedinger; Jack Vance: "The New Prime" (as "Brain of the Galaxy") Worlds Beyond February 1951, edited by Damon Knight; Fritz Leiber: "Cry Witch!"; and Kris Neville: "Seeds of Futurity" 10 Story Fantasy Spring 1951, edited by Donald A. Wollheim                                                                                                                  

1952: August Derleth: "The Night Road" Weird Tales May 1952, edited by Dorothy McIlwraith

1953: Shirley Jackson: "Root of Evil" Fantastic April 1953, edited by Howard Browne; Margaret St. Clair: "The Espadrille" Famous Fantastic Mysteries April 1953, edited by Mary Gnaedinger; Algis Budrys: "The Weeblies" Fantasy Fiction (first issue as Fantasy Magazine) June 1953, edited by Lester Del Rey

1954: Miriam Allen deFord: "Gone to the Dogs" (aka "Henry Martindale, Great Dane") Beyond Fantasy Fiction March 1954, edited by H. L. Gold; Charles Carroll Muñoz (as T. P. Caravan): "The Soluble Scientist" Universe Science Fiction March 1954, edited by Bea Mahaffey; Mann Rubin: "The Other Voice" Fantastic Universe March 1954, edited by Beatrice Jones; Robert Bloch: "The Goddess of Wisdom" Fantastic Universe May 1954, edited by Leo Margulies

A small panoply of stories I've been meaning to read or reread or in a couple of instances have stumbled across while looking up the others. Most notable for how little-discussed they are of late...a few understandably, if not necessarily deservedly. All more or less what might've been on newsstands in April of 1949-54, arbitrarily enough.

The 1949 entries, from an issue of Avon Fantasy Reader, include one of Fritz Leiber's best-known early stories and a reasonably well-known item from Robert Bloch's bibliography (the Bloch was bumped from another Donald Wollheim project at Avon, the notable 1949 original-fiction anthology The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories, the title story being another major Leiber story). The Reader having been Wollheim's attempt to recreate the flavor of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, as opposed to the less gothic and more modernist approach of Dorothy McIlwraith's issues, the spirit of the Bloch and its Lovecraftian elements made it at least as at home in the magazine. 

"The Man Who Never Grew Young" is a lovely work, as many readers here will already know, that takes the concept of time-regression away from the single-person or similar "small-batch" examples, most famously of  late F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button", and, in a sense at least, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment", and posits a world in which some sort of barely-remembered (by the protagonist) near-Doomsday weapon has caused, as a result of detonation, the regression of time for everything on the Earth...except, apparently, for the protagonist, who remains pretty much as he has been as those people and other things around him tend to flow backwards, as it grows more difficult to remember just how things once were for him and his world (he is thus a sort of immortal, as he watches his lovers and friends eventually find their mothers and be reabsorbed, and civilizations become less complex over time). The elegiac quality of the story is beautifully maintained. It's sadly less than remarkable that Leiber couldn't find a periodical market for the story, which first appeared in his first collection. 

"The Unspeakable Betrothal" by Robert Bloch is nearly the last of his blatantly Lovecraftian works, before his stated (vain, but knowingly so) hope to put Lovecraftian pastiche to bed permanently with his 1979 novel Strange Eons. (Bloch, as I've noted here on the blog before, was a student and protégé of Lovecraft's, as was, much more briefly, Leiber, and they were the most notable writers to emerge from the Lovecraft Circle of corresponding friends, and did the most to expand and refine Lovecraft's innovations.) It's also, I see on rereading, a harbinger of the increasing turn toward explicitly psychological analysis in his storytelling, while in this case retaining the supernatural element...which would continue, without supernatural elements, through such stories as "Lucy Comes to Stay" and "I Do Not Love Thee, Dr. Fell", both clearly leading up to the novel Psycho, and such other earlier crime fiction as The Scarf and subsequent work such as Firebug and "A Home Away from Home"...

1950: Fantastic Adventures, under the editorship of Howard Browne for three years before it was merged with the new and rather more modish Fantastic, had a brief spell of featuring no little first-rate work (such as Leiber's You're All Alone and Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels), at least some purchased for a mooted 1950 upgrade of companion magazine Amazing Stories, but mostly was treated as a repository of so-so pulp fantasy and sf adventure fiction, much of it published under house names, even if some of it had suggestions of better work to come from such writers as William McGivern and, in this case, the young Mack Reynolds, the son of Verne Reynolds, a presidential candidate for the very doctrinaire Marxist, and first US socialist, political party, the Socialist Labor Party (founder Daniel De Leon had criticized his contemporary Karl Marx for deviation from the latter's own early proposals). Political considerations would find interesting ways to inform nearly if not all of Reynolds's fiction, and "Isolationist", while an early and not completely successful example, is a forerunner building toward such better stories as "Pacifist" and "Compounded Interest"...in this case, a misanthropic farmer has his day, and an acre of good corn, ruined by the unwelcome visit of some condescending aliens, in a spaceship which reminds the protagonist of  children's toys that have led to weapons of mass destruction. (Reynolds has another story in the same issue, "He Took It With Him", under a pseudonym, likewise taking a concept...in this case "You can't take it with you" as in any material wealth into what afterlife there might be...and putting forth a literal reconsideration of the terms in question.)

Reasonably prolific pulp-magazine contributor (largely to aerial-combat fiction titles) Curtis Mitchell's undercapitalized Magabook, Inc. offered two issues only of Fantasy Fiction (the second retitled Fantasy Stories for no obvious reason), and the magazine relied heavily on reprints from the eclectic fiction magazine Argosy and its competitor Adventure (often given new and intentionally crude new titles), interlarding them with short new pieces that often were tagged "true fantasy stories"--about mildly or less mildly bizarre supposed actual occurrences with some sort of uncanny element. My eye was drawn by the first issue containing older stories by Robert Arthur, Richard Sale and Cornell Woolrich I hadn't read.

The Arthur, from Argosy's 18 May 1940 issue, is what I'd call an almost-good example of his work, and I can understand his not rushing it back into print...a camera with an unintentionally-created magical lens which photographs the thoughts of its subjects at the time the shot was taken. It plays out reasonably cleverly, if not too surprisingly. 

To be continued...

for more of today's short fiction reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

SSW: John D. MacDonald, Kurt Vonnegut, "Oliver Wyman" (Olive & Wyman Holmes), Cyril Hume, Leon Ware: COSMOPOLITAN, July 1958, edited by John J. O'Connell; fiction editor Kathryn Bourne

 From the FictionMags Index, the fiction content:

Cosmopolitan [Vol. 145 No. 1, July 1958] ed. John J. O’Connell (The Hearst Corporation, 35¢, 8¾″ x 12″, cover: [photo of Princess Margaret])    (Full Text of the issue can be read here)
Details supplied by Ira B. Matetsky from copies at the NYPL.
• 78 · [The] Fast Loose Money · John D. MacDonald · ss; illustrated by Bob Peak
• 83 · The Manned Missiles · Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. · ss; illustrated by Paul Nonnast
• 89 · Yankee Angel · "Oliver Wyman" · ss; illustrated by Robert Schneeberg
• 94 · El Greco and Mrs. London · Cyril Hume · ss; illustrated by Bernard D’Andrea
• 98 · Sea Barrier · Leon Ware · ss; illustrated by Fredric Varady
• 103 · The Gate · Finlay McDermid · na; illustrated by Arthur Lidov

illustration for "Fast Loose Money"

Unsurprisingly, the juxtaposi0n of unfamiliar-seeming MacDonald and Vonnegut stories in this late '50s issue of Cosmopolitan, still a more-0r-less not-gender-specific magazine at this point, was what caught my eye...as it happens, I had read the Vonnegut, but about forty years ago while first going through his collection Welcome to the Monkey House, among better short stories by him but few as unironic and heartfelt; the MacDonald was collected in his 1966 volume End of the Tiger and Other Stories (which I haven't yet read), apparently under JDM's preferred title "The Fast Loose Money" rather than the article-free version that Cosmo gave it. It, too, isn't the most memorable of MacDonald stories, but it's more than clever enough, and while the protagonist and his old war-buddy and partner in crime aren't quite the true "mean furniture" MacDonald would refer to in his work, extremely unsavory people who won't shrink from violence to get their ends, they aren't far from it, not particularly noble at all. In fact, their WW2 service in the US Army, in the Quartermasters Corps in India, was essentially one long set of scams, which has allowed for a civilian life of considerable comfort, driven in part by continued skimming in the small businesses they run, initiated with their GI nest eggs. Well-drawn characterization of the two married couples at the heart of the story (as is typical of MacDonald), and a deft resolution to the various plot turns (likewise). Bob Byrne, writing in the Black Gate blog, notes that MacDonald spent some WW2 Army time in the procurement service setting he describes here, and didn't love it, before reassignment to the OSS (Byrne also breaks down every detail of the story, so you might want to read "The Fast Loose Money", in the book or in the magazine issue online, before reading Byrne's article). 

The Vonnegut story, "The Manned Missiles", has very little that's surreal nor particularly ironic about it, in telling a simple near-future (for 1958) science fiction story in the form of a Russian father's exchange of letters, his translated into English by his student son, with those of the US father of another cosmonaut/astronaut, both with sons who died in an accident while in single-person craft in orbit, the American sent to try to determine what sort of observation/surveillance the Soviet was up to. A graceful and humane account, which reminded me a bit of the likes of Edmond Hamilton's "What's It Like Out There?" in slightly less melodramatic terms. Vonnegut's note in his introduction to Welcome to the Monkey House, that the large-circulation slick-paper magazines would take stories about almost anything, as long as they celebrated the Middle Class, doesn't quite apply here, as this one has a somewhat more universal appeal (I'd say, even given that both fathers are clearly of their respective countries' essential middle class...as I have been of mine).

"Oliver Wyman" (the married writing team of Olive and Wyman Holmes) has another epistolary story which follows, but one of an utterly different stripe, a comic piece about a young woman with dreams of becoming an investing "angel" in a mildly distant cousin's Broadway production...if only she can pry some of her trust fund from her starchy, disapproving Bostonian aunt. The cousin, a young man who (as it turns out) fled the stultifying effect of Beacon Hill family, initially for a financial-industry job but soon becoming a producer, is not sure he wants anything to do with supportive young Kathy, much less the family money or its stern guardians. Amusing, if slight. Wyman Holmes was very briefly a professional actor, in one of Clare Boothe Luce's less successful B'way productions, Kiss the Boys Goodbye; Olive and Wyman, formerly Harvard students together, married during the short run of the play, and went on to at least a mildly productive writing career together. Wyman presumably knew from blue-blood Bostonian families, as likely the son of Henry Wyman Holmes, the founding Dean, in 1920, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Olive Holmes seems to have been a dance student and perhaps briefly a professional dancer, who would eventually edit a volume of Henry Taylor Parker's dance columns for The Boston Evening Transcript titled Motion Arrested (Wesleyan University Press/Harper & Row 1982), among other work solo and with her husband, including what look like culture studies for the likes of the US Information Agency. Was Cosmopolitan almost as clandestinely tied up with the 1950s CIA as, say, The Paris Review?

illustration for "El Greco and Mrs. London"

Cyril Hume had an interesting career...and seemingly one of many starts and stops, including an abbreviated hitch in the US Army, followed by some time at Yale (possibly without graduating, as online biographies disagree about this), though a dark fantasy story he placed with The Yale Review in 1930, "Forrester", would be included the O. Henry Awards volume for 1931 (his work was given the arguable plaudit of a limited edition collection, issued after his first with a regular press run, by Doubleday/Doran in 1932, Myself and the Young Bowman and Other Fantasies). He soon made his way to Hollywood, where he would script (either completely or through adaptation) a number of crime dramas and fantastica among other work for film and eventually television, including several in the Tarzan film series, the film Ransom! (later remade, without exclamation point, with Mel Gibson in the Glenn Ford role), and writing the script, from another writer's treatment (which in turn owed something to The Tempest), for the notable sf film Forbidden Planet. "El Greco and Mrs. London" is almost a casually tossed-off story by a writer who clearly knows what he's doing, and probably has more than a little in common with his protagonist, an artist of some talent but little application who is somewhat bitterly teaching painting to an adult education class in a small high school. Some sharp observation of the kinds of students this kind of class could attract, as well as of the degree of self-loathing the instructor can turn outward, only to find that he's actually falling for a talented young widow among his students. Hume would die rather young, not too long after this story's publication, in 1966.

Finally, for the purposes of this SSW entry (though I might read Finlay McDermid's novella for a later one), we turn to Leon Ware's "Sea Barrier", easily the worst of the short stories in this issue. Ware picked up an Edgar Award in 1966 for best young-readers' novel, The Mystery of 22 East, like this story one with a nautical setting, and if this story had been less simple-minded, I might be more willing to go dig up that or other work. This story posits, as one might in the late '50s with less likelihood of deserved mockery than today, that All Men Must Go Risk Their Lives in some pursuit, and All Women Will Do Better When They Just Accept This, No Matter How Little They Understand It Or Ever Will. Basically, a youngish lawyer and father of small children spends most of his weekends essentially stunt-sailing; his wife grows vexed at how little she and the kids see of him between work and his obsession with his hobby; she notes, a bit fretfully, his obvious itch to return to the wind in his face, and she learns, finally, from some shared wisdom from another "sailing widow" as both await their husbands' return (or worse) from at best a stupid attempt at a sailing run in a hurricane. But what are you going to do, Boys with Responsibilities will still be Boys, and that's All Men, and All Us Women just have to take it, and love them for it (and No Women clearly Ever Need Risk Nor Adventure in their lives, not even a little!  Says so right here!). Reductionist propaganda for irresponsibility and selfishness Rules OK. Remember, All Men are like this and All Women are like that. Hacks of various sorts still run these lines today, of course.

Meanwhile, here's this (touched on in the discussion of the Holmeses, above--see also in the comments below, for a bit more about Olive Holmes): In the July 1958 COSMO, in the editorial/in this issue column "What Goes on at Cosmopolitan" as signed by Associate Editor Harriet La Barre, this is the last item:

Write-where-you-are Twosome
Television buys a startling number of Cosmopolitan stories. But not the short story “Yankee Angel,” page 89. Any TV producer would run screaming from it; but everyone else will love it.

Oliver Wyman, who wrote the story, is really a couple of other people: the husband-and-wife writing team of Olive Holmes and Wyman Holmes. This Boston-born pair met at Harvard, where John Mason Brown was trying to teach them how to write plays. In the strange game of becoming a writer, Wyman first became a Broadway actor and was playing in Clare Boothe Luce’s “Kiss the Boys Goodbye” when he married Olive. The show promptly folded; no connection.

Unlike lots of writers of our acquaintance who can write only in a particular room or setting, this team can write anywhere—even in their two-room shack on a ten-acre island off the Maine coast. If too many guests turn up by motorboat, they retreat to a nearby tent and keep batting it out while sitting on an Army cot, their typewriter on an orange crate. Cosmopolitan, so far, has published four Oliver Wyman stories, mostly about the rich and stubborn Yankees that this Boston pair knows to a fare-thee-well.

—H. La B.

For more of today's Short Story Wednesday reviews, 

please see Patti Abbott's blog.

At the Earth's Core, revisited...

The rankest form of hobbyist's speculation here, as someone who hasn't formally studied geology for forty years, but...

courtesy The Smithsonian Magazine

I have to wonder if the (at least since 1996) posited cycles of faster or slower rotation of the inner core of the Earth--in relation to the outer core, mantle and crust/surface--might also result in what (anecdotally, at least) seems to be a current uptick in notable seismic and volcanic activity around the world, including in the last several hours in the border areas in Turkey and Syria and in Buffalo (otherwise, clearly the gods are today targeting the territories English-speakers like to name for fellow chordates)...contrasting firmer data may be useful.

Art Lortie has passed along some links to abstracts from the harder data:

British Geological Survey: Is Earthquake Activity Increasing? (bgs.ac.uk)

Lists, Maps, and Statistics | U.S. Geological Survey (usgs.gov)

Number of earthquakes globally 2000-2021 | Statista

SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: links to reviews+: 25 January-1 February 2023

Frank Babics: "The Little Black Bag" by C. M. Kornbluth, Astounding Science Fiction July 1950, edited by John W. Campbell, Jr. (and widely reprinted/adapted for television by Night Gallery)

Joachim Boaz: "Lot" by Ward Moore, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May 1953, edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas; "I Remember, Anita..." by Langdon Jones, New Worlds SF, September-October 1964, edited by Michael Moorcock

Brian Busby: Destination: Universe by A. E. van Vogt

Tim DeForest: "Hok Visits the Land of Legends" by Manly Wade Wellman (Fantastic Adventures, April 1942, edited by Raymond A. Palmer)

Barry Ergang: Thriller 2 edited by Clive Cussler

Paul Fraser: "Evil Robot Monkey" by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume 2, edited by George Mann); "A Feast of Butterflies" by Amanda Hollander (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March-April 2020, edited by Charles Coleman Finlay); "What We Call Service, They Call Treason" by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov's Science Fiction, January-February 2023, edited by Sheila Williams); "Toy Planes" by Tobias Bucknell (Nature, 13 October 2005, edited by Philip Cambell); "Algy" by L. Sprague de Camp (Fantastic, August 1976, edited by Ted White)

Aubrey Hamilton: Snake-Bite and Other Mystery Tales of the Sahara by Robert S. Hichens

Rich Horton: Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination by William Golding, John Wyndham,  and Mervyn Peake

Jerry House: "Henry Horn's Super-Solvent" by Dwight V. Swain (Fantastic Adventures, November 1941, edited by Raymond A. Palmer); "A Ghoul and His Money" by C. M. Kornbluth (Dime Detective, September 1946, edited by Loring Dowst? John Bender?); "An Illusion in Red and White" by Stephen Crane (first published posthumously in the UK edition of The Monster and Other Stories by Crane); "Moozeby" by James F. Sullivan (The Strand Magazine, February 1892, edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith)

George Kelley: Verdict of 13: A Detection Club Anthology edited by the (new) Detection Club; Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures by Garth Nix

Joe Kenney: The Coming of the Terrans by Leigh Brackett

Richard Krauss/Larque Press: The Best of Manhunt 4: The Jack Ritchie Stories by Jack Ritchie, edited by Jeff Vorzimmer

B.V. Lawson: A Thief in the Night: The Further Adventures of Raffles by E. W. Hornung

Steve Lewis: "The Defenders" by Philip K. Dick, Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1953, edited by H. L. Gold

James McGlothlin: The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series XI edited by Karl Edward Wagner

Neeru: The Puffin Book of Funny Stories illustrated by Amit Vachharajani (Penguin India 2005; no editor credited)

John O'Neill: In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner; Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction: Invasions edited by Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh; January-February 2023 roundup of issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Sheree Renee Thomas, Asimov's Science Fiction edited by Sheila Williams, and Analog Science Fiction & Fact edited by Trevor Quachri; High Noon on Proxima B edited by David Boop

James Reasoner: Texas Rangers, April 1954 (editor uncredited); G-Men Detective, April 1946; further pulp citations

Jack Seabrook: "Terror Town" by "Ellery Queen" (Argosy, August 1956, edited by Henry Steeger? Alden H. Norton?) as adapted by Leigh Brackett for Alfred Hitchcock Presents:

John Stickney: Shooting Creek and Other Stories by Scott Loring Sanders

"TomCat": Short impossible crime and locked room mystery stories

Mark Yon: New Worlds, February 1968, edited by Michael Moorcock

Patti Abbott will be gathering the weekly links again this coming Wednesday...

Short Story Wednesday: the links to the reviews: 18 January 2023

Patti Abbott is on vacation, happily not too immediately threatened by mudslides in California, and I'll go ahead and gather the Short Story Wednesday items for the next week or so. TM

Patricia Abbott: Antarctica (in part) by Claire Keegan

Frank Babics: First Book of Unknown Tales of Horror edited by Peter Haining (some Peter Haining paperback covers: Will Errickson)

Joachim Boaz:  Phyllis Gotlieb: her first three published short stories (1959-60): from Fantastic and Amazing Science Fiction edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli 

John Boston: Amazing Stories, February 1968, edited by Harry Harrison

Matthew Bradley: "The Empty Hours" by "Ed McBain", Ed McBain's Mystery Book #1 (1960 magazine) edited by "McBain" (Evan Hunter)

Bob Byrne: The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories (series)

Graeme Cameron: On Spec issue 122, January 2023, edited by Diane L. Walton

Juan Ignacio Escribano Garcia-Bosque: Maigret's Christmas by Georges Simenon (translated by Jean Stewart)

Paul Fraser: "The Past, Like a River in Flood" by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 27 August 2020); "Silver Door Diner" by Bishop Garrison (FIYAH, Autumn 2020); "Bloody Man" by Avram Davidson (Fantastic, August 1976)

Ryan Harvey: Robert Howard and the "weird menace" pulps

Rich Horton: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1955, edited by "Anthony Boucher"

Jerry House: "A Heart Divided" by "Louisa Carter Lee" (Will F. Jenkins, a.k.a. "Murray Leinster"), Love Story Magazine, June 12, 1926

Kate Jackson: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January 1951, edited by Frederic Dannay

George Kelley: Lucifer Jones by Mike Resnick

B. V. Lawson: "The Problem of Cell 13" by Jacques Futrelle, Boston American October 30 1905 - November 5 1905 

Robert Lopresti: The Best Short Mysteries of 2022 

Todd Mason: 3 autobiographical short plays in prose by Fritz Leiber: "The Secret Songs", "237 Talking Statues, Etc." and "The Winter Flies" (all first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

Paperback Warrior: The Best of Manhunt 4: The Jack Ritchie Stories by Jack Ritchie, edited by Jeff Vorzimmer

Marta Randall: "A Scarab in the City of Time", New Dimensions 5, edited by Robert Silverberg

James Reasoner: Dark Avenger: The Strange Saga of The Shadow by Will Murray; The Wolf Pack by "Frank Wynne" (Brian Garfield); "Escape from Alcatraz" by Edward Churchill (G-Men Detective, April 1946); Double-Action Western, January 1951, edited by Robert W. Lowndes

James Sallis: The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume 1 

Kevin Tipple: Dead Even by Frank Zafiro

At Last: FRIDAY'S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS AND MORE: the links to the reviews, texts, etc.: 1-30 September 2021

Rescued from draft status.

Cele Goldsmith Lalli at the World SF Convention 1962

Patricia Abbott: Catastrophe and Other Stories by Dino Buzzati (translated by Judith Landry); Let Him Go by Larry Watson; Bring Your Baggage and Don't Pack Light by Helen Ellis; Stories from Justice by Larry Watson; "Outside the Jurisdiction" from Justice by Larry Watson; In the Morning, I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty; Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives edited by Sarah Weinman (and particularly the Patricia Highsmith and Dorothy Salisbury Davis stories); "So Much Water, So Far from Home" by Raymond Carver (UCSB Spectrum, 1975)

Bob Adey: Smear Job (David Callan #4) by James Mitchell

Thomas Baird: The Glimpses of the Moon by "Edmund Crispin" (Robert Bruce Montgomery)

Brad Bigelow: Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling; the 1976 Club: The Red House by Else Jerusalem (translated by Grace Isabel Colbron)

Mike Blake: The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov

Les Blatt: Miss Pym Disposes by "Josephine Tey" (Elizabeth Mackintosh)

Peter Blauner: Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato

Elgin Bleecker: The Big Book of the Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett (edited by Richard Layman and Julie Rivett)

Joachim Boaz: "The Oceans are Wide" by Frank M. Robinson, Science Stories, April 1954, edited by Bea Mahaffey and Ray Palmer; Furthest by Suzette Hayden Nelson; In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan; Fellowship of the Stars edited by Terry Carr

John Boston: Amazing Stories August 1966, edited by Joseph "Ross"; Watchers of the Dark by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.; Amazing Stories October 1966, edited by Joseph "Ross"; "In Praise of Cele Goldsmith Lalli"

Cora Buhlert: The Star Warriors by Lin Carter; Cele Goldsmith Lalli and the Sword & Sorcery Revival

Brian Busby: the novels of Robert Barr (and The Story of Esther Costello by Nicholas Monsarrat); the paperback originals of Brian Moore as "Michael Bryan"; Kim Campbell: The Making of a Politician and other work by Robert Fife; Poldrate Street (aka The Undertaker Dies) by Garnett Wilson; The Water-Drinker and The Yellow Briar by "Patrick Slater" (John Mitchell)

James M. Cain interviewed by David Zinsser, The Paris Review, Spring/Summer 1978,  edited by George Plimpton

Douglas Cohen: Realms of Fantasy April 1997 edited by Shawna McCarthy

Eric Leif Davin: Hugo Gernsback and his magazines

Liz Dexter: Peace Breaks Out by Angela Thirkell; Black Joy edited by Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff and Timi Sotire; The Impossible Mile by Johnny and Becki Agar; Digging to America by Anne Tyler; Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan; Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler; The Heart of a Woman by Maya Angelou; The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye

Scott Edelman: Veronica Schanoes; Javier Hernandez, Zach Kruse, Carl Potts and Arlen Shumer on Steve Ditko

Lucy R. Fisher: Passenger to Frankfurt by Agatha Christie

Barry Gardner: Two for the Dough by Janet Evanovich; am I out of step? (in 1995)

Dana Gioia: Collected Poems: 1945-1990, by Barbara Howes

Ed Gorman: Baby Moll by John Farris; archived version with new comments

Doug Greene: Sometimes They Bite by Lawrence Block

Aubrey Hamilton: Patterns in the Dust by Lesley Grant-Adamson; Unholy Dying by R. T. Campbell; Uncle Paul by Celia Fremlin; Blue Murder by "Harriet Rutland" (Olive Seers Shimwell); A Trouble of Fools by Linda Barnes; Rainy City by Earl Emerson; Blood Moon by Gary Disher; Bull Mountain by Brian Panowich; The Judge by Steve Martini

Jerry House: "Legend of the Dropping Well" from Scenes and Legends from the North of Scotland (2nd edition) by Hugh Miller; Gosh! Wow! (Sense of Wonder) Science Fiction edited by Forrest J Ackerman;  Asthma Simpson, the Village Queen by Myer Marcus; "The History of the Prince Tangut, and of the Princess with a Nose of a Foot Long" by Jean Paul Bignon, translated by William Hatchett; "An Oak Coffin" by Louisa T. Meade and "Clifford Halifax" (Edgar Beaumont), The Strand Magazine, March 1894 (edited by Herbert Greenhough Smith); Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader edited by Robin Scott Wilson; Buck Ryan in Shadow Castle (Super Detective Picture Library), 1 September 1960, written by Don Freeman and illustrated by Jack Monk

Maxim Jakubowski: The Joy and Sorrow of Fiction Magazines

Tracy K: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three by "John Godey" (Morton Freedgood); "Sugar and Spice" by Vera Caspary The American Magazine December 1943 edited by Summer Blossom; "Sweet Baby Jenny" by Joyce Harrington Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine May 1981 edited by Eleanor Sullivan; The Wheel Spins (aka The Lady Vanishes) by Ethel Lina White; Montalbano, Hard Boiled and Noir compilations; Murder by Parnell Hall; September reading

Jackie Kashian: Michael Charbonneau on Neil Gaiman

Evan Lewis: Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine October, November and December 1946 edited by "Ellery Queen" (Frederic Dannay); The Saint comic strip, week 6, 1948, by Mike Roy and Leslie Charteris (and the previous and subsequent strips); "Vengeance of the Mounted" by Jack Cole True Crime Comics July-August 1948; The Thin Man radio series, 1041; "The Clue of the Tattooed Man" by Clayton Rawson, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, December 1946, and subsequent contest entries to conclude the story; "The Bandits of Eagle Rock" illustrated by Graham Ingels, Gunfighter November-December 1949; The Shadowed Circle #1 (2021) edited by Steve Donoso; Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, January, February and March 1947, edited by "Queen"/Dannay; "Kit Carson" (anon.) (though Patricia Highsmith might've written for this comic book) It Really Happened #1 1944; Lancecon (small paperback collectors' convention) 1988 (photos by Art Scott); EQMM, April, May and June 1947, edited by Dannay; "A Fight to the Death" illustrated by H. C. Keifer, War Against Crime June-July 1948; "The New Racket" (aka "The Judge Laughed Last" in 1930s newspaper syndication) by Dashiell Hammett The Black Mask 15 February 1924 edited by George W. Sutton, Jr.; "Tom Mix and the Ride for Life" illustrated by Fred Meagher Tom Mix Comics February 1942 

Steve Lewis: Future Science Fiction Jun 1954 edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes; Treasure Hunt by John Lescroat; Threshold of Eternity by John  Brunner; The Mother Shadow by Melodie Johnson Howe; J. Randolph (Randy) Cox, 1936-2021; The War of Two Worlds by Poul Anderson; Worlds of If Science Fiction January 1967 edited by Frederik Pohl

Gideon Marcus: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1966: Isaac Asimov Special Issue edited by Edward L. Ferman

Walker Martin: Windy City Pulp Convention 2021

Todd Mason: "The Governess: A Professor Challenger Story as told by Mr. Edward Malone" by Stephen Gallagher; stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Rosel George Brown, Avram Davidson, Fredric Brown et al., from Fantastic August 1960 edited by Cele Goldsmith Lalli  and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction October 1961 edited by Robert P. Mills; stories by Eudora Welty, Robert M. Coates, James Still and Edita Morris from The World Within: Stories Illuminating the Neuroses of Our Time edited by Mary Louise Aswell

Gloria Maxwell: Christine by Stephen King

Francis M. Nevins: Georges Simenon in the early WW2 years

Bill Peschel: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

Bill Pronzini: Gil Brewer

James Reasoner: The Girl With No Place to Hide by "Nick Quarry" (Marvin Albert); Smashing Western March 1937; Strange Detective Mysteries September 1940; Trent V. 2: The Kid script by Rodolphe Jacquette, illustration by "Léo" (Luiz Eduardo de Oliviera); Fright by Cornell Woolrich (originally published as by "George Hopley"); 5 Western Novels Magazine April 1952; Amazing Stories July 1943 edited by Raymond Palmer (see also this); Greatest Enemy by Jason Kasper; Interface by Joe Gores; Big Book Western Magazine April 1947; Detective Novels Magazine December 1939 edited by Harvey Burns(?); Rimrock Raiders by "Bradford" (A. Leslie) Scott; Star Western August 1953 edited by Rogers Terril and/or Michael Tilden; Fantastic Adventures May 1942 edited by Raymond Palmer

Richard Robinson: Doing Time by Jodi Taylor; Silver Waves of Summer edited by David M. Olsen; Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman: Masters of the Art of Automobile Advertising by Rob Keil; Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories edited by Martin Edwards; Lightning Strikes by William Kent Krueger

Ron Scheer: The Wire-Cutters by Mollie Davis

Robert Silverberg: The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1949 edited by Everrett Bleiler and T.D. Ditky

Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Tomorrow August 1966 edited by Frederik Pohl; Fantastic September 1966 edited by Joseph "Ross"; Catastrophe Planet by Keith Laumer

Kevin Tipple: Crooked Roads: Crime Stories by Alec Cizak; The Devil's Bones by Larry D. Sweazy; Unhappy Endings by Judy Penz Sheluk; Fallen from Grace by J. R. Lindermuth; 

Scott Tipple: The Builders by Daniel Polanski: 

Danielle Torres: "Sugar and Spice" by Vera Caspary The American Magazine December 1943 edited by Summer Blossom; Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

David Vineyard: Departure Delayed by Will Oursler; 

Bill Wallace: Weird Tales, edited by Farnsworth Wright: December 1926; January 1927; February 1927; March 1927; Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism by Paul S. Hirsch; The Pocket Austin Ossman Spare edited by Jake Dirnberger; The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard; Gorgo Attacks! by Joe Sinnott, Joe Gill and Vince Coletta; Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement by Nadia Choucha

A. J. Wright: the novels of William P. McGivern

Mark Yon: New Worlds September 1966 edited by Michael Moorcock; sf Impulse September 1966 edited by Kyril Bonfiglioli and Keith Roberts; October 1966 New Worlds (ed. Moorcock) and sf Impulse edited by Harry Harrison and Keith Roberts