THE BEST OF MANHUNT 2. Edited by Jeff Vorzimmer. Stark House, trade paperback, August 2020.

   Well, this was a nice surprise. It was a typical gray and gloomy sky here in Connecticut all day, drizzling on and off, or at least it was until I discovered what Rose my mail carrier dropped off for me this afternoon, and all of sudden everything got a whole lot cheerier.

   I’ve not begun to read it, but you can bet the farm I will be over the next few months until August when it officially comes out and you’ll be able to as well. I’ve listed the contents below. You may be struck as quickly that as I was that some of the authors don’t seem to have the same “name value” that the first collection did. I think that that’s all to the good and am willing to wager that the stories were chosen on how good they are, and not so much who wrote them.

   If there are any errors in the Table of Contents below, they’re mine. I didn’t type them in by hand, but OCR scanning is still often only an approximate art.

Forward: For The Love of Manhunt … Peter Enfantino. .. 7
Introduction … Jon L. Breen … 11
On the Passing of Manhunt … Jon.L. Breen … 15
Life and Death of a Magazine … Robert Turner … 17
A Stabbing in the Street … Elezazer Lipsky … 23
As I Lie Dead … Fletcher Flora … .36
So Dark for April … Howard Browne … 49
Shakedown … Roy Carroll … 66
The Choice … Richard Deming … 73
Confession … John M. Sitan … 85
The.Empty Fort … Basil Heatter … 92
You Can’t Trust a Man … Helen Nielsen … 127
Sylvia … Ira Levin … 136
Protection … Erle Stanley Gardner … 15
Blonde at tl1e Wheel Stephen Marlowe 154
Vanishing Act … W. . Burnett … 166
One More Mile to Go … F. J. Smith … 186
Key Witness … Frank Kane … 192
Puddin’ nd Pie … De. Forbes … 229
Blood and Moonlight … William R. Cox … 234
Shadowed … Richard Wormser … 244
Deatl1 of a Big Wheel … William Campbell Gault … 248
The Geniuses … Max Franklin … 271
Kitchen Kill … Jonathan Craig … 285
The Crying Target … James McKimmey … 299
The Girl Friend … Mark Mallory … 320
Midnight Caller … Wade Miller … 326
Arrest … Donald E Westlake … 329
Time to Kill … Bryce Walton … 333
Absinthe for Superman … Robert Edmond Alter … 356
Wharf Rat … Robert Page Jones … 333
The Safe Kill … Kenneth Moore … 374
A Question of Values … C. L. Sweeney, Jr … 378
Shatter Proof … ]ack Ritchie … 381
The Old Pro … H. A. DeRosso … 385
Retribution … Michael Zuroy … 395
In Memoriam … Charles Boeckman … 398
Bugged … Bruno Fischer … 402
Interference … Glenn Canary … 412

   

[UPDATE] Jiro Kimura has advised me that the contents have changed slightly from the galley from which I obtained the above to the final product. He says: “It does not have ‘Sylvia’ by Ira Levin but ‘Where There’s Smoke’ by Edward D. Hoch instead, which was an Al Darlan story first printed in the March 1964 issue of Manhunt.

   “Hoch’s story was placed at the bottom of the contents page and the last one in the book.”