Fri 6 Nov 2020
DIARY REVIEW: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 1966.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Magazines[14] Comments
ELLERY QUEEN’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, November 1966. Overall Rating: 2½ stars.
MICHAEL INNES “The End of the End.†Short novel. Sir John Appleby solves a murder committed in a snowbound English castle. Method of murder quite contrived to make it appear suicide. (3)
Comment: According to the cover, this was the first publication of this story. Based on my short description of it, it’s one of my favorite sub-genre of traditional Golden Age stories, even though published way later, in 1966.
EDWARD D HOCH “The Spy Who Walked Through Walls.†Rand of Concealed Communications. Mystery of disappearing reports has a very obvious solution. (2)
Comment: While always solid tales, Hoch’s Rand stories have never seemed as memorable to me as those with either Dr. Sam Hawthorne or Nick Velvet.
FRANK SISK “The Face Is Familiar.†Crooked con becmes involved in bank robbery by his cousin. (3)
JONATHAN CRAIG “Top Man.†A gangland story based on an eventually obvious pun. (2)
HENRY SLESAR “The Cop Who Liked Flowers.†A detective story with heart. (5)
Comment: The highest ranked story of this issue. Apparently a sentimental story that caught my fancy.
MIRIAM ALLEN deFORD “At the Eleventh Hour.†Another execution story: no surprises. (1)
PAMELA JAYNE KING “Nightmare.†Clever short-short [2 pages] by junior high stoudent, about a girl in trouble. (4)
Comment: This was this issue’s First Story, a standard feature of the magazine. up through and including today. While I enjoyed this one, the young author never published another work of crime fiction.
PHYLLIS BENTLEY “Miss Phipps and the Invisible Murderer.†Miss Phipps solves a church killing in the last four paragraphs [of a 13 page story]. (1)
Comment: Miss Phipps was a writer of detective novels who kept stumbling onto mysteries to solve. Her earliest appearance was in 1937, but none of her many others appeared until 1954. Several were collected in Chain of Witnesses: The Cases of Miss Phipps (Crippen & Landru, 2014), but I do not know if this is one of them.
J. F. PEIRCE “The Pale Face of the Rider.†German artists painting save daughter. Weird. (2)
GEORGES SIMENON “Inspector Maigret Deduces.†First US publication. Maigret solves train murder from studying character. No real clues. (2)
Comment: This was, of course, Maigret’s usual way of solving crimes.
JAMES CROSS “The Hkzmp gav Bzmp Case.†The spy story is demolished by this inane nonsense. Title is code for “Spank the Yank.†(3)
VINCENT McCONNOR “Pauline or Denise.†Murder of his two sisters leaves playboy trapped in asylum. Distinctly French. (4)
HOLLY ROTH “The Game’s the Thing.†An interesting anticipation of Dr. Berne, but story may be overshadowed. (3)
Comment: Dr. Berne was the author of Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis (1964). This was Holly Roth’s last published story; she died in 1964.
LAWRENCE TREAT “M As in Mugged.†Lieutenant Decker’s 60th birthday. A comparison of present and past police methods, with experience the key factor. (1)
November 6th, 2020 at 7:38 am
Last night while checking out the drawers of a desk that for the last 20 years I’d been using only to store things on top of, I found six small notebooks of reviews I’d written long before I has any idea I’d ever have any of them published in any shape or form.
They were intended for my eyes only, and maybe they should have been kept that way, but with my apologies for inflicting them upon you, here’s the first one, written in June of 1967.
There are several hundred more. You’ll see them here as time goes on. It’s my blog, you see.
PS. The comments inserted are and will be current, if and when I decide to add anything I said then, over 50 years ago.
November 6th, 2020 at 11:20 am
Personal:
This issue of EQMM came along in my second year as a member of the readership; I had just turned 16, and I was home.
I had gotten into mysteries about two years before, and finding EQMM in ’65 was like entering a literature class conducted by Fred Dannay himself.
The difference between this and my high school lit classes was that I actually enjoyed what I was reading in EQMM – and I was learning things that would become useful to me.
Looking at that ’66 table of contents (and I have a copy of this issue at hand), I’m seeing the wide net that Fred Dannay cast editorially: so many different types of stories, so many tones, so many moods, humorous and serious, a whole diverse world that I had entered the year before – and came to love more and more as time went on.
I have no idea, of course, exactly what’s in that drawer of yours, but I am looking forward to seeing what you’re going to put up in future weeks.
It’s FUN!
It’s HISTORY!
It’s AMERICA!!!
… And since 2021 will be EQMM’s 80th year of publication, I’m definitely looking forward to whatever the current management has in the hopper …
November 6th, 2020 at 1:24 pm
It wasn’t possible for me to include an overall summing up of this issue, but I’m glad you just did, Mike. And you’re right. The stories in it include a wide range of various types and categories as well as authors.
It’s been a long time since I subscribed, so when the Covid shutdown happened, it’s been nearly a year since I’ve even seen a new issue. I bought the magazine at Borders on a regular basis before they went belly up, then at Barnes & Noble, but their having new copies on display at the one closest to me was haphazard at best.
As for more Diary Reviews, all I can say is stay tuned. And thanks!
November 6th, 2020 at 2:14 pm
Funny thing …
When the Covid shutdown became imminent, what I did was subscribe – for the first time ever – via Amazon.
I would have missed one issue, but I did manage to find one open store that sold it (after much effort) before the subscription kicked in.
Lucky Me.
I’m guessing that right now (6 November 2020, 1:12 pm CST), you’re looking at The Show That Never Ends (and likely won’t in the near future).
Here’s to 2021 – which can’t come a moment too soon …
November 6th, 2020 at 3:27 pm
I might have done the same, Mike, subscribe I mean, if my collection hadn’t gotten so spotty over the past two or three years, and if those I did manage to obtain hadn’t disappointed me so much. I’d been finding only one or two stories an issue that I didn’t stop reading after only a few pages. Not like the days such as this one from 1966.
November 6th, 2020 at 2:47 pm
I let my subscription expire many years ago after I never received four issues in one year — fully one-third of the issues. When I contacted the company then I was told that all extra copies had been pulped. I forget who was publishing the magazine at the time but I had a similar experience with other magazines the chain published. I still miss the magazine but I’m unable to conveniently find it on the stands. Oh, well.
Your listing brings up a item that has bothered me for years. Holly Roth died mysteriously in the Mediterranean Sea (either after falling out of a yacht or while swimming — I’ve read both versions)and her body was never recovered. She was 48, a former model, newspaper and magazine writer, and author of fifteen very readable novels and a number of short stories. A mysterious end for a mystery writer.
November 6th, 2020 at 3:23 pm
Thanks, Jerry, for bringing up Holly Roth, and her untimely and never really resolved death. There’s a long account of her life then her strange disappearance from a ship sailing the Mediterranean here:
https://crimereads.com/the-drowning-of-holly-roth/
November 6th, 2020 at 6:24 pm
This Phyllis Bentley story is NOT in the Crippen & Landru collection “Chain of Witnesses”.
I very much liked the book “Chain of Witnesses”, and would recommend it.
This whole issue of EQMM sounds very interesting!
I don’t think I’ve read any stories from it.
November 6th, 2020 at 6:45 pm
Of the stories in this issue, I’ve been thinking that the one by Bentley was the most likely to have been reprinted anywhere.
The one by Innes is also a strong possibility, but for some reason, it doesn’t appear that it has. Right now when I google Innes and the title, all that comes up that’s relevant is this review.
November 6th, 2020 at 6:51 pm
Which puts the Hoch story the only other possibility, or the Maigret…
And there we go. “Inspector Maigret Deduces” is included in MIDNIGHT SPECIALs, edited by Bill Pronzini.
November 6th, 2020 at 7:48 pm
I once tried to cull my EQMM issues, but there was something in almost every one of them I wanted to keep. Even when it was reprinted in another book it was usually without the editorial comments that I read even when I only scanned the story.
McConnor wrote several good suspense novels set in France including a good historical mystery with Eugene Francois Vidoq.
November 6th, 2020 at 8:18 pm
McConnor wrote three novels with an Inspector Damiot as the leading character:
1. The Provence Puzzle (1980)
2. The Riviera Puzzle (1981)
3. The Paris Puzzle (1981)
and besides the book I Am Vidocq (1985), which you mention, David, I’ve always been intrigued by the the title of his book The Man Who Knew Hammett (1988), which I’ve never seen a copy of.
November 7th, 2020 at 11:38 pm
Steve, I hope you continue the Diary Reviews. I also have the long time habit of commenting in every issue of the magazines I read: rating, date read, and comments. I must have hundreds, maybe thousands of slips of paper reviewing stories in my pulp and digest magazines. I’ve been at it for around 60 years like you.
November 8th, 2020 at 1:02 am
Indeed I will, Walker. I’ve been enjoying reading what I wrote about what I read way back then, and I hope everyone else will, too.