Tue 28 Feb 2023
An Archived Review: ALFRED HITCHCOCK, Editor – Murderer’s Row.
Posted by Steve under Editors & Anthologies , Reviews[18] Comments
ALFRED HITCHCOCK, Editor – Murderer’s Row. Dell, paperback, first printing, May 1975; reprinted January 1980.
There perhaps is not a lot to be said for reviewing one of these anthologies from the Hitchcock magazine. You read and enjoy this kind of story, or you don’t, and the collections seem only to sift out no more than the worst clinkers.
Nor is there anything outstanding this time either. The best of the lot is “The Artificial Liar,” by William Brittain, on how to program a liar, with the intriguing possibility that it just may work. Fletcher Flora has a good private eye yarn, as Percy Hand proves himself to another client in “For Money Received.” Richard Deming tells a good cop story, “Nice Guy.” Intriguing is Rog Phillips’ “The Hypothetical Arsonist,” which deals with a firm calling itself Justice, Incorporated, but he flubs the story miserably.
Other stories by the usual AHMM regulars: Frank Sisk, Henry Slesar, Theodore Mathieson, Ed Lacy, Edward D. Hoch, Richard Hardwick, C. B. Gilford, David A. Heller, Richard O. Lewis, and Arthur Porges. Solid writing. strong openings, endings that don’t surprise quite as much as they should. It is a fine choice to help fill the nooks and crannies of an omnivorous mystery reader’s day.
Overall rating: C plus.
Contents:
Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock (ghost written)
Nice Guy by Richard Deming
The Bridge in Briganza by Frank Sisk
Thicker Than Water by Henry Slesar
The Artificial Liar by William Brittain
For Money Received novelette by Fletcher Flora
The Compleat Secretary by Theodore Mathieson
The Hypothetical Arsonist by Rog Phillips
Who Will Miss Arthur? by Ed Lacy
Arbiter of Uncertainties by Edward Hoch
Slow Motion Murder novelette by Richard Hardwick
Never Marry a Witch by C.B. Gilford
The Second Thief by David A. Heller
The Nice Young Man by Richard O. Lewis
A Message for Aunt Lucy by Arthur Porges
March 1st, 2023 at 1:01 am
Maybe a little hard, but these best-ofs from AHMM did tend to be the Rather Good-Ofs, indeed…I think I recall the Gilford, but I’m fond of his horror stories that appeared in AHMM more than anyone else’s, at least till Cathleen Jordan (iirc) took up the editing at David Pubs. (and produced, despite running more horror, the blandest of AHMMs thus far). The FictionMags Index gives the splayed-over-decades AHMM issues these were taken from.
I’d still like to know who ghost-edited these Dell originals…and still suspect it was whoever was editing the magazine at the time.
March 1st, 2023 at 1:11 am
Who knows what I was thinking at the time — I no longer do — but a C plus means better than average but barely.
And as for your second “still like to know,” I thought that if anyone does, you’d know who really edited the Hitchcock books from that particular era. But the chances that it was the editor of the magazine his/herself are, as you suggest, awfully good.
March 1st, 2023 at 7:10 am
Possibly also the case that Dell had a contract via the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which had a hand in launching AHMM (if not Quite to the same extent as running MANHUNT and stablemates in the ’50s), so that SMLA apparatchiks did the editing. But that seems like More Effort, if also helping to explain why No One Seems To Know Who.
Yes, it’s a plaint I will tend to post anywhere relevant, since it makes little sense that no one’s got the details. And the Hitchcock-branded paperbacks at Dell were published so confusingly.
March 1st, 2023 at 7:46 am
This one, and 52 (!) other Hitchcock anthologies (including some two-volume reprints from hardcovers), is available at Luminist Archives.
No idea who edited this one, although it was most likely someone within the AHMM organizational chart. Some who did sign their name to AHMM anthologies (or to joint AHMM and EQMM anthologies) were Eleanor Sullivan, Cathleen Jordon, Kathleen Hannigan, and Charles Ardai; Peter Haining ghost-edited a half dozen volume for England’s Four Square Books, which later morphed into the New English Library.
March 1st, 2023 at 7:59 am
I recently bought a dozen or so of these DELL Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. I used to read them as a kid back in the 1960s As Steve pointed out, they vary in quality.
March 1st, 2023 at 8:50 am
And, as noted previously, there are actually about seven types of AH-branded volumes that Dell published in one form or another, and this cheap computer just ate the half-explicated list. Will return with the power-supply plugged in, in hopes of laying that out again…
March 1st, 2023 at 9:01 am
For now, let it be noted that Frank Babics and the Alfred Hitchcock Zone folks between them have Most of It Right.
barebones of Dell editions:
1. 1940s anthologies apparently edited by Don Ward
2. two-volume reprints of Random House hardcovers edited by Robert Arthur, and then by Harold Q. Masur (Arthur died; Masur’s RH series ended when Hitchcock died)
3. AHMM best-ofs, kinda at least–usually as AH’S XXX rather than AH PRESENTS: XXX
4. at least one US reprint of a Peter Haining UK “AH” anthology
5. Dial Press (Dell subsidiary) hardcovers of the Davis Publications ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S ANTHOLOGY issues (Dial volumes usually aimed mostly at libraries)
6. Variant retitlings of any of the above, particularly in the ’70s-’80s reprints
7. Possibly some Dial Press hardcovers of the Dell Magazine special products, essentially continuations of the magazine versions of ELLERY QUEEN’S and AH ANTHOLOGY issues after Dell bought the magazines from the collapsing Davis Pubs, edited by Sullivan, Jordan, Ardai and Landrigan.
March 1st, 2023 at 9:11 am
Meanwhile, Arthur’s AH PRESENTS: hardcoves at Random House had included some novels and novellas that never had hardcover editions, previously, such as Sturgeon’s SOME OF YOUR BLOOD…but their paperback editions were still available, so when Dell did their two-volume reprints, they replaced the novels/novellas with short fiction, often lifted from Robert Arthur’s YA hardcover anthologies for Random House, making for variant TOCs…and a couple of paperback lines, not Dell’s, did abridged YA reprints of the RH hardcovers (also missing their good illos), causing yet more variants.
One source of confusion for both Frank’s and the Hitchcock Zone’s guide, and which threw George Kelley at one point as well, is between the AHMM best-of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S WITCH’S BREW and twh Henry Veit-edited (who did two RH YA anthos after Robert Arthur’s death), AH’S WITCHES BREW–completely different anthos, with similar titles…and the Veit also had an abridged paperback. Add a few more instant-remainder volumes, including a bug-crusher of AHMM stories, edited by Harold Masur, and more confusion is all but inevitable.
March 1st, 2023 at 9:29 am
As Jerry mentioned, a bunch of AHMM content at luminist.org:
http://luminist.org/archives/PU/AHMM.htm
http://www.luminist.org/archives/
March 1st, 2023 at 9:32 am
And that mess above leaves off a few fine points…such as the two Possibly Robert Arthur-edited items: AH PRESENTS: MY FAVORITES IN SUSPENSE, where the ghost-editor credit cited in the book is given to Patricia Hitchcock, rather than Arthur (PH also had a colophon credit for some years in the HSD Publications version of AHMM), and Arthur also gets no visible credit for putting together AHP: STORIES THEY WOULDN’T LET ME DO ON TV (which in a sense was edited as much by Joan Harrison, the AHP tv series producer, and the NBC/sponsor censors). The first YA antho at RH was edited by a veteran YA editor, but her bright idea of devoting a third+ of her one book to an excerpt from THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER led to Arthur doing the remaining volumes till his death in ’69.
And, damned if I didn’t make the WITCH error myself above–the AHMM best-of was WITCHES’ BREW, and the Henry Veit final Random House YA antho was WITCH’S BREW.
March 1st, 2023 at 9:43 am
Thanks for digging that out, Tony.
Of course, overlap can be found here, including some UK editions scanned in:
https://archive.org/search?query=alfred+hitchcock+presents
George, I’d tend to suggest that each different set of “Hitchcock” volumes are rather consistent–with others of their set! The Arthur and Masur Random House books, and the Arthur and Veit YA hardcovers, tend to be the best.
March 1st, 2023 at 9:47 am
And, in a comment that might’ve fallen into a hole, I note I made the WITCH mistake myself, above: the AHMM best-of is AH’S WITCHES’ BREW, while Henry Veit’s second and last RH YA anthology was AH’S WITCH’S BREW.
March 1st, 2023 at 10:39 am
So, in other words, the answer is
“Well, it’s complicated.”
Thanks, everyone!!
March 1st, 2023 at 10:41 am
Oops. Not another post with exactly 13 comments!
(But it may have been fitting for an Alfred Hitchcock anthology…)
March 1st, 2023 at 9:23 pm
I was never as much of a fan of the Hitchcock collections as EQMM. It’s not that the stories aren’t as good, just that they don’t seem to stand out individually as often as the EQ story collections did.
March 1st, 2023 at 9:30 pm
I think the stories reprinted from AHMM from this era were often much of the same pattern or theme, crime stories with an ironic twist at the end, while those from EQMM had a much wider range of storytelling.
March 2nd, 2023 at 5:46 am
Though the AHMM stories hewed a bit more readily toward the hardboiled, if not as readily as, unsurprisingly, the contents of MANHUNT or MIKE SHAYNE MM. EQMM also reveled in reprints, while AHMM carried very few, allowing the older magazine to be even more diverse than it would’ve been otherwise. By the time of the Davis ELLERY QUEEN’S ANTHOLOGY issues/hardcovers began emerging, the reprints within were all (IINM) reprints of new work from EQMM, and a certain similarity of tone might be detected.
Certainly the Random House AHP volumes were more diverse than even the Queen anthologies that Dannay put together before the sale of the magazine to Davis.
March 2nd, 2023 at 9:39 am
Back in the 1960s, it was the covers on the Alfred Hitchcock DELLs that caught my eye. Plus, it seemed like a bargain to get a nice batch of stories for 35 or 40 cents! Hitchcock, an iconic figure back then, mostly lent his likeness to these anthologies…but that was enough to sell over 50 volumes!
Here’s my take on WITCH’S BREW: http://georgekelley.org/forgotten-books-345/