Fri 3 Jan 2025
SF Diary Review: STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, Summer 1968.
Posted by Steve under Diary Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[7] Comments
STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, Summer 1968. Editor: Robert A. W. Lowndes. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. Overall rating: *½.
COL. S. P. MEEK “The Black Mass.” Originally published in Strange Tales, November 1931. The monastery of St. Sebastian is attacked by Asmodeus, the master of a c oven celebrating the Black Mass. Is not made believable. (1)
EARL PEIRCE, JR. “The Last Archer.” Novelet. First published in Weird Tales, March 1937. A hated Crusader Knight, put under a curse by a dying Saracen, is condemned to die only at the hands of the world’s greatest archer. An electronics expert is brought to his deserted island castle to help him killing himself as his mirror image. Effectively weird, in spite of diary format. (3)
JAY TYLER “The Sight of Roses.” Lester Morrow thinks he has contacted the Devil in his efforts to have his unfaithful wife done away with, but his perfect plan works too well. Uneven writing, some good, most terrible. (1)
FERDINAND BERTHOUD “Webbed Hands.” Originally published in Strange Tales, November 1931. A South African uses a monstrously deformed assistant to kill female relatives for insurance money. The author uses clumsy inverted sentence structure as he generally displays ignorance of the English language. (0)
PAUL ERNST “Hollywood Horror.” Dr. Satan #3. Novelet. Originally published in Weird Tales, October 1935. Dr Satan invents a ray that makes flesh invisible and uses it to threaten the motion picture industry, Not very scientific to be sure, but fun reading. (2)
January 4th, 2025 at 12:34 am
Mostly worthwhile of Dr.Death and Ernst.
January 4th, 2025 at 7:43 am
I have a soft spot for STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, THE MAGAZINE OF HOOROR, and the other Columbia magazines edited by Lowndes. At the time, it was just about the only place where you could find some of these creaking old tales from the pulps. What Lowndes did with practically no budget was remarkable, I believe Lowndes had to take the old pulp magazines apart and photograph the individual pages to get many of the stories. The first issue of SMS started off with a reprint of Edward D. Hoch’s first published story, a Simon Ark tale that first appeared in another of Lownde’s Columbia magazines; Lowndes would go on to -publish 18 of the first 22 Simon Ark stories (five of the Ark stories would be reprinted in SMS. SMS also reprinted 13 of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories in its 18 issues, as well as stories about Paul Ernst’s Dr. Satan, David H. Keller’s Taine of San Francisco, Murray Leinster’s Preston & Hines, E. Hoffmann Price’s Pierre d’Artois, and August Derleth’s Solar Pons, as well as stories by Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, and Ramsay Campbell. Notably, SMS also published the first stories of Stephen King and F. Paul Wilson. Not bad for a little magazine that could.
January 4th, 2025 at 11:11 am
Thanks, Jerry. That’s quite a neat appraisal of the magazine as a whole. My format for tackling various issues of magazines back then was to review them story by story, a process which didn’t really express the fact that (if this makes sense) in the case of SMS I liked the magazine itself more than I did the stories.
Lowndes did an absolutely bang-up job on it, especially given the fact that he had no budget at all to work with. He was also handicapped by the lack of consistent distribution for his line of magazines. I bought them whenever and wherever I found them, and in many cases hardly ever the same store twice.
January 4th, 2025 at 4:55 pm
While active many years earlier, Lowndes was in high-gear during this period curating many stories that might otherwise been overlooked. I liked the digest-size, too, and it fit nicely with the traditional pulp format that was fading into larger-size publications. His other forays into science-fiction, fantasy, Westerns and the paranormal are also worthy of mention.
January 4th, 2025 at 9:26 pm
Lowndes was in high-gear around this time, that’s for sure, but now that I think about it, of all the editors for the SF magazines in the 50s and 60s, he’s the one I know the least about. Curious.
January 10th, 2025 at 2:55 pm
Look to Damon Knight’s THE FUTURIANS and these will point you in useful directions: https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lowndes_robert_a_w
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._W._Lowndes
The former notes how Borgo Press has had his autobio awaiting publication for decades.
My first grab-bag of digests in 1978 from Gerry de la Ree included an issue of SCIENCE FICTION STORIES from the late ’50s, and I noted the editor worked on my engineer father’s favorite late 1970s electronics magazine, RADIO-ELECTRONICS, a Gernsback Publication (he liked ELECTRONICS WORLD better, but it had been merged several years earlier with the more dumbed-down POPULAR ELECTRONICS, at Ziff-Davis). Magazine publishing has always been a relatively small world…and then there’s CHASE, the mystery magazine that HK published when the West-Coast Star Press folks behind GAMMA, edited by Charles Fritch, later the last MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE editor, went broke after buying a couple of issues-worth of content. (Hell, I helped some spoken-word performers I worked with at TV GUIDE get in touch with Fritch ca. 1997 to obtain rights to perform one of his short stories…small world or at least labyrinth).
January 11th, 2025 at 12:15 pm
Thanks, Todd. Lots of connections here. As you say, “Magazine publishing has always been a relatively small world…”