Sun 27 Jul 2025
Stories I’m Reading: ROBERT BLOCH “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?”
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[7] Comments
ROBERT BLOCH “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1958. First collected in Blood Runs Cold (Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1961). First reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Murder—in Spades!, edited by Ellery Queen (Pyramid, paperback, 1969). Reprinted and collected many other times since, often with changes in the title. (See Comment #5.) TV adaptation: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (March 27, 1960) as “Madame Mystery,” with Audrey Totter as the title character.
This small chiller of a story takes place in Hollywood, where a writer turns down the chance offered him by a live-wire PR agent to help him publicize a movie star’s latest and possibly final film by building up a huge campaign on her life after her assumed death in a motorboat accident. When I say huge, I mean the works. Ads and magazine stories galore. Is she alive? And if so, where is she?
All is going well, extremely well, when … you probably guessed it – [Plot Alert] the lady shows up. All that work? For next to nothing? Usually this is as far as I’d go in telling you about a story, but since you’ve been warned, I will let you know the lady disappears again. In all likelihood this time she is as dead as she can be. [End Plot Alert.] But of course that is not the end of the story.
Author Robert Bloch tells the story as smoothly as he ever did, and maybe even more. Once started you are not likely to put this one down. And yes, the very last line is a small masterpiece.
July 28th, 2025 at 2:27 am
BLOOD RUNS COLD one of the best collections in Bloch’s career, and “Blake” a fine story.
July 28th, 2025 at 4:45 am
Bloch’s Mystery/Crime stories are preposterously enjoyable, but I was impressed by his autobiography, ONCE AROUND THE BLOCH. When he wrote it, he was dying of cancer, and there’s a joke on every page. Not a very good one (This is Bloch, after all) but ’tis there ans ’twill serve.
July 28th, 2025 at 6:57 am
Few people, if any, could match Bloch for combining Hollywood with suspense and horror. And, in my opinion, few people could match Bloch in anything.
And yes, he faced the end with humor, dignity, and grace. We should all be ultimately so lucky.
July 28th, 2025 at 2:23 pm
Everything you fellows say about Bloch is true. I corresponded briefly back in the 60s. (One postcard back from him.) Thanks, guys!
July 30th, 2025 at 8:35 am
The title is, to say the least, problematic. It did indeed first appear in EQMM as “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?,” but was reprinted first as “Is Betsy [note the change in spelling, with the original unacknowledged in many sources] Blake Still Alive?,” and then as “Betsy Blake Will Live Forever.” By any name, a nice little Blochian zapper on both page and screen.
July 30th, 2025 at 12:17 pm
Thanks, Matthew. I didn’t go into all of the title’s various changes in the info at the top of the review, but a true bibliographer really, really should. Always glad to have shortcomings on my part on record!
July 31st, 2025 at 7:57 am
Rest assured, my friend, I intended no implication whatsoever of any shortcomings on your part; this is a brief review, not a bibliographic treatise.
I was thinking of the usually thorough Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb), and of the generally exhaustive Robert Bloch: An Unconventional Bibliography, just published by Jim Nemeth, webmaster of the Robert Bloch Official Website. Neither mentions the discrepancy…
…but I do now, in my discussion of the Hitchcock adaptation from my eternal work in progress!