In assembling ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE PRESENTS FIFTY YEARS OF CRIME AND SUSPENSE, editor Linda Landridge certainly had a rich history from which to draw. Though Hitchcock is long gone – his involvement ended with lending his name and occasionally mining the contents for his ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS TV show, anyway – the magazine continues to hang in there today, despite hard times for short fiction. Many are unaware it’s still around, so hopefully this collection will lend it some well-deserved visibility.
Thirty-four stories from its venerable history are here, arranged chronologically, which allows you to see how the old pros directly influenced the new school. These kind of inclusionary choices are purely subjective, though Landrigan’s introduction notes her polling of the perodical’s readers for suggestions and believes the end result is “a representative sampling” of its lifespan rather than a straightforward “best of.” One wonders if there weren’t better stories to epitomize the legacy of its legendary contributors as well as the mag’s overall influence, but FIFTY YEARS offers so many good tales that the argument is rendered moot.
One of the earlier highlights is Edward D. Hoch – for me, the king of the seemingly impossible crime – who shines with “The Long Way Down,” in which a suicide jumper appears to have disappeared somewhere between his shattered office window and the curb below. And it’s amazing how effective a mere three- or four-page story can be, proven by Jack Ritchie’s serial killer-centric “#8″ and Ed Lacy’s bank robbery tale “The Method Sheriff.” One rarely runs across such economy today.
Over the years, the magazine played host to series characters, repped strongly here in Lawrence Block’s “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” with alcoholic P.I. Matt Scudder nosing into the murder of a homeless woman, and Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective procedural, also dealing with the death of a skid row vagrant.
Twist endings abound in the works of Henry Slesar, Evan Hunter, Charles Willeford and more in AHMM’s early run, but the bulk of the book focuses on the 1980s on, when the stories were decidedly less pulpy and more literary, with contributors including George C. Chesbro, Sara Paretsky (with a V.I. Warshawski story), S.J. Rozan and Loren D. Estleman.
Best among this more recent lot is Ed McBain’s “Leaving Nairobi,” a tale of unwanted safari lust (and his last contribution to the magazine), and what quite possibly may be the book’s ace in the hole: Steve Hockensmith’s “Erie’s Last Day,” detailing a widowed, depressed detective’s last day on the job before retirement. Rather than take it easy, he’s nagged by the handful of unsolved cases he’s leaving behind, and picks one to see if can’t dig up some new lead before he calls it quits. It’s unconventional, both thrilling and sad, and makes me want to seek out Hockensmith’s other work. And any anthology that can do that should be considered wildly successful. –Rod Lott
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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• AN AFFAIR OF SORCERERS by George C. Chesbro
• THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART by Lawrence Block
• THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE by Ed McBain
• LEARNING TO KILL: STORIES by Ed McBain
• LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE DEAF MAN by Ed McBain
• MURDER AT HEARTBREAK HOSPITAL by Henry Slesar
• THE PUSHER by Ed McBain
• TRANSGRESSIONS edited by Ed McBain
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