2025 March 07 • Friday

Besides Edward Y. Breese's first Johnny Hawk story, what else was in the November 1968 Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine?

The Johnny Hawk story was the first one, followed by Bryce Walton's "The Displaced Spirit", a not especially interesting tale of elderly psychichal researchers whose glory days of possible supernatural encounters with poltergeists and the like are decades behind them.

Lacking both funds and enthusiasm, one of them accepts a grant from a local university to study not ghosts but people's reactions to ghosts. This is to be accomplished by their going around pretending to be ghosts and observing people's reactions.

As soon as you read this, you can be pretty sure that the story will head in one of two directions and sure enough, that's what it does. The only mild suspense is in which of the two paths it will take.

Fletcher Flora's "Something Priceless", is much more rewarding, using a standard story of blackmail, murder and revenge as the basis for a masterclass in writing suspense.

The ending is ambiguous but not in a cop-out way. The groundwork was laid right up front and I'm sure that it's not a coincidence that Flora had written about lesbian characters in earlier works, including his very first novel.

Next up is "Waiting, Waiting" by that stalwart Bill Pronzini. It begins as kind of a riffon Out of the Past, in miniature and with a significant turn of direction. This very short story builds up to a twist that isn't much of a twist. The atmosphere is good and Pronzini writes with admirable economy but there isn't much point to this story. The low word count wouldn't have even paid much to the author.

The Jollyboys Caper by Leo R. Ellis is a comic crime piece that’s almost like a proto Dortmunder story.

It starts at a back table in a bar called The Jollyboys Grotto, with the criminals there gathered to discuss a kidnapping scheme.

It’s pretty much foolproof and that’s good because they want the help of a fool, their current bartender and owner of the bar, as well as the narrator of the tale, a fat man named Greasy, short for Greaseball.

Greasy is relentlessly malapropic, which gives the narrative a Runyonesque quality as well as being generally amusing.

The story is entertaining as well as being on the light and gentle side, despite the kidnapping angle, and I only wish that the punchline hit harder.

Irwin Porges’s “One Good Reason” is another very short one that takes a familiar story element, basically the starting point of Death Wish, in which three young violent men break into an elderly woman’s apartment to rob her but become furious when it turns out that she doesn’t have more than a few dollars.

So they’ll kill her. They can at least have a little fun. Unless she can give them one good reason they should let her live.

This extremely short tale manages to be frightening and sad and even gesture toward a moral, while also giving sketches of characters substantial shape and depth. This is writing with economy and getting the job done well.

“Death of the Kerry Blue” by Henry Slesar revels in the macabre irony that was the Hitchcock brand in the 1950s and ‘60s, particularly because of the anthology television shows bearing his name.

This would make a perfect episode of the half-hour show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which isn’t surprising since quite a lot of them were in fact based on Slesar stories.

This one is about a marriage that’s gone from loveless to hostile. Silence is interrupted only by enraged conflict. When Ned goes away on a business trip and returns to find that his beloved Kerry Blue dog has died while he was away, he blames his wife, Thelma, for not calling the vet for confirmation of death before burying their pet.

Eventually Ned asks his doctor for some sleeping pills and you know where this is going, but Slesar has a couple of twists waiting for you at the end.

Next is a return to the whimsical in Carroll Mayers’s “Plot and Counterplot”. Narrated by a small town sheriff’s deputy who enjoys writing as a hobby, it’s about a professional writer of crime fiction who’s been experiencing writer’s block ever since his mother-in-law moved in with him and his wife.

Since the pro occasionally drops by the police station in the hopes of hearing about some real-life crime to inspire a made-up one, he tells our deputy about his problem and, after hearing about a series of break-ins and petty thefts, comes up with an illegal but mostly harmless plan to solve it.

This was fun and humorous and wraps things up in an easygoing “meta” fashion.

Michael Brett’s “Beiner & Wife” is about a mom and pop grocery store in a poor NYC neighborhood. Old man Beiner is barely keeping cans on the shelves and is more likely to be robbed than visited by customers.

His wife Betty used to help him behind the counter but now she’s lying down suffering from arthritis and there’s no one to wait on anyway.

When a man named Clawson comes in and promises to supply Beiner with stock at such a deep discount that he can undercut the supermarkets and start actually making money again, perhaps find a way out of their poverty trap, Beiner goes for it even though he knows it can’t be as good as it sounds.

Of course there are going to be problems and I was wondering if there might be a touch of sulphur in the air. This was an enjoyable story.

The next one, “Bronc Mahoney’s Foolproof System”, by Lorenc Kunetka, is even more enjoyable and ingenious. It’s told in the form of letters between Bronc and his brother-in-law, Kid, and has a bit of a Ring Lardner tone to it.

Bronc is out in Reno with his wife, Kathy, and has come up with can’t-miss system for winning at Keno. But he’s wiped out and needs Kid to send some money to get started. A simple investment of one hundred dollars (minimum) will return thousands, tens of thousands, immediately.

Kid has a lot of respect for Bronc’s brains, so he sends the money and takes the first step on a winding road that goes to some unusual places. This is the second best story in this issue.

Robert Colby’s “The Old Needle” is another well done tale, humorous and suspenseful, about employees at a department store who get interested in how easy it seems to rob a bank and get away with it.

One of them seems a little too overconfident in his abilities, and soon finds himself having to choose between committing the crime or enduring constant teasing at work.

“Mean Cop” by W. Sherwood Hartman is about an ex-con out on parole who’s grateful that the owner of a 24-hour diner took a chance on him.

He works the night shift, when many of his customers aren’t especially law-abiding. And every night they get a visit from the title character, a very tall and muscular police officer named Hemphig.

Hemphig hates all the no-good punks in the no-good neighborhood and it seems like maybe he’s even going around killing them.

There isn’t much to this story but it’s decent and also anticipates Maniac Cop a bit.

The old "let’s get our wealthy uncle declared insane and confined to a sanitarium" plot is given another run through by Talmage Powell in “Psycho Symptoms”. The villains do a good job creating the effect of the uncle’s wife’s ghost but of course it doesn’t go as planned, which is kind of the point of all these stories.

This one was short and diversting if not stunning, which is also kind of the point.

Finally there’s the “novelette”, the longest story and one which gets featured at the top of the contents page even though it’s the last story.

“The Tilt of Death” is by Rod Amateau and David Davis is the best story here and deserves its pride of place.

It’s got a great punchline and several satisfying reveals that I won’t ruin for you. The narrator is an insurance salesman, happily married with two children.

When he finds out he has only three months to live and tells his wife, she sits down and very practically figures out the logistics of a future for their family once the breadwinner is gone.

And then she encourages him to travel and go sport fishing, live the high life he always dreamed of. He can charge everything to his company credit cards and he’ll be dead before the bills arrive.

She performs the necessary legal maneuvers to escape liability for his debts and he takes off for Mexico.

You should find out what happens next but you won’t hear it from me. One amusing note that I don’t mind sharing, however, is that one of the characters uses “Fred C. Dobbs” as an alias at one point.
2025 March 05 • Wednesday

Quite a few books have been added to the Gutbrain library because of a positive review on the Paperback Warrior blog. (They have a podcast, too, but I find even the word "podcast" to be tedious. I did nonetheless listen to one episode, which means that in my life I have listened to two (2) podcasts.)

Last year they mentioned a short story they really liked, one of thirteen, apparently, featuring a freelance man-of-action named Johnny Hawk. They read the third story and loved it, so I decided to check out the first story, which appeared in the November 1968 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

Johnny Hawk is presumably no relation to the Native American New York police detective John Hawk played by Burt Reynolds in the TV series Hawk. (I watched the first episode on YouTube. It's got Gene Hackman in it!)

This first outing, "Dreamsville", takes place in drugged-out hippie-ville San Francisco, with Hawk entering this demimonde to locate a young woman whose parents want her back.

She's not a minor and she left home by choice soo it's not a job for the police and there's no legal basis for bringing her back. But Hawk isn't a cop or even a private detective. He's just someone who gets things done.

Author Edward Y. Breese seems to be feeling his way somewhat gingerly with his character's premiere adventure, establishing the basics: competent, experienced, tough, good-lucking, attractive to women, equally adept at sex and violence with no hesitation for either.

There's another underworld character who's also looking for the same missing woman and he knows Johnny Hawk by reputation and there's instant respect. So Hawk has got around. He lives in Florida and is all the way out here in northern California for a job, so it won't be surprising if people have heard of him wherever he goes.

The AHMM format pretty much demands that this be a very short story, so Breese gets q bunch of exposition out of the way up front, throws in some sex and violence, wraps up the expositional requirements in a second conversation and then briskly proceeds to sex and violence part two.

This is 1968 so while not extremely explicit, the sex and violence elements are fairly hardboiled and what actually happens to some of the characters is horrifying. It's not a feel-good story but rather a bleak and slightly sickening one.

Johnny Hawk wasn't especially impressive the first time out, but I have at least his first three stories here and am curious to see how they develop.

2025 March 03 • Monday

Happy birthday!

Gil Mellé is here again with his score for Gold of the Amazon Women, the 846th Soundtrack of the Week!

This is such a cool record. Traditional orchestra with some electronic instruments dropped in, mixing up classic Hollywood underscore with "modern" classical ideas as well as various jazz idioms.

The "Opening Credits" start out with some strings and a repeating 11-note figure and then about halfway through drop a slinky groove with hand percussion and an adventure-promising string melody.

A short. sharp piano figure kicks off "Amazons in New York" and then strings take over, joined by flute, playing some long and legato passages. At the end the strings get choppy and fast, joined by marimba and electronic instruments.

A similar string feel from the first half of "Amazons in New York" continues in the beginning of "The Poison and Chasing the Killer", which shifts to a heavier, seesawing section with lots of timpani in the second half.

Piano in a gentle waltz feel opens "Heading to South America/Hotel Muzak", soon joined by electric bass guitar and the strings. It's a lovely, lyrical cue with drum set and hand percussin making it swing. The muzak part is a really nice Fender Rhodes feature also with strings and also really beautiful. There's a cool sax solo at the end.

"Snake Attack and Hotel Escape" opens with an electronic sting, some kind of analog synth, and then keeps a pensive atmosphere with strings and percussion, the timpani being especially prominent.

The "Hotel Muzak" cue returns slightly faster in "Journey into the Jungle and the Village" but no sax solo this time, just reiterations of the theme by strings and flute.

Dramatic pounding action music announces "Village Fight: Back on the Road", which manages to blend off-kilter modern classical writing with some jazz grooves in a fragmented but coherent and exciting way.

Some lower tones from the wind instruments and dissonant piano clusters convey the menace of "Helicopter Attack", which also deploys the percussion in a big way and leans toward some of John Barry's action writing for the Bond movies at the end.

"Snake Bite and Noboros Death" starts out quietly, lots of space, just creating an atmosphere, and then segues into a swinging but also urgent-sounding cue before turning into more love-theme territory at the end with a flute melody.

A dramatic and suspenseful string melody with timpani support is played over another slinky groove for "Captured by the Amazons" while "Fight in the Water" picks up the tempo and intensity and brings back the electronic instrument that makes sporadic appearances. It might be a blaster beam.

Eerie tones mixing acoustic and electronic sources introduce "The Burning Village" before once again kicking into another multi-layered groove with lots of percussion and weird accents from the electronics.

This same mixture of the modern and the groovy, the acoustic and the electric, flows into "Jungle Run", which again features the Fender Rhodes, after which the music relaxes into a more level orchestral cue, though with some warped percussion contributions, in "Chasing the Bad Guy".

Electronics, strings, percussion and flute have a jagged and tense call and response session in "Blowdart Attack" after which we're rewarded with another cool groove tune, this time with overblown flute, in "Closing In".

Low reed tones then take us to "The Lost City of Gold", which also features the piano before the rest of the orchestra comes in for dramatic fanfares with the brass up front.

Strings fade in with subdued long tones for "The Amazons Arrive". After the piano joins them, the strings get more dissonant and percussion and electronics join the party but keep everything level and in suspense.

Snare drum gets a martial but light and sprightly beat going while strings and flutes and piccolos dance above it for "March of the Amazons" after which we get the bluesy and slow "Farewells" with piano and sax as the lead voices.

The "Closing Credits" bring back the spiky and uptempo action/adventure cues from previously in the film and add some lower-pitched, percussion-heavy figures in the second half.

Also included in this release is a bit of Haydn's "String Quartet No. 1 in E Major" plus a few very short "Bumpers".