Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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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.