Hello...thought I'd step forward with (I apologize) a
cross-post. Glad to be here. Todd Mason
Before falling asleep the other night, I picked up four CF
magazines from 1959-61 (the most popular four in the US at
that time, I believe), and read the first stories in each
issue. MANHUNT April 1959 leads off with utility-fictioneer
Bryce Walton's "The Runaway," a decent if loosely plotted bit
of guilt-drenched, id-driven despair, full of ugly details of
slum life of the time. AHMM, January 1961, offers Henry
Slesar's clever, bitter "The Case of the Secret Sorrow"--an
insurance investigator manages to uncover the ugly truth
behind an apparent accident. Noir attitude delivered with
eyedropper versus Walton's ladle. EQMM, August 1960, begins
with Frances & Richard Lockridge's "The Scent of Murder,"
which manages to take the form of a brief procedural but
still be in the mode of the tale of a single clue which tips
off our uniformed sleuth as he gathers the suspects in the
study...well, the suspect in the kitchen. The stage-setting
red herring, however, isn't completely forgotten, and adds a
bit of human tragedy at the end. And THE SAINT MYSTERY
MAGAZINE for February 1960 leads off with "The Saint and the
Mug's Game," which, I was reminded by David Pringle when I
posted this to the FictionMags list, was a reprint of a
pre-WW2 Charteris short originally published as "The Mug's
Game" ...a clever-enough and slightly surprising
middling-good caper-story, one marred, in part, by an odd bit
of business about Templar's reputation preceding him to what
seemed to me an unlikely extent...as if the author had long
since begun taking his series-stories for granted.
So, as one might anticipate, MANHUNT nihilistic
existentialism, AHMM wry duplicity verging on gallows humor,
EQMM technical sleuthing with a touch of literary humanism,
and SAINT cleverness-above-all (and the only story without
murder nor the threat of murder deployed).
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