--- In rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "foxbrick" <foxbrick@...> wrote:
>
> MERCURY MYSTERY and its stablemates BESTSELLER MYSTERY and JONATHAN
> PRESS MYSTERY were a periodical set of digest magazine-format
> reprints (at least for most of their run) of cf novels and
> eventually some short story collections...a number of indexers and
> collectors consider them paperback books, but they were produced in
> the same format as stablemate ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE, and
> were apparently issued periodically, so I tend to think of them as
> magazines
This is the first time I have seen Jonathan Press and brethren
considered as magazines but I see your logic even if I don't agree
with your conclusion.
The novels were reprints with some abridged and some not. I'm looking
now at Richard Sale's LAZARUS #7, which as I recall won the praise of
Chandler. On the copyright page there is this notation (which was
standard for the series): "These mysteries are sometimes reprinted in
full, but more often they are cut to speed up the story--always, of
course, with the permission of the author or his publisher. This
mystery has not been cut."
The short story collections were often original publications. The
series Jonathan Press published of Dashiell Hammett stories, most with
introductions by Ellery Queen, are true first editions. I am lucky
enough to own THE RETURN OF THE CONTINENTAL OP (1945) but others were
to pricey for my budget. Most, if not all, of the series were
reprinted as Dell Mapbacks, which are also quite collectible. Fred
Dannay, half of the Ellery Queen team and editor of the EQ magazine,
really helped keep Hammett's name before the reading public in the
year's after the war.
The standard pocketbook format did not begin to dominate the paper
reprints until the late 1940s. Reprints (along with some originals)in
the size of digest magazines were popular throughout the 1940s and
continued into the 1950s. Evan Hunter's first adult novel was THE
EVIL SLEEP! published in the digest format by Falcon Books in 1952 and
it was a quite hardboiled debut. I've only seen one copy, which I
promptly purchased, but I know Bill Crider has since added one to his
collection.
Not all of the publishers of digest-formatted novels were out of New
York. Century Publications was out of Chicago and Leslie Charteris,
creator of The Saint, edited and published a line in (IIRC) Los
Angeles. Charteris reprinted some of his own The Saint novels but
there were originals by other writers. One by Otis Adelbert Kline
fetches a high price today.
Richard Moore
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