Book Description
Con men and criminals, PIs and amateur sleuths, the mean streets of New York and San Francisco, Chicago and Seoul, not to mention eighteenth-century London and eleventh-century Japan. For 50 years Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine has offered its readers a wide range of the finest crime and detective stories available and stands today as one of the foremost magazines of mystery and suspense. In anticipation of AHMM's golden anniversary, Ms. Landrigan invited readers to nominate their favorite stories, and this collection is packed with popular authors and well-known characters, including Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder, Bill Pronzini's Nameless Detective, and Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski.
Linda Landrigan is editor-in-chief of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. She lives in New York.
Customer Reviews:
Great Anthology!.......2007-09-12
Have never read Alfred Hitchcock's Magazine so have no idea if these are the best stories which have appeared in there but I can say I have read a fair few anthologies and would have to say this is up there with the best of them. You'll never come across a large collection of short stories by various authors where you love every single story inside but the great collections have a large percentage of stories you really enjoy, allow you to read stories you will have a pretty difficult time tracking down by authors who you are a fan of as well as introduce you to authors whose full length novels you have never tried. This collection does accomplish all this.
The best stories in here in my opinion are the first story Frightening Frammis about a hitchhiker con man who is returning to LA with his tail between his legs when he is given a lift by a couple and shortly after offered a scam by the wife if he will kill her husband. #8 although a bit predictable is a good old serial killer tale. Although most of Westlake's work is better Good Night Good Night is still a good read about a TV star who is shot while watching an episode of his show and wants to work out which of his co-stars shot him before death embraces him. The Method Sheriff, the tale of a small town bank robbery is one of those classic twist stories. New Neighbour is the story of how the elderly in a street react to a new bully neighbour who kills their animal companions when they complain about the noise and other matters. The Muse by Jan Burke along with being a great story also constantly pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock with his films constantly referenced by the main characters who play games where the other must guess which film they are referring to unfortunately for them though someone else wants to play an even deadlier game. Sinkhole is another great tale of a man not able to divorce his wife who uses a sinkhole in the backyard to get rid of her only to find he is not the only person in the area who has had this idea.
Since Amazon doesn't give a list of who has contributed to this collection and which of their stories are in here, something which I personally find really annoying when trying to track down stories I haven't read by authors that I like. I will provide a comprehensive list at the bottom of this review. Buy this anthology it's good! Other great recently published anthologies are Dangerous Women edited by Otto Penzler, The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 edited by Scott Turow and Mystery Writers of America Presents Death Do Us Part: New Stories about Love, Lust, and Murder edited by Harlan Coben.
Inside this anthology you'll find:-
The Frightening Frammis by Jim Thompson
The Day of the Execution by Henry Slesar
#8 by Jackie Ritchie
Not a Laughing Matter by Evan Hunter
A Genuine Alectryomancer by Charles Willeford
Good Night! Good Night! By Donald E Westlake
The Cost of Kent Castwell by Avram Davidson
The Long Way Down by Edward D. Hooch
The Method Sheriff by Ed Lacy
Death of a Nobody by Bill Pronzini
Recipe for Murder by James Holding
New Neighbor by Talmage Powell
Historical Errors by William Brittain
A Candle for the Bag Lady by Lawrence Block
Making a Killing With Mama Cass by Wiliam Bankier
The Takamoku Joseki by Sara Paretsky
My Brother's Wife by Rob Kantner
Final Rites by Doug Allyn
The Search for Olga Bateua by Stephen Wasylyk
Hawks by Connie Holt
Unbearable Temptations by Jeffry Scott
Priests by George C Chesbro
Pusan Nights by Martin Limon
Body Englis by S. J. Rozan
The Muse by Jan Burke
Sinkhole by Carol Cail
Saturday Night at the Mikado Massage by Loren D Estleman
Lord of Obstacles by Gregory S. Fallis
Black Spartacus by James Lincoln Warren
Eries Last Day by Steve Hockensmith
Tabloid Press by Janice Law
The O-Bon Cat by I. J. Parker
Leaving Nairobi by Ed McBain
Voodoo by Rhys Bowen
An excellent mystery anthology.......2006-12-16
I'd never heard of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, though I am an avid reader of mystery and suspense novels. If this anthology is an indicator of what's to be found in the magazine, then the montly is definitely worth a look.
Most of these thirty-four stories are very well done. There were several that didn't quite hold my interest, but that wasn't because they were poorly written: they just didn't grab me.
There are several standouts in the anthology, including a wonderfully wry short by Ed McBain.
Many of the names in the anthology are familiar. Some stories represent early works, some later.
In any event, any mystery fan will enjoy this anthology. It will provide several evenings of fun mystery reading when you're not up to tackling the latest novel.
Jerry
For hard-core crime fiction fans only........2006-10-21
I recall reading 'Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine' in the '80s, and discovering quite a few of the now long out of print paperback anthologies, which purported to be 'edited' by Hitchcock himself, along with ghost-written introductions. All of this was in the manner of the classic 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' TV series, with which the magazine is the longest-lived tie-in.
The glory days of the magazine(and the anthologies) were filled with short, concise, suspenseful little tales in which the bad guy would reach a suitable end, with an appropriate twist of fate (and plot).
Only a few such stories are in evidence in this volume, perhaps because the best work has already been reprinted in numerous places.
This 'comprehensive' 50th-anniversary collection suffers from the same problem as many anthologies, with perhaps a few too many riches. Although there are a few well-known authors, and some occasional nuggets among the stories, nothing in particular sticks in the memory, and in fact, skipping a few stories altogether won't make too much difference.
The 'Hitchcock' magazine has somewhow managed to last half a century, so it must be doing something to satisfy a (relatively) small but loyal audience. As an example of a declining breed-the a short story anthology magazine-this is worth browsing through as a curiousity, but the reader would probably be better served to dig deeper into the works of the reprsented authors. I get the feeling all are capable of better things in a different forum.
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The Deadliest Games: Tales of Psychological Suspense from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf Pub
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Customer Reviews:
delightful historical amateur sleuth .......2007-04-27
In 1965 Harry Trauble thinks he has the best job for a single twentyish Southern California swinger. He works in the promotions department of Ogle magazine, the second most popular men's magazine in the country. However, Harry is unaware of a war between top management over the future of the magazine as he is to busy trying to make it with receptionist Terry O'Mara.
The workforce is shook when the famous statue of the frog in the lobby falls and crushes Circulation Department Vice President Nick Hobart. Everyone assumes a tragic accident occurred, but the sculptor thinks otherwise. Terry agrees with the artist as she believes one of the top managers killed Nick probably over the strategic direction dispute that could be worth millions depending which way the wind blows.
Dick Lochte provides readers with a delightful historical amateur sleuth that brings to life the swinging sixties. The story line is driven by the cast especially the hero Harry who thinks he owns the world because to quote his parents he works on a "porn" magazine. Fans who appreciate a deep look at a tumultuous era will appreciate the aptly titled CROAKED! as this is an entertaining mystery.
Harriet Klausner
Customer Reviews:
a comprehensive history of the pulp magazines.......2006-04-20
The first volume(of a total of six) in Robert Sampson's comprehensive study of the history of pulp magazines and the varieties of heroes/vigilantes/detectives/etc. that existed.
Has plenty of black and white reproduction of old pulp covers, ranging from mysteries to westerns.The hardcovers are out of print, but it is still possible to locate new paperback copies.
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Death on the Verandah: Mystery Stories of the South from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine
Manufacturer: Carroll & Graf Pub
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Pulp Classics: The Black Mask Magazine, No. 2 (May 1920)
John Gregory Betancourt
Manufacturer: Wildside Press
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Product Description
The second issue of the legendary pulp mystery magazine, The Black Mask, dates from May 1920.
Amazon.com
Eugene Robinson, an African American assistant editor at The Washington Post, experienced strong culture shock when he went to Brazil and discovered that nation's staggering degrees of blackness: with over 60 million people of apparent African descent, Brazil is the world's largest black country after Nigeria. But as Robinson deftly articulates in the stunning Coal to Cream, most Afro-Brazilians suffer from race denial and an underdeveloped sense of racial identity, which keeps them from demanding social and political reforms. Robinson is awed by the nation's African musical, culinary, and religious influences, which, along with generations of cohabitation (in every sense of the word) with Indians and Europeans, have eliminated--at least on one level--the harsher aspects of racism. "The emphasis on the more mutable issue of color (rather than the rigidity of race) was at the heart of what I loved so much about Brazil--the absence of racial conflict," Robinson writes. "There was no silent struggle going on."
But he also notes that black Brazilians occupy the lowest rungs of Brazilian society; many of them live in the hopeless conditions of the favela slums. He also observes the emerging black consciousness movements in Bahia and the Afro-eroticism of Carnival (which serves as a safety valve for the country's poor and discontented). And he contrasts Brazil's black population with the more marginalized Afro-Peruvians and the Afro-Caribbean Brixton area of London, two regions where race consciousness abounds. Yet, with all of its ambiguities, Eugene Robinson sees Brazil as a possible future for the United States, as the absurd "one drop" rule used to arbitrate racial identity becomes a thing of the past. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Book Description
Eugene Robinson didn't expect to have his world turned upside down when he accompanied a group of friends and acquaintances to the beach at Ipanema in Rio de Janeiro one sunny afternoon. He had recently moved to South America as the new correspondent for the Washington Post, a position he had sought not only as an exciting professional challenge but also as a means of escape from the poisonous racial atmosphere in America's cities, which he experienced firsthand as a reporter and editor covering city politics in Washington, D.C. Black and white wouldn't matter so much, he thought, if he gave himself a little distance from the problem.
At first Robinson saw Brazil as a racial paradise, where people of all hues and colors mingled together on the beaches, in the samba schools, and at carnaval. But that day on the beach, his most basic assumptions about race were shattered when he was told that he didn't have to be black in Brazil if he didn't want to be. The society looked at people through a broad spectrum of colors, ranging from "white" to "coffee with milk" to "after midnight," and not as members of two rigidly defined races. Like most African Americans, Robinson had always recognized the existence of color gradations within the black community -- the members of his own family span the entire range from coal to cream -- but he never looked at color the same way after that encounter at Ipanema.
Coal to Cream is the story of Robinson's personal exploration of race, color, identity, culture, and heritage, as seen through the America of his youth and the South America he discovered, forging a new consciousness about himself, his people, and his country. As he immersed himself in Brazilian culture, Robinson began to see that its focus on color and class -- as opposed to race -- presents problems of its own. Discrimination and inequality still exist, but without a sense of racial identity, the Brazilians lack the anger and vocabulary they need to attack or even describe such ills. Ultimately, Robinson came to realize that racial identity, what makes him not just an American but a black American, is a gift of great value -- a shared language of history and experience -- rather than the burden it had sometimes seemed.
A penetrating look at race relations in the United States and much of the rest of the hemisphere, Coal to Cream is both a personal memoir and a striking comment on the times in which we live. At a time when many are calling for the abandonment of racial identity, Robinson cautions that we should be careful what we wish for, lest we get it.
Customer Reviews:
Interesting exploration of racial identity.......2006-02-25
Robinson uses his own personal sojourn through South America as a framework to discuss broader issues of race relations and racial identity. When Robinson first visits Brazil, he views it as a utopia for black individuals, a place where unlike America race was not an immutable construct but rather a broad spectrum of possibilities which ebbed and flowed: "[t]he emphasis on the more mutable issue of color (rather than the rigidity of race) was at the heart of what I loved so much about Brazail--the absence of racial conflict, the ease of coexistence."
At first, Robinson's exulation of Brazil as a paradigm for issues of race appears naive and simplistic. However, as Robinson's journey continues, he realizes that Brazil also suffers from its own insidious forms of prejudice and problems of racial conflict though manifested differently, exist there as well. Robinson's meditations on race are interesting and emerge from a well written and engaging story.
Thought provoking!.......2001-08-03
I enjoyed this book because it is a thought provoking book. Too often the topic of race is avoided. The truth is that race may be the topic of the next decade in the US. The country is starting to have a substantially higher percent of population of non-whites. The largest California is already mostly non-whites. The author compares and reflects on his upbringing in the US with his experiences in Brazil thru the eyes of a dark Black man. I agree with the author that Brazilians do indeed think about race and are certainly not color blind. In my travels to Brazil I noticed from looks that some people certainly acknowleged the fact that I was Black by giving me a certain look or holding their look a little longer. However the lack of malice was apparent among my Brazilian contacts. In the US sometimes I have created static by simply showing up as a Black man at an all white affair or business meeting. The average Brazilian is actually quite a laid-back person. The American in comparison tends to be aggressive and highly opinionated. I hope to one day spend some time living in Brazil. I think that the author also overestimates the number of Blacks (by US standards) in Brazil. I have the number at around 50%. I actually prefer the terms AfroBrazilian and AfroAmerican. The author actually made it a point to study race. In Brazil race is certainly not one of the top conversational topics. Although this book is only around 4 years old, plenty has change in Brazil. Global changes have had an impact on Brazil and the people have adapted. Foreign films and TV shows have had an impact on Brazilian culture. Inventions such as cell phones and the internet have had a profound effect of reducing Brazils isolation. I can't wait to go back next year!
Ironically, he ignores Brazilians' views on this matter..........2001-03-14
In spite of my better judgement, I really like this book. As a quietly emotional, introspective and beautifully written report of one Black American man's reactions to Brazilian notions of race, it has no equal.
Why do I give it only two stars then? It upsets me that people across the U.S. will use this as some sort of "text book" to decipher Brazilian race relations. It is not. In fact, for an intelligent, sensitive journalist, Robinson shows a shocking lack of knowledge of Brazilian history and culture, especially as viewed through Brazilian eyes. This fatally undermines his analysis of race relations in Brazil.
To hear Robinson tell it, Brazil is in some kind of racial purgatory. Brazil's concepts of race never change. Or rather, its /lack/ of concept of race never changes. Brazilians, as we are told again and again throughout "From Coal to Cream" simply don't believe in the idea of race: they only see colors relative one to another. This theory of race in Brazil has a long and hallowed history in American academia. Unfortunately, Brazilian social scientists have pretty well demonstrated it to be full of enormous holes. There has been quite a long and well-documented tradition of seeing things in "black" and "white" in Brazil - a tradition which the Brazilian public ideologies of race would prefer to ignore. That this tradition remains alive and well in our quotidian world, however, is a fact that's brought back to me everytime I see some light-brown skinned kid wearing a "100% Negro" t-shirt here in Rio de Janeiro.
Ironically, the years that Robinson spent as a journalist in Brazil saw some of the greatest historic changes in afro-descended Brazilians' perceptions of themselves and their nation. These changes were perhaps best (but not exclusively) symbolized by the 1988 Constitutional Resolution to give land to Brazil's surviving quilombo residents - a law which was only won through large-scale mobilization of Black Brazilian grass-roots groups. None of this exciting ferment and activity is touched upon by Robinson, whom, I suspect, is unable to read a daily newspaper in Portuguese. From what I've gathered in the book, he didn't know anything of this sort was occuring among Black Brazilians. If he did, he certainly didn't follow it up, prefering to maintain the old, thread-bare dichotomy of a Brazil which ignores race and doesn't progress opposed to a progressive, race conscious United States.
Robinson would probably be quite suprised that, as regards his conslusions on race in Brazil, he is travelling the same path that many hard-core racists once tread. The French philosopher and scientific racist Gubineau (SP, sorry...) also believed that as a mixed race nation, Brazil was a contradiction in terms which could never, ever progress. The real question, of course, is why Robinson finds it necessary to do this and how does he have the power to be more widely heard on this subject than any one of hundreds of Brazilian journalists and scholars (of all colors) who are infinitely more well-informed than he is.
Robinson needs to look into the mirror and realize that even though he's Black, he's also a U.S. citizen and thus inherits a certain degree of imperial power along with that status. Perhaps then he'd be capable of writing about Brazilian racism with a new degree of sensitivity - not only to his personal feelings, but to Brazil as well. What is scary to me is that "From Coal to Cream" is so convincingly written that even many Brazilians, ignorant of their own history, will buy into its precepts.
When a journalist who barely speaks the language of a country attempts to tackle one of its deepest, most perenial problems based upon a few superficial travels, we should take his conclusions with a large grain of salt. Though it attempts to address Brazilian racism, "From Coal to Cream" is yet another in a long series of fantastic projections of Anglo-American fears and desires upon Brazil. Nevertheless, one should buy this book if one is interested in how Americans perceive and react to Brazil. /That/ is it's true value, and in this sense, Robinson has crafted a masterpiece.
Race and Reality in Brazil from the authors honest viewpoint.......2000-06-02
i would recommend this book to any reader that wants a good perspective on how race and class abound our world. As a 18 year old Afro-American female,I too like Robinson, initially believed the myths of a Brazilian racial democracy, but later on I sadly realized the truth. Racism is just as explosive in Brazil as the US but only it is done in a more subtle and hidden fashion.
Compare neiborhoods like Ipanema and the favelas(ghettos) of Rochina and Mangueira and see what colors are most dominate. And also see the racist killings of street children (80% killed are Black), and why the most dominate workforce for Blacks is domestic service(i.e. maids and butlers) The affirmation that Robinson made of saying that he was told he didn't have to be Black shows how in Brazil race is not soley based on heritage, but social status and education.
Euguene Robinson digs into the reasons why the Black Brazilian Movement is finally starting in Brazil. Trying to find a voice in a racist society and have the series of "race" categorizations to seperate Blacks be removed so that Blacks can identify and work against racism in a country where they are dominate (UNESCO reports Blacks are 70% population) but used to be counted only as 6% in 1973 and then 44% in 1992 by the government, these figures do not show a boost in Black births, but a boost in Black identity and pride.
Many will argue how Brazil can have Affirmative Action, but with a predomite population and predominte population of poor Afro-Brazilians, it is needed in Government and TV. I disagre with reviewers that claim that Black race identity leads to race "wars", it unifyies us, the only reason why people do not think racial conflict happens in Brazil is because most Blacks haven't been saying anything(ending that is Senetor Benedita da Silva).
Even though I think that this book could have dug deeper in the realities and myths of race in Brazil, I belive this is a honest and well written work
Coal to Cream.......1999-12-20
A fasinating look at race and color.Well writing and obviously lived by Eugene Robinson. As a White 57 year old male I found his account of black life in Brazil to be educational and interesting. Its a shame that there has to be divisions between the races. I could only wish to live to see a colorless society. What then would they all fight over?
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