The Jackie and Laurie Show Video: Elijah Invented Congee (#521)

FRIDAY''S "FORGOTTEN" BOOKS: the links to the reviews and more: October 2025

Patti Abbott: The Damned by Andrew Pyper

Yvette Banek: The Christopher St. John Sprigg Collection, Illustrated: The Perfect Alibi, Fatality in Fleet Street, Death of a Queen, Crime in Kensington, Death of an Airman (an e-book omnibus) by Christopher St. John Sprigg (Yvette suggests you ignore the public domain "illustrations" in this edition.) Kate Jackson on Sprigg's novels.

Brad Bigelow: No More Orchids by Grace Perkins

Brian Busby: Crimes; or: I'm Sorry Sir, But We Do Not Sell Handguns to Junkies by "Vicar Vicars" (Ted Mann)

Colman/Olman: The General by Alan Sillitoe; Barking Dogs by Terence M. Green

Martin Edwards: The Sea Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts

Eric/"Paperback Warrior": At Home with the Horrors by Sammy Scott

Will Errickson: Ghouls in My Grave by Jean Ray (translated by Lowell Bair)

Curtis Evans: On Philip MacDonald (Blogspot ads are a bit much...don't click on them, vs. around them, unless you want to see more ads...); Bodies from the Library 4 edited by Tony Medawar

Paul Fraser: Tor.com Short Fiction, September/October 2002, edited by Ellen Datlow, Lee Harris, Jonathan Strahan and Ann VanderMeer

Michael A. Gonzalez: Pimp by "Iceberg Slim" (Robert Beck)

Rich Horton: Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick; Fantastic, August 1956, edited by Paul Fairman (featuring four stories by the young Robert Silverberg); (the utterly unforgotten) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Kate Jackson: Miss Winter in the Library with a Knife by Martin Edwards

Tracy K: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (for Neeru's "Hundred Years Hence" blog project, reviewing 1925 books this year)(and another utterly un-0bscure book, to be sure)

George Kelley: House of Suns by Alistair Reynolds

BV Lawson: The Mystery of the Boule Cabinet by Burton Egbert Stevenson

Xavier Lechard: Wilkie Collins and his legacy

Steve Lewis: The Sock-It-to-'Em Murders (a The Mod Squad novel) by Richard Deming

B. D. McClay: Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller

Neeru: The Murder of the Mahatma by G.D. Khosla

James Reasoner: The Ship of Shadows by H. Bedford-Jones; Double-Action Western, January 1953, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes

Leo Robson: A Different Kind of Tension: New and Collected Stories by Jonathan Lethem

Victoria Silverwolf: Worlds of Fantasy #2 (essentially, Fall) 1970, edited by Lester del Rey

TM

J. Kingston Pierce: Crime Fiction End of Year Releases Possibly of Interest

Short Story Wednesday: book received: THE LOST COAST AND OTHER SHARON McCONE STORIES by Marcia Muller (Stark House Press, January 2026)

In Wednesday's mail is a book I hope I don't have to persuade you to snap up, or at least take a look at--Marcia Muller's selections of what she considers her best stories about her most popular series character, detective McCone, who is featured in a long string of novels, beginning with Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977, and, as Muller notes, had her short-fiction debut about a decade later. After an impressive string of retrospective collections from her husband and frequent collaborator Bill Pronzini, the McCone stories selection is also more than welcome. 

Muller's McCone is one of the earliest pragmatic female private investigator series, notably preceding in publication the first Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski and Sara Grafton's Kinsey Milhone volumes, and loses nothing by not including much that is stereotypical or fanciful, as opposed to McCone using her wits and courage to get through the hardest parts of her job, working with a cooperative private detection agency, All Souls (and a number of times working with the "Nameless Detective", the most populous series of  'tec' fiction from Pronzini; they also have collaborated on a historical PI mystery series, the Carpenter and Quincannon stories, while also writing stories about their respective PIs on their own).

I started reading the McCone novels with the rather brilliant Trophies and Dead Things (1990), in part a farewell to the late '60s in largely youthful progressive and radical political subcultures, and those who were hangers-on, and a look at those still or newly working for the better aspects of society, and dealing with those who would exploit their "marks" in those interacting communities. 

I've read some of the stories collected here, and others are new to me...I will be digging in here, along with the delayed reads of the recent Pronzini retrospectives.

Greg Shepard's Stark House is doing very good work with these. Muller's preface is a very welcome account of how she fleshed out McCone's life and experience, many other times hewing closely to some of the other most remarkable events in San Francisco and its environs (and the larger world).  More thorough review coming when I get a chance to get it down on screen...

The Lost Coast and Other Sharon McCone Stories by Marcia Muller (Stark House, 2026, 260 pp, $15.95 trade paperback: ISBN 979-8-88601-176-0)

7 * Preface * Marcia Muller (all stories by Muller)

10 * Deceptions * from A Matter of Crime #1 (HBJ 1981)

28 * All the Lonely People * Sisters in Crime (1989)

40 * The Land that Time Forgot * Sisters in Crime #2 (1990)

54 * Somewhere in the City * The Armchair Detective * 1990

69 * Silent Night * Mistletoe Mysteries (1990)

82 * Benny's Space * A Woman's Eye (1992)

98 * The Lost Coast * Deadly Allies (1992)

117 * The Holes in the System * Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine  June 1996

136  * "Knives at Midnight" * Guilty as Charged (1996)

155 * Up at the Riverside * Irreconcilable Differences (1999)

 170 * Irrefutable Evidence * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 2005

185 * Telegraphing * Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine June 2009

196 * Tell Me Who I Am * (a short e-book) Grand Central Publishing (2016)

212 * April 13 * Deadly Anniversaries (2020)

227 * Scamming the Scammer * Shamus & Anthony Commit Capers (2024)

239 * The McCone Files * The McCone Files (as "The Last Open File" and "File Closed") (1995)

258 * Marcia Muller Bibliography (apparently by Muller) (2026)

[More to come]

Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library finding guide for Muller's papers.

TM

See Patti Abbott's blog for more Short Story Wednesday (more complete!) reviews for this week.

Short Story Wednesday: short stories from THE SUN magazine: August 2024: "Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum; May 2025: "The Healer" by Rob Keast. THE SUN, edited by Rob Bowers

Links to the online texts from The Sun, which will allow two free accesses before asking for subscription money (subs can be print and online, or online only, for the same price):

"Clean Breaks" by Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum (my review of her first collection, This Life She's Chosen) Lunstrum's website

Lunstrum's story is about a woman not quite adrift, but unsure of her destination, as she takes a small boat up and down the coast of the northwestern contiguous U. S. and southwestern Canada, who finds herself helping a man and his daughter in distress in another craft. He's been sold some watered-down diesel by shady dealers, and, worse, his young daughter is suffering from a raging fever. As a nurse who's taking a sort of sabbatical, she reflects on this in comparison with her own situation with her daughter, going years back, as she diagnoses and tries to stabilize the young girl.

It's a meditative story, even given the urgency of the crises before them...and those in the past. This story seems more informed by life experience than those in her first collection, and is worth the read.

"The Healer" by Rob Keast (improbably, there are at least three Rob Keasts going by that version of their first name in some sort of public life on the web, at least, but this Rob Keast does have this essay online from Writer's Digest)

The only story in this later issue is a vignette, albeit just long enough to be long for a vignette...another meditative work (The Sun does gravitate in that direction), in which a young man, teaching conversational/business English in Japan, hopes that certain rituals he engages in help a close college friend and his mother, who have some health crises back home. He's not so very sure that anything he does has any effect, but engages in the mildly ritualistic behavior, riding his local subway circuit with a kind of Shinto (I think that, rather than Buddhist) talisman, in hopes of somehow lending or engendering what amounts to good karma for his loved ones. It's a reasonable portrait of what we do when we can do little, if anything, else, in the face of peril to others...more, whether one realizes it or not, to soothe ourselves and with the wan but desperate hope we can make a difference thus. The first story I've read by Keast, and solid work, with some wit added to the protagonist's perplexity.

For more, and much more prompt, examples of Weds. Short Stories this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Saturday Music Club (On Thursday): 2 October 2025

 Diane Monroe: "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"

Brian Arnold: Carole King: "Will You Still Love Me, Tomorrow?" (Live on BBC TV, 1971)

Jim Cameron: David "Fathead" Newman: "Davey Blue"

Jeff Gemmil: Alexandra King: Across the Pond; Tasmin Archer: Vibration

Michael A. Gonzalez: "I Want You Back: On First Love and Michael Jackson"

Jerry House: Hymn Time: Elizabeth Cotten and Guy Penrod (separately) "In the Sweet By and By"; Hank Williams, Sr.: "The Old Country Church"; Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma: "Simple Gifts"

George Kelley: Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan; 

and Remembering Now by Van Morrison        

Van Morrison: "Down to Joy"

from Better Broken by Sarah McLachlan:

 

April Landrum: Indirect Satisfaction (Strange Mono, an all profits for charity label), a four-way split album between bands Assisted Living, Bruise Bath, Droopies and Tlooth (2 songs each). (One of these bands, Bruise Bath, features a cousin, one gen removed, of Diane Monroe, above. Music can run in families.)

BV Lawson: "The Obsession" (a short story)

Joe Marchese: The Monkees; Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd. augmented reissues

T. S. Monk et al.: The First Thelonious Monk Memorial Concert, 1986, as recorded for PBS broadcast, etc. Leonard Feather not impressed by the video. (I attended this concert, nearly 40 years ago.)

Charlie Ricci: The Supremes: "When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes"; The What Four: Four (the Record); The Jayhawks: Live at the Colonial Theatre, Phoenixville, PA, 27 September, 2025

Dom Tyer: Hüsker Dü fans have “a miracle year” ahead of them

Vintage Obscura Radio: a web radio station devoted to a wide variety of obscure music and with a busy BlueSky presence/archive. Their 2020 Hallowe'en playlist.

SSW: June 1943: UNKNOWN WORLDS;; July 1943: WEIRD TALES, FANTASTIC ADVENTURES, SCIENCE FICTION (previously FUTURE FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION); September 1943: FAMOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES--stories from 1943 US fantasy fiction magazines:

A snapshot/slice of a time long past...notable that the most famous story in this issue of Weird Tales would be the most famous and among the most influential stories to be published in any of the issues cited here, one which posits that "Jack the Ripper" has found a means of achieving literal immortality through his crimes. Got a top-line banner, though not the cover illustration (albeit, to be fair, the story is not so very much Newsstand Illustration-friendly for the times). 

Weird Tales [Vol. 36 No. 12, July 1943] ed. D. [Dorothy] McIlwraith (Weird Tales, Inc., 15¢, 112pp+, pulp, cover by E. Franklin Wittmack) [] 4 · The Shape of Thrills to Come · [uncredited] · ms; illustrated by Hannes Bok 6 · His Last Appearance · H. Bedford-Jones · ss; illustrated by Boris Dolgov 20 · The Street of Faces · Frank Owen · ss; illustrated by A. R. Tilburne 28 · The Unfriendly World · Allison V. Harding · nv; illustrated by Boris Dolgov 43 · Lost · Alice-Mary Schnirring · ss; illustrated by Fred Humiston 46 · The Scythe · Ray Bradbury · ss; illustrated by Fred Humiston 55 · Strange Music · Dorothy Quick · pm 56 · Return of the Undead · Otis Adelbert Kline & Frank Belknap Long · nv; illustrated by A. R. Tilburne 71 · Desert Dweller · Clark Ashton Smith · pm; illustrated by Hannes Bok 72 · Superstitions and Taboos · Irwin J. Weill · ia 74 · Legacy in Crystal · James Causey · ss; illustrated by John Giunta 83 · Yours Truly—Jack the Ripper · Robert Bloch · ss; illustrated by Boris Dolgov 96 · Tamara, the Georgian Queen · Harold Lawlor · ss 107 · The Eyrie · The Editor · ed _107 · [letter] · Harold Lawlor · lt _109 · [letter from Phoenix, AZ] · Richard Tooker · lt 110 · Weird Tales Club · [uncredited] · ms _110 · [letter from Tip Top, VA] · V. Edward Sutherland · lt _111 · [letter from Milwaukee, WI] · Lawrence Straw · lt _111 · New Members · [uncredited] · ms; lists 25 new members. This issue can be read here ...and here. ISFDB index link, here.

Unknown Worlds [v7 #1, June 1943] (25¢, 164pp, trimmed pulp) [] edited by John W. Campbell, Jr 
• · [illustrations] · Newton Alfred · il
• · [illustrations] · Ralph Hall · il
• · [illustrations] · Isip · il
• · [illustrations] · William A. Kolliker · il
• · [illustrations] · Frank Kramer · il
• · [illustrations] · Paul Orban · il
• 6 · Of Things Beyond · John W. Campbell, Jr. · ed
• 9 · Wheesht! · Cleve Cartmill · nv; illustrated by Paul Orban
• 35 · The Wishes We Make · E. Mayne Hull · ss; illustrated by Ralph Hall
• 48 · Blind Alley · Malcolm Jameson · nv; illustrated by Frank Kramer
• 71 · A Bargain in Bodies · Moses Schere · ss; illustrated by Isip
• 81 · Sriberdegibit · Anthony Boucher · nv; illustrated by Ralph Hall
• 102 · The Rabbit and the Rat · Robert Arthur · ss; illustrated by Paul Orban
• 115 · The Devil Is Not Mocked · Manly Wade Wellman · ss; illustrated by Newton Alfred
• 120 · Eight Ball · Hugh Raymond (John Michel) · ss; illustrated by William A. Kolliker
• 126 · The Green-Eyed Monster · Theodore Sturgeon · ss; illustrated by Frank Kramer
• 138 · The Hounds of Kalimar · P. Schuyler Miller · nv; illustrated by Isip
• 156 · Prophets and Critics · Anthony Boucher · ar

The most famous story here, I'd say, is the Wellman. I've certainly seen it collected and anthologized the most. Though the Sturgeon is probably a not too distant second...

• This issue can be read here.  ISFDB link here.

Fantastic Adventures [v5 #7, July 1943] (25¢, 212pp, pulp, cover by Robert Gibson Jones) [] 
Editors:
• B. G. Davis - Editor: Fantastic Adventures, May 1939 – Jan 1947.
• Raymond A. Palmer - Managing Editor: Fantastic Adventures, May 1939 – Jan 1947. (Palmer was the actual editor of the magazine at this time. TM)
• Howard Browne - Assistant Editor: Fantastic Adventures, Dec 1942 – Jul 1945 (And Browne succeeded Palmer as editor when Palmer left to start his own publishing company. TM)
• 
  
• 10 · Craig’s Book · Don Wilcox · na
• 88 · Vignettes of Famous Scientists: Bessel · Alexander Blade · bg
• 89 · Vignettes of Famous Scientists: Aristarchus · Alexander Blade · bg
• 90 · Little Yowlie · Warren A. Reed · ss
• 94 · If You Believe · Chester S. Geier · ss
• 108 · Caverns of Time · Carlos M. McCune · na
• 160 · The Goon from Rangoon [Lefty Feep] · Robert Bloch · ss
• 174 · What Are Hormones? · [uncredited] · ar
• 176 · Nazi, Are You Resting Well? · Leroy Yerxa · ss
• 182 · Other Worlds · Walton Blodgett · nv
• 200 · Introducing the Author: Carlos M. McCune · Carlos M. McCune · bg
• 208 · Warriors of Other Worlds: [Venus] · Morris J. Steele · ar

This issue can be read here.  ISFDB index here. (Bloch's light-hearted, pun-laden "Lefty Feep"-series story might well be the best-remembered story in this issue.)

Famous Fantastic Mysteries [Vol. V No. 4, September 1943] (25¢, 148pp, pulp, cover by Virgil Finlay) [] 
Editor: Mary Gnaedinger
• 8 · The Iron Star · John Taine · n. Dutton, 1930
• 116 · Doorway Into Time · C. L. Moore · ss
• 128 · Dwellers in the Mirage · Nanek · pm [Ref. A. Merritt]
• 130 · The Yellow Sign · Robert W. Chambers · nv The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, F. Tennyson Neely, 1895
• · [letter from West Virginia] · Eugene W. Allbright · lt
• · [letter from Hertfordshire, England] · Frank Edward Arnold · lt
• · [letter from Illinois] · Ronald Clyne · lt
• · [letter from Minnesota] · Raymond Grumbo · lt
• · [letter from California] · Harry Honig · lt
• · [letter] · Mrs. Edward Honkanen · lt
• · [letter from South Dakota] · G. H. Laird · lt
• · [letter] · Nanek · lt
• · [letter] · John A. Savage · lt
• · [letter from Rhode Island] · Loren Sinn · lt

This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Catherine L. Moore story would be the best remembered of the new fiction in this issue...even if by default. Chambers has had a spike in interest in part from television taking elements from his fiction and/or name-checking it in such series as True Detective, From, and Good Omens, the last in its turn based on the novel by Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore which also pays homage to Chambers, and apparently also Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which I have yet to see.

Science Fiction [v3 #5, July 1943] (20¢, 116pp, pulp, cover by Milton Luros)  Robert (A.) W. Lowndes - Editor: Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1942 –Feb 1943/Science Fiction (Stories), Apr 1943 –May 1960. 10 · Dominion · Arthur J. Burks · na 43 · Infiltration · Clifford D. Simak · ss 54 · Close to Home · Robert W. Lowndes · ed 55 · Blackout · Damon Knight · vi 58 · Problem in Ethics · Henry Kuttner · ss 69 · The Man Who Saved New York · Ray Cummings · ss 79 · The Stellar Vampires · Frank Belknap Long · ss 88 · The Machine That Changed History · Robert Bloch · ss 97 · The Answer Out of Space · Graph Waldeyer · ss This issue can be read here. ISFDB index here. The Bloch story is (just barely) the most widely-reprinted here. More to come in this post. Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more Short Story Wednesday links.