Movie Mania! Inappropriate celebrity-endorsed 1960s kids' anthology

 

I'm back with a third post of the off week, and I'm taking this feature further off the beaten path than usual. Our exhibit under consideration is something I've thought of writing about on and off for a very long time. It's a book I read when I was young from the even more distant past that I'm sure was floating in and out of my memory long before I finally stumbled upon it on the used bookstore shelves. It is in turn part of a whole series that seems nearly inconceivable today or for that matter when I actually read it, yet clearly never set off the moral guardians' radar. Moving in, here is a pic of the cover and another shot of its loose jacket.

The backstory for this one can be summed up briefly. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Random House published a series of anthologies under Hitchcock's name for the kids'/ YA market, presumably building on the fame of both his movies and the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" TV show. Like the previously-considered Crestwood House "Monsters" books, they appear to have been marketed to school and public libraries, though unlike that unicorn-level series, it's not difficult or costly to find copies without library binding in the wild. As is standard for school libraries, they remained on the shelves for decades. I personally encountered them in both the elementary and junior high school libraries, which had enough overlap in their collections for me to reread many of the stories and volumes several times through the late 1980s and middling '90s. Even as a wide-eyed kid, it was clearly sketchy whether Hitchcock had much hand in their contents, but they all had a satisfying introduction that fit what we knew or assumed about him. This also applies for the illustrations, which tend to favor slightly overdone melodrama; here's the frontispiece as an example of the mood of the book and series.

That brings us to the present book and why I'm including it here. It's one of three I both read and currently possess, the others being Monster Museum and the later, generically-titled Supernatural Tales of Terror and Suspense. I'm sure I read this one and Supernatural Tales right around 1989, a few years before I can recall seeing a Hitchcock movie (North By Northwest, and moderately horrifying in itself). While this book's contents aren't quite the most graphically inappropriate in the series (that distinction almost certainly goes to Patricia Highsmith's mindboggling "The Quest For Blank Claveringi" in Supernatural Tales), it has quite possibly the highest concentration of of obviously problematic stories. The first case in point is the story that was undoubtedly the basis of the cover, Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game", which was never adapted by Hitchcock but still filmed several times, notably as the parallel production to King Kong in 1933, and undoubtedly provided the basis of many more movies including Predator. I can further attest that it made enough of an impression on me that I tried to make my own version of it several times through the years but never quite got anything together. 

The next in line, directly following Connell's story, is that "The Birds" by Daphne DuMaurier, obviously the basis for Hitchcock's movie of the same name. This is where I have one of my somewhat frequent experiences of what I think of as "reverse Mandela effect", things I know I must have seen at a certain point but don't really "remember" until significantly later (see the Executor). In this case, I have no doubt I read the story as a kid, but most of the details that stand out in my mind now only seem to have stood out in later readings. I'm sure this is first and foremost an indication of just how rich and nuanced DuMaurier's claustrophobic apocalypse really is, the kind of story that can make an impression early yet continue to yield small and terrible details with rereading and further maturity. What really stands out now is that the story never got me interested in the movie, but may if anything have done the reverse. In fact, as I'm writing this, I've been cross-checking a receipt and some other records and just confirmed I only got the movie after buying my copy of this book. (In fact, I first looked up the weird novel of the same name by Frank Baker at about the same time.) Here's the main illustration from the book.

Next up is a story that I know did make an impression on me as a kid, to the point that I'm pretty sure I considered it the best in the book at the time, at least after Dumaurier's contribution. It's titled "Eyewitness", by Robert Arthur, an author I knew for the Three Investigators series my brother and I read into the ground. It is now known that Arthur was in fact the editor responsible for this and most of the other books in the series, up to his own demise in 1969. (His absence definitely shows in the uneven tone and quality of Supernatural Tales, published in 1973.) It's representative of the tone that predominates through the series, free of anything lewd or unduly graphic yet unquestionably mature. Its three characters are a cop, a moderately wealthy gentleman whose wife has disappeared, and a third person revealed to be a magician with a "mind-reading" act. The last detail is only revealed at the end of the story, but it's really not much of a spoiler. The story is literally in the journey as the cop takes the other two on a drive around the city, building up masterfully to the ending that's never really in doubt. Here's the illustration that goes with the story, unfortunately never reprinted since.

Inevitably, there are lesser tales among the 13 entries in the book. One that still made an impression is "Treasure Trove" by (female!) journalist F. Tennyson Jesse, also known by the self-explanatory title "Thirty Pieces of Silver", a startlingly short tale of betrayal centered on the discovery of a cache of ancient coins. I was underwhelmed by "Black Magic", a Sax Rohmer yarn I can't remember anything about, and for that matter by "Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper", a Robert Bloch tale possibly even more obviously over the edge than "The Birds" or "Most Dangerous Game". (I've long since become conversant with the mundane theory that the Ripper was simply a disgruntled nobody, or several nobodies.)Yet, the most incomprehensible inclusion is still ahead, Roald Dahl's "The Man From The South", a central exhibit why the author's work should never have been allowed anywhere near kids. It's just a simple, tasteful story about a bet with body parts at stake. It's not like we even see anything, until the end. Here's the illustration that goes with it; if I see this guy, I'm going for my rock hammer and asking questions later.

To wrap this up, I'm going with a story that's actually pretty funny, "Treasure Hunt" by Edgar Wallace, apparently the same author credited with "co-creating" King Kong. (Honorable mention goes to Dorothy Sayers' "The Man Who Knew How".) It's the tale of an ex-con who sets out to get revenge on a cop who convicted him by stealing his rumored stash of bribes and other ill-gotten gains, while the cop has his own angle. It's a fun little romp, right up to this... 

With that, it's once again time to wrap this up. As I have admitted, I've been stretching the bounds of what I had in mind for this feature. On the other hand, my idea all along has been to cover the more obscure and unexpected artifacts that turn up in pop culture. By that standard, this has been a new new turn, covering material that would probably end up in a new feature if I took it any further. If you can find this or other books in the series, it's certainly worth your money and your time to take a look. We could argue if these were ever appropriate for children, but the unquestionable fact is that they stay in the mind and memory at any age. That's all for now, more to come!