The Caroussous, Part 2: Georges -- Garbo

 

Last week in Part One, we touched on a Year 3 blog post about one of those Alfred Hitchcock mystery paperbacks. This was was  1963 collection but some stories were from the 1940s. This puts Georges and Dorothee Carousso -- Georges had a story in the anthology -- within from the scope of The Kay Kemble Project.

A theme which comes up in these blog posts now and then is just how transient fame really is. It's truly surprising to me that Georges Carousso's name is all but forgotten now. 

Back in the day, writers like Georges supported themselves by selling stories to magazines. Because the mags landed all over, from subscribers' homes to newsstands to libraries to waiting rooms, someone's byline could be seen by thousands of people in a single week. Georges Carousso sold a lot of stories so his name was before the eyes of a certain portion of the reading public very often. 

Back when there were men's magazines and women's magazines and lord knows what happened to you if you read something not designed for your gender, Carousso wrote some suspense stories and some true crime stuff. For instance, he's got a piece in this 1951 issue of Detective Tales.

However, what Georges Carousso mostly turned out were adventure stories. Walter Mitty stuff about, say, a guy who wrestled a shark or a tiger, or whose scuba tank ran out of air or whose hot-air balloon became untethered while he was in it alone getting ready for his first lesson. 

A typical example of the kind of adventure tale is "It's a Long Way Down," which a;pp;eared in a ten-story anthology called Full Forty Fathoms.

 

Here's the first page of Georges' story.  I do realize the text on the page is unreadable! Happily you can read the story, and the rest of the tales in the anthology as well, over at Internet Archive.

We go from deep in the ocean to the woods in winter in "The Warden," which Carousso wrote for Collier's. This is the story which was gathered for Alfred Hitchcock's A Baker's Dozen of Suspense Stories.

 

I suppose one way Geroges Carousso's name may be retained somewhere in future years will be the current love affair people have with anything collectible and vintage, which includes old magazines. And a lot of people scan back issues and create digital files which will not crumble away like the soft old paper of the pulp magazines.

So there are lots issues of Argosy and similar magazines with Georges Carousso's byline in them. 

There is a third Carousso writer to consider, and next week we'll take a look at the little bit of information I could scrounge up. In the meantime, I have located a readable scan of "The Warden."

Here ys go..