I was shocked -- shocked, I tell you! -- when I figured out that Alfred Hitchcock didn't actually edit the collections of mysteries stories with his name on them. Didn't even write the introductions.
The Hitchcock story collections are famous for their garish cover art, about which I once wrote this C7 Year 3 post with many examples. but the paperback anthologies also contain stories which cross genres. There are ghoulish tales, mysterious ones, suspenseful ones, and very strange ones. Another post I've done looks at these tattered old paperbacks, once created to cash in on Alfred Hitchcock's name while he was famous again from being on television. The publishers were clever to see that they could easily turn a profit from reprints gotten cheap or free. No one was concerned with the longevity of the stories.
For a person like me, forever hunting up writing of forgotten or nearly-forgotten writers, The Alfred Hitchcock Presents paperbacks have turned out to be valuable literary archives. I've been astonished at how the work of established and/or talented writers, which were once found in tens of thousands of American homes inside monthly magazines, has been lost. Or if not lost, at any rate difficult to find and expensive to buy in "vintage" form.
Though the paperbacks were inexpensive fillers for those old whirling metal paperback displays at Rexall, the material inside was so good because of a series of great editors. Part of one this little blog series looks at one of these editors, Robert
A. Arthur, Jr.
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| Robert Arthur, circa 1940 |
Arthur was born in 1909 and by age twenty-one he was already selling his mystery and speculative fiction to magazines. In the 1930s, he wrote for Amazing Stories, Black Mask, Startling Stories, Unknown Worlds, and many others.
After his early success in the pulps, Robert Arthur went on to greater success in what we now call old-time radio. This online article about Robert Arthur and his writing partner, who worked together on the old-time radio programs "The Mysterious Traveler" and "Murder By Experts" gave me so much great info!
You can enjoy, over at Internet Archive, a good episode of "Murder By Experts" by following this link.
And by going over here you can enjoy the episode "Beware of Tomorrow" from the radio program "The Mysterious Traveler."
Besides his work for old-time radio, Robert Arthur is known for writing a series of popular venture stories about The Three Investigators.
As you see from the book cover above, the Three Investigators series of books was affiliated with Alfred Hitchcock's publisher. Robert Arthur edited a number of the mystery anthologies, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents... Stories for Late at Night, Stories That My Mother Never Told Me, Stories Not for the Nervous.
Arthur also contributed to the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" television program, writing the script for the episode "The Jokester." Here that episode is on YouTube, minus usual intro by Hitch.
Robert Arthur also wrote scripts for other suspense TV shows, including Thriller," for which he penned three episodes including "The Prisoner in the Mirror."You can watch that one on YouTube as well.
But my favorite Robert A. Arthur credit is for an episode of NBC Matinee Theater."
The title of the 1956 episode is "The Babylonian Heart," and the IMDb gives this synopsis: "The
fifth wealthiest woman in the world hires detectives to trail her fifth
husband and ensure his faithfulness. The husband decides to regain his
freedom by arranging his own 'death.'" The star? Zsa Zsa Gabor, of course.
Next time: A bit more about some other Hitchcock anthology editors
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