My favorite story in Murder for Halloween (1994) is Edward D. Hoch’s clever Nick Velvet heist, “The Theft of the Halloween Pumpkin.” Nick Velvet only steals worthless items so when a woman wants to hire him to steal a Halloween pumpkin, Velvet accepts. Only later does Velvet learn that sometimes a Halloween pumpkin can be more than a pumpkin.
I also enjoyed Ellery Queen’s “The Adventure of the Dead Cat” where a game at a Halloween Party turns deadly. Steven Saylor, who specializes in crime-solving in the Roman Empire, delivers “The Lemures,” a story about lemures (aka, the unquiet dead) and murderous deception.
It was fun to reread Robert Bloch’s “The Cloak,” a story he wrote back in 1939. Vampires are involved. Gahan Wilson, best known for his cartoons, made me laugh with “Yesterday’s Witch,” with a witch named Miss Marbles (a sly nod to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple).
Murder for Halloween offers a variety of stories with various settings and characters. If you’re in the mood for Halloween stories with an edge, Murder for Halloween certainly provides some memorial tales! GRADE: B+
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
PREFACE — xiii
Monsters / Ed McBain — 1
The lemures / Steven Saylor — 9
The adventure of the dead cat / Ellery Queen — 43
The odstock curse / Peter Lovesey — 65
The theft of the Halloween pumpkin / Edward D. Hoch — 81
Hallowe’en for Mr. Faulkner / August Derleth — 99
Deceptions / Marcia Muller — 111
The black cat / Edgar Allan Poe — 135
Omjagod / James Grady — 147
The cloak / Robert Bloch — 173
What a woman wants / Michael Z. Lewin — 191
Yesterday’s witch / Gahan Wilson — 211
Walpurgis night / Bram Stoker — 221
Trick or treat / Judith Garner — 237
One night at a time / Dorothy Cannell — 243
Night of the goblin / Talmage Powell — 267
Trick-or-treat / Anthony Boucher — 279
Pork pie hat / Peter Straub — 297
ABOUT THE EDITORS — 363
A lot of good writers here, so if I came across this one I would definitely read it.
Jeff, MURDER FOR HALLOWEEN has a nice mix of old and new stories. And a line-up of good writers!
What, nothing from Bill Crider? How did he miss this?
Bob, Bill Crider would have fit right in to the authors in MURDER FOR HALLOWEEN!
What a great cover, a skeleton hand and candy corn! I am sure I would like some of the stories.
Tracy, the covers on many of the MYSTERIOUS PRESS anthologies were as good as the one on MURDER FOR HALLOWEEN.
“The Cloak” is notable, as I remember it, as the earliest of the distinctive Bloch-approach (which was coming into it/his own by this time) handing of the vampire concept. Or, at very least, a notable early example of this. Not at all Lovecraftian, largely based in a reasonably well-fleshed out contemporary context, and Things Go Wrong.
Todd, “The Cloak” was published in 1939…when Robert Bloch was 22 years old!
He did start young. That he was all but intentionally throwing off his explicit Lovecraftian trappings is indicative of not only coming into adulthood full stop but also as an artist, as, say, Fritz Leiber did at the same time as a slightly older young writer, and unlike the more slavish Lovecraftians, the first-gen Lin Carters.
Todd, it had to be heady stuff for Robert Bloch to have H. P. Lovecraft writing him letters and inviting Bloch to contribute to the Mythos!