WEDNESDAY’S SHORT STORIES #231: ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S DARING DETECTIVES Edited by Robert Arthur

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I’ve been reading “Alfred Hitchcock” mystery anthologies for decades (check out the list below). Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives (1969) includes an excellent blend of stories. I particularly enjoyed Stuart Palmer’s “Green Ice,” a Hildegarde Withers gem. The police struggle to find the thief of a value green diamond. Miss Withers shows them the way to solve the crime.

Also fun is Erle Stanley Gardner’s “Adventures of the Irate Witness” where Perry Mason fakes out the Prosecution. And, I’m a fan of August Derleth’s Solar Pons series. “Adventures of the Grice-Paterson Curse” involves a series of mysterious deaths. Solar Pons sees the pattern that no one else does.

Who doesn’t like a good spy story? Michael Gilbert’s “The Headmaster” involves the murder of a British agent and it’s up to Calder and Behrens to even the score. I’ve read a lot of Ellery Queen but somehow missed “The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats.” An infirm woman fears someone is trying to murder her so she buys a series of black cats–even though she hates cats. Ellery Queen becomes intrigued and investigates.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives is one of the best mystery anthologies I’ve read lately. How many Alfred Hitchcock anthologies have you read? GRADE: A-

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

  • “The Day the Children Vanished”: by High Pentecost — 3
  • “Through a Dead Man’s Eye”: by Cornell Woolrich — 30
  • “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim”: by Agatha Christie — 57
  • “Green Ice”: by Stuart Palmer — 71
  • “The Grave Grass Quivers”: by MacKinlay Kantor — 88
  • “The Case of the Irate Witness”: by Erle Stanley Gardner — 104
  • “Adventures of the Grice-Paterson Curse”: by August Derleth — 120
  • “The Headmaster”: by Michael Gilbert — 140
  • “The Adventure of the Seven Black Cats”: by Ellery Queen — 153
  • “The Wicked Cousin”: by Leslie Charteris — 174
  • “The Footprint in the Sky”: by John Dickson Carr — 193

Hitchcock fiction anthologies chronology

A chronological list of Hitchcock fiction anthologies.

In general, only the first new edition of each American and British title is listed. The country, format (paperback or hardback/hardcover) and date of publication is shown in parentheses.

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Hitchcock_fiction_anthologies_chronology

19 thoughts on “WEDNESDAY’S SHORT STORIES #231: ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S DARING DETECTIVES Edited by Robert Arthur”

  1. Jeff Meyerson

    Wow, that’s a lot of books! I remember buying “Hitchcock” anthologies back in the early ’60s, things like 13 MORE STORIES THEY WOULDN’T LET ME DO ON TELEVISION. I think I read stuff like “Lambto the Slaughter ” in his anthologies.
    This one sounds like a good one, and I’ve read most of the stories. You can’t go wrong with Calder and Behrens or Perry Mason.

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    1. george Post author

      Jeff, ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S DARING DETECTIVES is one of the best Hitchcock anthologies that I’ve read. Yes, there were a lot of them!

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  2. Byron

    I have a number of the supernatural themed titles and at least one of the “Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on Television” books. I gave a particular soft spot for these since they regularly adorned the mass market paperback racks of the drug stores and department stores that I scoured as a young reader. I have one of the hardcover collections as well that includes “The Birds” and, if you can believe it, was marketed to kids. This would have been when you also could have found the standard texts of of Melville, Dickens, Stevenson, etc. in special covers markted to grade schoolers. Those were the days. Now they repackage YA books in “adult” editions for 30 and 40-year-olds.

    That’s a handy list that I’ll bookmark and use when picking up some of my fall reading titles. Thanks.

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    1. george Post author

      Byron, glad you found the list useful. I used to find ALFRED HITCHCOCK anthologies frequently in used bookstores and thrift stores. Not so much any more…

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  3. Fred Blosser

    Like Byron, I remember when those “Hitchcock” anthologies were all over the racks in those Dell photo-cover editions. I didn’t realize they lasted into the ’80s and ’90s. Wonder how many 13-year-olds you could pull away today from “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty” to read DARING DETECTIVES? I have to smile when I see Cornell Woolrich’s name in a book aimed at what today we’d call the YA market.

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    1. george Post author

      Fred, you’re right about pulling kids away from GRAND THEFT AUTO. When I was teaching MARKETING at my College, the Dean sent me and my colleagues a memo that we should consider assigning “Enrichment” books to our classes. I assigned Dickens’ BLEAK HOUSE to that group. At the end of the semester, a student–male, about 26 years old–came up to me and said, “Dr. Kelley, this is the first book I’ve ever read, cover to cover. I loved it!” I smiled and told him, “Come with me to my Office.” I gave him three more Dickens books–DAVID COPPERFIELD, A TALE OF TWO CITIES, and GREAT EXPECTATIONS. A few months later, the student sent me a nice THANK YOU card and said he was now a Charles Dickens addict.

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  4. Todd Mason

    As you might remember, I was another for whom Robert Arthur’s and Harold Q. Masur’s (after Arthur’s death) Random House “HITCHCOCK” anthologies, either borrowed from the libraries or bought in book club editions or secondhand hardcover, or in the Dell paperbacks that essentially split the hardcovers in half, were core reading for me, along with the anthologies from AHMM, usually distinguished from the Random House volumes and their reprints by title forms that read ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S versus AH PRESENTS:…sadly, this led to confusion on the part of some bibliographers, such as Frank Babics at CASUAL DEBRIS and now his somewhat cautious revision on his list, after I pointed out the error, and it’s replicated on the HITCHCOCK ZONE listings you link to, that conflates the MYSTERY MAGAZINE best-of anthology WITCH’S BREW (first published by Dell in ’65) with the post-Arthur YA volume, edited by Henry Veit, AH’S WITCHES’s BREW, which is a fine, wide-ranging mostly horror anthology that most of the “Hitchcock” YA Random House volumes were (I forget who published the YA paperback versions–Viking?, but they lost the fine illustrations and some of the stories [!] of the Random House originals). And the early (1940s) anthologies at Dell were ghost-edited by Don Ward, who also edited ZANE GREY WESTERN MAGAZINE and otherwise helped Dell do interesting things in its early decades. When Davis Publications bought AHMM in the mid ’70s, they began issuing fat best-ofs the magazine edited by AHMM editor Eleanor Sullivan, as ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S ANTHOLOGY magazine issues (as they much earlier did with EQMM after they bought that, and would do with fiction from ASIMOV’S SF while Asimov was still alive), which where published in hardcover as well as AH’S (You Name It)….and the few UK original volumes were edited by the busy anthologist Peter Haining. The one which might be said to be co-edited by Hitchcock himself, along with Joan Harrison the AHP tv show producer and the US network censors was AHP: STORIES THEY WOULDN’T LET ME DO ON TV, from Random, and in the typical two volumes from Dell.

    Yikes, I’ve almost re-hashed a SSW entry here myself. But I loved the best of these books, and liked the rest. Robert Arthur did only two Random House YAs which deviated away from mostly horror, unless the porous memory is playing me badly, this one and the spy-fiction/espionage one. He edited all the YA RH volumes but the first, edited by Muriel Fuller, an old hand at YA fiction, but hers wasn’t as good and they wisely handed both the YA and adult series to Arthur for the rest of his time….

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    2. Todd Mason

      And I Did Not type “WITCHES’s BREW”…some helpful routine on my low-rent Lenovo or perhaps the blog here decided I needed help with that sentence!

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  5. Todd Mason

    And just to beat it into the ground, one reason to get the RH hardcovers of the adult-aimed anthos was because Arthur would reprint whole novels in some of them, that had not seen hardcover publication beforehand, which is how I first read Sturgeon’s SOME OF YOUR BLOOD. Of course, usually when Arthur/RH did that, it would conflict with paperback rights/in-print editions of such as the Sturgeon, so Dell would take some of the stories from the YA anthologies and use them to fill the hole where the novel had been, for their paperback two-volume reprints.

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  6. Cap'n Bob

    I used to see these Hitchcock books in used book stores (remember them) all the time, yet was never tempted to get one! The one you’re showcasing has a lot of top-notch writers! My loss!

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    2. Todd Mason

      However, the Robert Arthur ones don’t…even though this one was aimed at young readers (and would blow their doors off), I fully believe George’s report of how much he enjoyed it.

      Most of the weaker anthologies under the HITCHCOCK rubric are, in fact, the AH MYSTERY MAGAZINE best-ofs, which tend to be good but only very rarely superb.

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      1. Todd Mason

        Actually, one Robert Arthur I’ve never tried (nor, I think, seen, beyond pictures of its cover) is indeed another variant from his horror/suspense/fantasy mixes, AH’S SOLVE THEM YOURSELF MYSTERIES. So, perhaps that might be the Weak Link in the Arthur anthologies. But it does look like it might be fun. Arthur, of course, also created, wrote several of, and edited the rest published during his life–he died in 1969: the AH AND THE THREE INVESTIGATORS YA novel series.

        The Harold Q. Masur adult AHP anthologies are excellent as well, and introduced writers such as John Kefauver to the mix (in his recent review of one of Kefauver’s late collections, Frank Babics was very impressed indeed–don’t know if he read same late ANP volumes as I did.).

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