Anyone remember those Hitchcock collections of short stories? They alway had a cool name. Stories that even kept me awake.
Yes, I have one here somewhere (I think) called ‘Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV’. Wasn’t there also an ‘Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’ or somesuch, with short stories submitted from various authors? I remember having several old copies laying around our home as a child.
Yeah, I pick them up whenever I see them at the used bookstores.
They do have great titles - stuff like:
Happiness is a Warm Corpse
Boys and Ghouls Together
Coffin Break
Anti-Social Register
Let it All Bleed Out
Murders on the Half-Shell
They’re getting harder and harder to find lately.
One of my favorite book series when I was a child. I liked that I could read a story or two every night. I used to have one of the hardback books, but I don’t know what happened to it. I swear I read every story in that book a dozen times when I was a kid!
Ditto for me. But I only remember one story for sure. A bet for a finger vs. a car (or something expensive) over whether a lighter would light 10 times in a row.
I have a vague idea there was a deadliest game type story too, but I might be wrong about that. You’d think for the number of times I read them I’d be able to remember more.
The one with the finger and the lighter is by Roald Dahl. I think it’s called “The Man from the South” but I wouldn’t swear to it.
I don’t specifically remember reading any of the Hitchcock collections, but I probably did. I was into horror stories in a BIG way starting when I was about 9 until I was…well, now.
Oh I loved those! I had a whole bunch that used to belong to my dad that I read over and over when I was younger.
Wasn’t there one story about a body that was found in a locked room, or something like that? And a couple who drive through an empty town but cannot get out again? Anyone remember the name of that compilation?
I’ve got a nice collection here called “Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense”, with stories from the magazine starting in 1957.
I used to read these all the time as a kid; I think I read the local library system out of them in one summer, so I just had to keep reading them over and over, to the point that when I run across one of these stories in some author’s compendium like Patricia Highsmith or Robert Bloch I can often recall the entire plot of the story from the first couple of lines. I started trying to write short stories because of these.
A few years ago Barnes & Noble published a few compendiums–kind of a “Best Of” series–of stories from the original Hitchcock books. Good stuff.
Stranger
Well I’ll be. Glad the genre is alive and well.
It still exists - hubby submits to them on occasion.
Hey, I remember one of those books! I’m pretty sure it was called “Stories Not For The Nervous.” I know I was still in grade school when I read it. Scared the bejeebers outta me, it did.
That’s a great one! It contains one of my favorite stories, “Dune Roller” by Julian May. Also, I believe, “River of Riches”…the one about gambling for gold in the Amazon with a nut that looks like a human brain.
But the all-time creepiest stories are in this little one I have (from back when paperbacks were only 6" high) called 12 Stories for Late at Night. The best is “The Cocoon,” by John B.L. Goodwin, about a weird little kid who collects butterflies and gets more than he bargained for with one specimen. Almost as good are “The Ash Tree” by M.R. James (about a haunted tree) and “Side Bet” by Will F. Jenkins (about a castaway vying for survival with an elusive rat). Great collection. Surrealistic cover pic of Alfie with two heads, one with two faces, and neither of them on his neck. My wrinkled and brown-paged copy has seen a lot of use over the years. 
I just scored one of these [hardback with paper flyleaf, with not too much of a musty smell or staining] from a local garage sale a few weeks ago, for the grand total of fifty cents. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories to Stay Awake By [1971]. Interestingly, far more of the 35 stories are reprinted from *Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine * than any other source, including Hitch’s own mag.
So far I’ve read only a few of the stories, and they’ve been pretty hit-or-miss. But what I like about all of them is that they’re fresh to me. Much of my short horror fiction reading since I was a kid was of “best of” compilations, and they tend to recycle the same chestnuts over and over. [“Leningen and the Ants,” anyone?]
FWIW, and to jog some disquieted memories, the book lists the AH book series thusly [as of 1971]:
For Adults:
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
A Month of Therapy
Stories That Scared Even Me
Stories Not for the Nervous
Stories My Mother Never Told Me
Stories for Late at Night
My Favorites in Suspense
and, for juveniles:
Alfred Hitchcock’s
Daring Detectives
Spellbinders in Suspense
Sinister Spies
Monster Museum
Solve Them Yourself Mysteries
Ghostly Gallery
Haunted Houseful
I still have the Sinister Spies collection. I found one of the other ones in a used bookstore last year and bought it for MilliCal – Haunted Houseful, I think. I used to take that one out of the library. My friend used to have Solve Them Yourself Mysteries.
It wasn’y unusual for TV figures to have such collections. Rod Srerling had a collection, and so did the horror host Zacherley. I suspect none of them lent anything to the collectionbut their names (Serling might have, though – he was a literary type). Heck, even comic books did this – Gold Key used to have Boris Karloff’s Tales of Mystery (Probably influenced by a TV show of a different name that he hosted).
That story was adapted for the TV series and was remade when the series was revived a couple of decades ago.
I remember checking these out of the library too as a kid. Got a bunch of them one summer for a three-week RV trip we took out West. Gotta agree that they were pretty hit-and-miss storywise. I don’t recall the details of any of the stories, with one exception, about an attack dog who was trained to be affectionate at the command “kill!” and to kill at the command “kiss!”
You’re right.
I have one called “No Harm Undone”, read it many times in my teen years.
I own one called Don’t Look a Gift Shark in the Mouth. It contains two of my favorite kinds of shorts - those with the punch line in the very last line.
One is rather hokily named - Island of Terror - but the last line is genuinely chilling in context. And, even though he knew he mustn’t, he turned, slowly. And looked.The other is named Treasure Trove. And the last line, in context, is even more chilling."Thirty pieces of silver. Thirty pieces of silver."And another called Getting Rid of George that makes you want to laugh and throw up at the same time.
Regards,
Shodan