Comic Cuts — 22 November 2024
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Saturday, December 01, 2012
Charles E. Fritch, RIP
I heard the sad news today that writer and editor Charles E. Fritch passed away back in October. His obituary is here. Chuck was the assistant editor at MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE when Sam Merwin Jr. was the editor and I assume during Larry Shaw's one or two issue tenure as editor as well, then took over the magazine and ran it for the remaining four or five years of its existence. He was the editor who asked me to write all the Mike Shayne stories, which I did for about two and a half years. That was my first regular writing job, and coming up with that 20,000 words month in and month out was great training for me. Chuck was a movie lover and had an oddball sense of humor, and both of those things showed up in his editing of MSMM. He was also a fine writer himself in the mystery and science fiction fields, although he was never very prolific. After the magazine folded we were out of touch for quite a while, but in recent years we traded the occasional emails. He was a good man and a top-notch pro, and I'm sorry he's gone. Rest in peace, Chuck.
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Sorry, James. In my brief dealing with him (helping some actor friends find him to ask permission to do dramatic readings of one of his stories), he was utterly pleasant, and he was also, of course, editor of GAMMA, the sf and fantasy magazine that might be best remembered for first publishing Patricia Highsmith's "The Snail Watcher," which isn't sf or fantasy...GAMMA's announced companion crime-fiction magazine, CHASE, which Fritch was set to edit, never appeared from Jack Matcha's publishing house, which collapsed shortly after the announcement, but was issued briefly by Health Knowledge, with Robert A. W. Lowndes editing, as he already did for MAGAZINE OF HORROR and other HK fiction magazines...
Sad. I corresponded with him briefly, and he seemed to enjoy my fan letters back then as they always appeared in the back of MSMM. Cylvia Margulies was also a real treat to correspond with. I never did complete the Mike Shayne authorship, but I was very close.
Apparently a great many of us of a certain age crossed paths in MSMM while Charles E. Fritch was editor. Some of my earliest successes writing short mystery fiction came thanks to Fritch and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine: he published four of my first seven mystery short stories.
Buying the issues of Gamma new on the stands was the first time Fritch's name stood out for me, although I had read several of his stories. Came across those issues of Gamma and admired them again.
I picked up his Powell paperback collection CRAZY MIXED-UP PLANET and reading them in a bunch carried home to me what a bite Fritch stories often carried. I don't recall ever seeing his other Powell volume HORSE'S ASTEROID, which sounds like a punchline to a SF joke.
I sold him a few stories at Mike Shayne and our dealings were pleasant. RIP
Although I only sold him a couple of stories when he was at the helm of MSMM, I've always held Chuck in the highest regard. He was the first editor who ever rejected me with constructive, encouraging personal notes but beyond that, and giving so many of us (then) new writers a widely read market (Reasoner, Lansdale & Mertz would be only the start of a very long list), he should be remembered for keeping alive the last of the true pulp magazines. I know, I know, it was a digest but from the continuing character stories of Shayne in each issue to the babes-with-guns covers to the quality of the writers he published. for this 19702 newbie MSMM was a jolt of vivid (if lurid) fun in a mystery magazine field compared to the staid, far more respectable (and oh so boring) pages of AHMM and EQMM. Thank you, Chuck. RIP.
--Stephen Mertz
Sad news, and I offer my sympathies to those who knew him.
Looking back on it now, and given MSMM's relatively low circulation (although it was still two or three times what EQMM and AHMM sell now), Chuck was a surprisingly important player in the mystery short fiction market in the Eighties. He published writers who went on to become big names in the horror genre (Richard Laymon and Dennis Etchison), he got John Ball to do a book review column, he even established a letter column (although I wasn't too happy about that when a reader griped about one of my Shayne stories). In short, he gave MSMM a distinctive personality, and he did it under far from favorable conditions.
It's nice to see that my Dad's work on Mike Shayne, Gamma, etc. was appreciated by you all. Writing was his love and passion, and I'm delighted that his body of work will continue to live on after him.
My Dad was especially proud that one of his short stories, "The Misfortune Cookie", was adapted to the small screen and used for an episode of the "Twilight Zone" reboot in the mid 1980s (which you can find on YouTube).
Thank you all for your kind words and condolences. :o)
~Mike a.k.a. "son of a Fritch"
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