I remember grabbing this first issue of a new mystery digest off the magazine rack in Buddies' Grocery Store in 1976 and thinking, "Oh, boy! Another market!" You see, at that time I hadn't yet sold my first story, but I was following the old pulp tradition of keeping multiple manuscripts out in the mail to various markets all the time. I'm sure I sent some of my unsold stories to MYSTERY MONTHLY right away...where, you guessed it, they remained unsold.
But hey, I got stories to read by Ed McBain, Harlan Ellison, Gil Brewer, Edward D. Hoch, and Jack Ritchie, plus a lot of assorted columns and features. I'd say I got my buck's worth. I never sold anything to MYSTERY MONTHLY, but I picked up all the issues I came across during its short life. It only lasted about a year and a half.
4 comments:
I remember buying that one, too. I don't think I picked up more than a couple of issues. Distribution must have been spotty.
I picked them all up at the time. Loved reading those short mystery stories back then. I still have them, along with the complete run of MSMM and many others. A shame there are so few magazines available today.
We must have been living in parallel universes! Yup. Bought my copy thinking, ohboyohboy, a new market. Nope. Okay magazine but closed to newbies so Newbie Me stopped supporting it. I was a MSMM man through and through even before it became a showcase for emerging writers of the 1970s. Now there was a great digest...
I managed to sell them 2 stories before they folded. I thought I had found a fertile market for my work. Ha!
RJR
Post a Comment