Sunday, August 09, 2020

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Top Detective Annual, 1952


That line "The Year's Best Mystery Story Anthology" makes it sound like the stories in this pulp are the best (in the editor's judgment) published in the past year, right? Well, you'd be wrong if you thought that. This is actually just a regular reprint pulp, with stories that go back to 1934 in their original appearances. Most are from various Thrilling Group pulps published during the Forties. But I'm willing to overlook that bit of hyperbole when you get a good Sam Cherry cover, along with writers such as Fredric Brown, William Campbell Gault, Murray Leinster, Stewart Sterling, Wyatt Blassingame, G.T. Fleming-Roberts, Dwight V. Babcock, Ray Cummings, and Joe Archibald. The stories may be reprints, but if you haven't read them before, they're new. And those are some good authors. 

2 comments:

Sean McLachlan said...

I've never read a Ray Cummings mystery, only his fun if rather antiquated science fiction. How was he in that genre?

James Reasoner said...

I don't think I've ever read a Cummings mystery story, at least not that I recall. I've read a couple of his Weird Menace stories and they were okay, not the best in the genre but certainly readable and entertaining.