An Obscure Credit of Mine

You never know what you're going to find when you go poking around the Fictionmags Index. In 1979 I sold a story to a men's magazine called DAPPER, never having seen an actual issue and going strictly off their listing in Writer's Market. The acceptance came pretty quickly, as I recall, and was accompanied by a check for a hundred bucks or so, pretty good money for a story I wrote in a day or two. But they didn't send contributor copies and I never knew when or even if the story ever appeared. I checked the newsstands in Fort Worth for a while, hoping to come across it, but no luck and after a while I forgot about it.

But what do you know? The FMI has a listing for the October 1979 issue of DAPPER, and there's my story, "Test Drive", under the pseudonym I used for most of my men's magazine stories, Jay Morris. Not just a listing, either, but a cover scan, too, which you can see here. So after more than 32 years, at least I can see what the issue looks like. How about that? Just don't ask me what the story was about, because I don't remember. It was probably a crime story, but I can't even be sure of that.