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Title: Bleeding Hearts
Series:
----------
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages:
171
Words: 67K
Publish: 1974
Man, engaging stories here.
We start off with a story, The Plays the Thing, about a thespian who finally has his big chance on Broadway to play Hamlet. But he’s gone off the deep end and kills his leading lady and uses her skull in the scene where Hamlet is talking about “Alas, poor Yorick!”. He left her body in a traveling trunk. What a nutjob eh?
The next story that stood out to me was The Sensitive Juror. By the end it strained credulity, as the entire story was based on the murderer being able to psychically manipulate a woman on each jury to be sympathetic to him. Even without that little reveal at the at, it was obvious where this story was going, as the current narrator (the sensitive juror) relates the murder trial, which we then re-tread by following her down the almost exact same path. It was just creepy.
Then we had another Fat Jow story, Fat Jow and Chance. This wasn’t so much a mystery as just a community coming together to right a wrong that the Law didn’t recognize as a wrong. It decided me on looking into the Fat Jow stories as an entity unto themselves. Which figures, because it turns out that they were only written for the Alfred Hitchcock collections and I couldn’t even find out any info on the author Robert Alan Blair. Makes me wonder if he was a “house author” and some poor schlub just wrote several Fat Jow stories to pad things out. Oh well.
I like when a story totally subverts your expectations, like how M. Night Shyamalan would put twists into his movies. Well, that happens with Motive: Another Woman in a big way. The story starts out describing a marriage that almost fell apart due to the husband’s philandering. He and his wife work things out and he gets back on the straight and narrow, for 5 years. Then he starts going out to the movies every Sunday evening and his wife doesn’t go with him because the crowded theatre gave her headaches. One day she overhears her husband talking about seeing a young Mrs Bennet the other night. The woman realizes her husband has gone back to his philandering ways, so she plans out a home invasion cover story where she “accidentally” kills her husband thinking he is a burglar. Only for the story to end with her seeing the title of the latest movie at the theatre “The Young Mrs Bennett”. And it just ends. We’re left to imagine what the woman is thinking and feeling, realizing her husband was still staying faithful to her and that she had just murdered him.
I think this is going to be my new “format” for these Hitchcock collections. Just talk about 3-4 stories and let that be the review. Unless I am feeling funny and write a post to amuse myself with my trademark wit and wonder ;-)
★★★✬☆
Table of Contents:
Introduction by Alfred Hitchcock
THE PLAY’S THE THING by Robert Bloch
THE EXECUTIONER by H. A. DeRosso
MAN ON A LEASH by Jack Ritchie
THE DEEP SIX (Novelette) by Richard Hardwick
HIDDEN TIGER by Michael Brett
THE SENSITIVE JUROR by Richard Deming
FAT JOW AND CHANCE by Robert Alan Blair
SLAY THE WICKED (Novelette) by Frank Sisk
INTO THE MORGUE by Hal Ellson
I’LL BE LOVING YOU by Fletcher Flora
MOTIVE: ANOTHER WOMAN by Donald Honig
THE BROTHERHOOD by Theodore Mathieson
THE FINAL REEL by John Lutz
CHIMPS AIN’T CHAMPS by Talmage Powell
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