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Title: Coffin Corner
Series:
----------
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating:
3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Crime Fiction
Pages:
176
Words: 71K
Publish: 1968
As I anticipated, smaller doses worked so much better for me. Unlike the bloated corpse of The Best of Mystery, Coffin Corner was a sleek little svelte book that lured me into the back room, then knocked me over the head with a kosh and stole my wallet. That’s a how a good Alfred Hitchcock Presents book should be.
Doesn’t mean it was all koshes and handcuffs though. There was an August Derleth story, and what’s worse, it was a REPEAT! *gasp!!! The only thing worse than a Solar Pons story is a Solar Pons story that I’ve already read and suffered through. Thankfully, once I realized it was a repeat, I just skipped ahead to the next story in the collection. But imagine, the horror of having to experience more Solar Pons? The mind just boggles. At that point, I was almost ready to ask Little Miss Coffin Corner to forego the kosh and just shoot me dead. Nothing is worth a Solar Pons story. Death is preferrable.
Thankfully, other than that, there were no repeats.
The Last Gourmand by Donald Honig was one of those great stories where nobody gets what they wanted out of a crime. Some guy recovers $5,000 (about $55K now) from a stiff who did a robbery. Only his name gets in the news and the mob captures him and tortures him to get it back. He “makes up” some story about stashing it in an old abandoned house. They don’t find it and kill him. Years later two petty crooks figured he must have really hid it well and figure they’ll tear the house apart to find the money. Turns out all those years ago some retarded crook had followed the original guy and found the money. Only he got stuck in a room with the money and because he was retarded, couldn’t figure out how to get out of the room. So he dies. BUT, he eats the money as he’s dying because he’s hungry. So our two crooks get nothing. Everybody loses! When I’m in the right mood, that kind of story feels real good, like when you were a kid and got the chicken pox and you scratched even though you weren’t supposed to.
The ending story was perfect, as it was one of those “the bad guy gets his just desserts” kind of stories. Blood Kin by Richard Deming was about two brothers and how the one son kills his father for his money. Once he runs through that, he prepares to take out his uncle, who is a chemist. Needless to say, the uncle knows, but can’t prove, that the nephew killed his father and that he’s next. But instead of whining to the police and running away like a ballless coward, he devises a plan whereby the nephew “could” knock him off, but adds a little chemistry to the mix and lets the nephew kill himself. Oh, it was glorious. The best part was that if the nephew hadn’t tried to kill his uncle, he would have been perfectly safe. He reaped the consequences of his own evil and it destroyed him. I love stories like that.
There were 14 stories here and that seems to be just about the right amount. Some are good, some are bad (I’m looking at you August Derleth!) and some are just great.
★★★✬☆
Blurb & Table of Contents:
A is for the arsenic he’s fond of.
L is for his lethal taste in tales.
F is for the fiends who are his best friends.
I is for the icepicks that they use.
E is for the extra-special pleasure he takes in every slaying that’s well done.
Put them all together they spell
ALFIE,
The man who says that murder can be fun.
Here are Alfie’s latest and best, in a gathering guaranteed to make a death’s-head grin:
A WALK ON THE MOUNTAIN
Richard Hardwick
A TIME FOR RIFLES
H. A. De Rosso
THE LAST GOURMAND
Donald Honig
SUDDEN, SUDDEN DEATH
Talmage Powell
CIRCLE IN THE DUST
Arthur Porges
JOSHUA
William Brittain
THE AMATEUR PHILOLOGIST
August Derleth
THIEVES’ HONOR
John Lutz
THE FINAL CHAPTER
Richard O. Lewis
THE HELPFUL HORTICULTURIST
Mary Linn Roby
DEAD OAK IN A DARK WOODS
Hal Ellson
A RECIPE FOR EGGS
Frank Sisk
NOT THE KILLER TYPE
John Arre
BLOOD KIN
Richard Deming
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