ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:¹
Fred Smith, Once There Was A Magazine— p. 40-41 (Beccon Publications)
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, p. 136-8 The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991)

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Editor, John W. Campbell Jr.; Assistant Editor, Kay Tarrant

Fiction:
The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag • novella by Robert A. Heinlein [as by John Riverside] ∗∗∗+
The Frog • short story by P. Schuyler Miller ∗
Magician’s Dinner • novelette by Jane Rice ∗∗∗
Letter to an Invisible Woman • short story by Hannes Bok ∗∗
Are You Run-Down, Tired— • short story by Babette Rosmond and Leonard M. Lake [as by Babette Rosmond Lake] ∗
The New One • short story by Fredric Brown ∗∗∗+
The Lie • short story by Richard Louis
The Goddess’ Legacy • short story by Malcolm Jameson ∗∗∗+
Compliments of the Author • novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Henry Kuttner] ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Frank Kramer (x10), Kolliker (x3), Smith (x4), M. Isip (x2), Orban (x7)
Of Things Beyond • editorial
Poetry • by Ruth Stewart Schenley, Arte Harbison, Marvin Miller
—And Having Writ— • letters

____________________

This issue leads off with one of the 1943 Retro Hugo novella finalists, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag by Robert A. Heinlein (run under the ‘John Riverside’ pseudonym for some reason). This long weird tale starts with Hoag at the doctors, where he is trying to find out the nature of a reddish substance found under his nails. Doctor Potbury tells him it isn’t blood but refuses to offer Hoag any more information, and brusquely tells him to get out. Once Hoag is outside he suffers several other unpleasant encounters with various people, and eventually seeks sanctuary at an anonymous hotel. Once in his room he realises that he can’t remember what he does for a living. Hoag leaves the hotel that morning to go home, but does not arrive until six in the evening. As he washes even more of the red substance from under his nails, he realises he cannot remember what he has been doing during the day.
Hoag then goes to see a hard-boiled husband and wife detective team, (Teddy) Randall & (Cynthia) Craig:

Randall helped him off with his coat, assuring himself in the process that Mr. Hoag was not armed, or—if he was—he had found somewhere other than shoulder or hip to carry a gun. Randall was not suspicious, but he was pragmatically pessimistic.  p. 14

Randall interviews Hoag, who recounts his missing days, a previous stay in a rest home, incurable amnesia, etc. Hoag tells Randall he wants to be watched continuously during the day, so that Randall can report back on what he does during his blackouts. Randall feigns reluctance but agrees when a large fee is offered. After Hoag leaves them, the couple find that he has managed to avoid leaving any fingerprints where he sat, or on the glass he handled, and they find that the hospital he told them about does not exist.
The next day Randall tails Mr Hoag to a tower block, and Cynthia tails them both. During this Cynthia sees Hoag speak to Randall before they enter a tower block.
When Randall reports back later to Cynthia, he tells her that he tailed Hoag to a jewellers on the thirteenth floor, saw him at work there, and that the red substance is jewellers’ rouge. When Cynthia asks Randall about the conversation outside the tower block, he tells her he remembers nothing of the sort. When the couple decide to investigate Hoag’s place of work, they find the tower block has no 13^th floor (only a 12^th and 14^th), and that there is no jewellers business in the building. Disturbed, they decide to give up the case but, before they can do so, Hoag visits them at home that night. He tells them about the garlic he wears to ward off an unknown and indescribable presence, and that he thinks he is being watched from mirrors.

That night Randall has a waking dream where a man in the bedroom mirror summons him to a board meeting on the 13^th floor of the tower block the couple visited earlier that day. After he is introduced to the men at the table, their Chairman tells him about “The Bird” and “The Sons of the Bird”:

“In the Beginning,” Stoles stated, “there was the Bird.” He suddenly covered his face with his hands; all the others gathered around the table did likewise.
The Bird—Randall felt a sudden vision of what those two simple words meant when mouthed by this repulsive fat man; no soft and downy chick, but a bird of prey, strong-winged and rapacious—unwinking eyes, whey-colored and staring—purple wattles—but most especially he saw its feet, bird feet, covered with yellow scales, fleshless and taloned and foul from use. Obscene and terrible—
Stoles uncovered his face. “The Bird was alone. Its great wings beat the empty depths of space where there was none to see. But deep within It was the Power and the Power was Life. It looked to the north when there was no north; It looked to the south when there was no south; east and west It looked, and up and down. Then out of the nothingness and out of Its Will It wove the nest.
“The nest was broad and deep and strong. In the nest It laid one hundred eggs. It stayed on the nest and brooded the eggs, thinking Its thoughts, for ten thousand thousand years. When the time was ripe It left the nest and hung it about with lights that the fledglings might see. It watched and waited.
“From each of the hundred eggs a hundred Sons of the Bird were hatched—ten thousand strong. Yet so wide and deep was the nest there was room and to spare for each of them—a kingdom apiece and each was a king—king over the things that creep and crawl and swim and fly and go on all fours, things that had been born from the crevices of the nest, out of the warmth and the waiting.
“Wise and cruel was the Bird, and wise and cruel were the Sons of the Bird. For twice ten thousand thousand years they fought and ruled and the Bird was pleased. Then there were some who decided that they were as wise and strong as the Bird Itself. Out of the stuff of the nest they created creatures like unto themselves and breathed in their nostrils, that they might have sons to serve them and fight for them. But the sons of the Sons were not wise and strong and cruel, but weak and soft and stupid. The Bird was not pleased.
“Down It cast Its Own Sons and let them be chained by the softly stupid— Stop fidgeting, Mr. Randall! I know this is difficult for your little mind, but for once you really must think about something longer than your nose and wider than your mouth, believe me!
“The stupid and the weak could not hold the Sons of the Bird; therefore, the Bird placed among them, here and there, others more powerful, more cruel, and more shrewd, who by craft and cruelty and deceit could circumvent the attempts of the Sons to break free. Then the Bird sat back, well content, and waited for the game to play itself out.
“The game is being played. Therefore, we cannot permit you to interfere with your client, nor to assist him in any way. You see that, don’t you?”
“I don’t see,” shouted Randall, suddenly able to speak, “a damn thing! To hell with the bunch of you! This joke has gone far enough.”  p. 24

The Sons of the Bird then show him Cynthia in a mirror and warn him to leave Hoag alone.
Randall wakes up the next morning thinking the episode was a nightmare, and suggests to Cynthia that they both go with Hoag to his work.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the various plot interactions of Hoag, Randall & Cynthia, and The Sons of the Bird, both in and out of the mirror world.
The climax comes when (spoiler) Hoag is eventually dosed up on scopalimine by the couple so that they can question him. At this point a different personality emerges. He writes a list of things he wants the couple to get for him, and tells them to meet him at a certain place. When they later rendezvous, Hoag explains to the couple that, essentially, their reality is an art work and he is an art critic sent to assess it. He also tells them that The Sons of the Bird are revenants from an earlier version of the work, and they are to be eliminated. Hoag leaves, but not before telling the pair to drive South. They are not to stop: reality will be undergoing a transformation:

A few blocks later Randall saw a patrolman standing on the sidewalk, warming himself in the sun, and watching some boys playing sand-lot football. He pulled up to the curb beside him. “Run down the window, Cyn.”
She complied, then gave a sharp intake of breath and swallowed a scream. He did not scream, but he wanted to.
Outside the open window was no sunlight, no cops, no kids—nothing. Nothing but a gray and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life. They could see nothing of the city through it, not because it was too dense but because it was—empty. No sound came out of it; no movement showed in it.
It merged with the frame of the window and began to drift inside. Randall shouted, “Roll up the window!” She tried to obey, but her hands were nerveless; he reached across her and cranked it up himself, jamming it hard into its seat.
The sunny scene was restored; through the glass they saw the patrolman, the boisterous game, the sidewalk, and the city beyond. Cynthia put a hand on his arm. “Drive on, Teddy!”
“Wait a minute,” he said tensely, and turned to the window beside him. Very cautiously he rolled it down—just a crack, less than an inch. It was enough. The formless gray flux was out there, too; through the glass the city traffic and sunny street were plain, through the opening—nothing.  p. 58

I found this reality altering finale quite sophisticated (for the time) but I realise that, for some readers,² this may turn the entire piece into a huge shaggy dog story.
An intriguing and readable tale, if an occasionally uneven one.

The Frog by P. Schuyler Miller gets off to an interestingly discursive start with a passage about precocious children, which leads on to the machinations of a wizard’s apprentice, a nasty piece of work called Shagsu. A large part of this story involves him mistreating and generally torturing a frog god required by his master. At the end (spoiler) the biter is bit.

Magician’s Dinner by Jane Rice starts off in her usual lively style:

I have just this minute finished reading an article entitled, “How to Stay Happily Married.” The authoress, though I strongly suspect there should be an “a” before those two “s’s” instead of an “e,” says plain, right out that the reason she has stayed happily married for umteen years is a simple one. She has, forsooth, never had any secrets from her husband.
Before I get into this any deeper I would like to bet any and all takers a case of Scotch against a bottle of sarsaparilla that he isn’t happily married. She may trot about humming merrily and being the essence of sweetness and light but I’ll wager he gets a three-inch layer of goose bumps every time he closes the garage doors and starts his trek to the back porch, thinking as he stumbles along—head sunk on his chest—“Oh, Lordy, what is she going to tell me now?”  p. 65

The story is about Clare, who is organising a dinner for her and her stage-magician husband’s friends. When she faces insurmountable problems Little Allie, a long dead family cook from her childhood, materialises and takes over. Matters proceed in a relatively ordered way until Clare realises that all the requirements for the dinner come from the past:

I leveled an agitated forefinger at the punch bowl. “That,” I squawked, “is the punch bowl my mother used to borrow from my aunt Lena when we had the family reunions.”
“Yes’m.”
“And ten years ago my cousin Robin tipped it over and broke it.”
“Yes’m.”
“Into a thousand pieces.”
“Yes’m.”
“What, in the name of Heaven, is it doing HERE?”
“There wasn’t nothing else big enough.”
“But it was broken and swept up and thrown in the ash can!”
“Yes’m.”
“But it couldn’t be here.”
“No’m.”
“But it is.”
“Yes’m.”
“How . . . how did you . . . did you get it?”
“ I materialized it.”
“I don’t foll— Wait, you mean you said, ‘Abracadabra,’ and it . . . it appeared?”
“No’m. I didn’t say nothing. I just materialized it.”
“Out of thin air!”
“No’m.”
“Out of what?”
“Out of what it was.”
“What was it?”
“Your aunt Lena’s punch bowl.”
“But how, Little Allie? Where?”
“Where? You mean where was it to materialize?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not much account at explaining things, Miss Clare.”
“Try.”
“It’s like this, Miss Clare.” Little Allie drew her brows together in profound concentration. “If something was, it can’t ever not have been, could it?”
“No.”
“And if it can’t ever not have been then it has got to have been a something that was a is once, ain’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And once it has been a is it can’t ever not have been a not be, can it?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s all.”
“But it was broken.”
“Yes’m.”
“But once it was broken, don’t you see, it became a was.”
“Yes’m.”
“Then how—”
“Miss Clare,” Little Allie interrupted, sighing at my lack of intelligence, “to be a was it has to be a is first—there’s no getting around it—and if it was a is no matter if it is a was it is a is where it was and it always will be a is even when it is a was as long as this here punch bowl of your aunt Lena’s has been a is that was.” She halted triumphantly. “I reckon that’s clear, ain’t it?”  p. 73-74

Initially, the dinner is a success, but matters spiral out of control when one of the guests suggests a séance. She is unaware that Little Allie the cook has also assembled, for advice on the visiting guests’ dining preferences, the spirits of their various dead cooks and servants . . . .
Structurally, and in terms of suspension of belief, some of this is slightly shaky (the ghost of Little Allie just turns up out of the blue, for instance), but there are compensating factors. Apart from Rice’s lively style, there is the word play above as well some amusing observation:

The wives continued to arrive and soon the house rang with that peculiar sonance that arises whenever two or more women are gathered together. Like a Chinese talkie run backward, or a group of delirious linguists speaking phonetics from which all the vowels have been painstakingly deleted, or a flock of extremely nervous poultry.
I’m not poking fun at my sex and don’t think it for a minute. We can’t help our group noises any more than men can help theirs and they have a brilliance of tone that is unequaled, except by a bunch of hungry grizzly bears mulling over the badly battered carcass of a mountain goat.  p. 72

Finally, there is an effectively creepy last scene where, during the séance, Clare is transported to the land of the dead:

I can’t describe it. It was like the hush before a dawn. Or the queer, deep, pervading quietness that makes oneself seem the very heart and core of one of those slow, heavy snowstorms that leave the shrubs puffy and white and the tree boughs bent with their cottony burdens and the whole world breathless with spent strength. It was a silence that could be tasted, thick on the tongue as clotted cream. A silence, one felt, that could be fingered like the rich pile of velvet or closed to like Stygian portieres weighted with dust and forgotten yesterdays and the musty smell of dead wood fires. A smothering, stilled silence. The silence of shrouds and tombs and the silence of earth. The earth of grass roots and blind worms. It grew and it grew and it grew like some gigantic black tulip or a pressure gauge going up and up and up[.]³  p. 77

An uneven piece, but one with some impressive parts.

Letter to an Invisible Woman by Hannes Bok is a vignette, in the form of a short letter, about a man falling for a woman who can slow down time (and give the impression that she has disappeared, etc.). It is an okay, if slight and undeveloped piece: I’m a little surprised that Campbell didn’t ask Bok to turn it into a longer story.
After this début piece there is a short teaser for Bok’s novel in the next issue, The Sorcerer’s Ship.

Are You Run-Down, Tired— by Babette Rosmond and Leonard M. Lake concerns a man who finds a wizard who dispenses vitamins and not magical cures. The man later develops a vastly improved physique and stamina, can see in the dark, etc. The one drawback is that his appetite for food substantially increases, which becomes a problem for his new girlfriend at the office. . . . This has (spoiler) a grisly and nonsensical end.

The New One by Fredric Brown starts off with a well done data dump that sets up the story’s premise about how human thought creates mythical beings, as explained by a fire elemental parent to his child:

“But what, papa, if [humans] conceive of a new mythological being? Would he come into existence down here?”
“Of course, kid. That’s how we all got here, one time or another. Why, look at poltergeists, for instance. They’re newcomers. And all this ectoplasm you see floating around and getting in the way, that’s new. And—well, like this big guy Paul Bunyan; he’s only been around here a century or so; he isn’t much older than you are. And lots of others. Of course, they have to get invoked before they show up, but that always gets done sooner or later.”
“Gosh, thanks, papa. I understand you a lot better than I did Ashtaroth. He uses big words like transmogrification and superactualization and what not.”
“O. K., kid, now run along and play. But don’t bring any of those darn water elemental kids back with you. The place gets so full of steam I can’t see.”  p. 87

The rest of the story is about Wally Smith, a man who has struggled with pyromania throughout his life. The reason for his compulsion is supernatural of course—fire elementals from the realm of thought exert influence over him at key moments, and have big plans for him later in his life. Wally has, for the moment, his compulsion under control:

He’d seen a movie newsreel that showed the new flame throwers. If he could get one of those things to operate—
But that desire was subconscious; he didn’t know that it was a big part of the reason he wanted to get into uniform. That was in the fall of ’41 and we weren’t in the war yet. Later, after December, it was still part of the reason he wanted to get in, but not the major part. Wally Smith was a good American; that was even more important than being a good pyromaniac.
Anyway, he’d licked the pyromania. Or thought he had. If it was there, it was buried down deep where most of the time he could avoid thinking about it, and there was a “Thus Far, No Farther” sign across one passage of his mind.
That yen for a flame thrower worried him a bit. Then came Pearl Harbor and Wally Smith had it out with himself to discover whether it was all patriotism that made him want to kill Japs, or whether that yen for a flame thrower figured at all.
And while he mulled it over, things got hotter in the Philippines and the Japs moved down Malaya to Singapore, and there were U-boats off both coasts and it began to look as though his country needed him. And there was a fighting anger in him that told him the hell with whether or not it was pyromania—it was patriotism even more, and he’d worry about the psychiatry of it later.  p. 88

Wally eventually ends up working in a war munitions factory that manufactures TNT (telegraphed earlier in the fire elementals’ conversations about him). Later, he has an ominous conversation with another worker about what would happen if the factory went on fire, and they speculate about the huge conflagration would spread throughout the surrounding area. Shortly after this conversation Wally literally struggles with his demons. Although he tries to resist, Davreth the fire demon exerts control over him, and an attempt at fire setting is described in an effective passage narrated in the second person:

Here it comes. The match was in his hand; his hand was striking the match. The Same. As the first flame he had ever seen, dancing on the end of a match in his father’s hand. While Wally’s stubby little fingers, all those years ago, had reached out for the thing on the end of the stick. The thing that flared there, ever-shapechanging; yellow-red-blue wonder, magic beauty.
The flame.
Wait until the stick has caught fire, too, wait until it’s well ablaze, so stooping down won’t blow it out. A flame’s a tender thing, at first. “No!” cried another part of his mind. “Don’t! Wally, don’t—”
But you can’t stop now, Wally, you can’t “don’t” because Darveth, the fire demon, is in the driver’s seat. He’s stronger than you are, Wally; he’s stronger than any of the others in that nightmare world you’re looking into. Yell for help, Wally, it won’t do you any good.
Yell to any of them. Yell to old Moloch; he won’t listen to you. He’s going to enjoy this, too. Most of them are. Not all. Thor’s standing to one side, not particularly happy about what’s going to happen because he’s a fighting man, but he isn’t big enough to tangle with Darveth. None of them are, over there.
Fire’s king, and all the fire elementals are dancing a dervish dance. Others watching. There’s white-bearded Zeus and someone with a head like a crocodile standing beside him. And Dagon riding Scylla—all the creatures men have conceived, and conceiving—
But none of them will help you, Wally. You’re on your own.  p. 95

Needless to say (spoiler) Wally manages to save the day by mentally yelling for help, and conjuring up a mythical being who arrives to rout the fire elementals. That deity is, of course, Uncle Sam.
This last part is a bit corny, to be honest, but it’s a pretty good read otherwise.

The Lie by Richard Louis is about a man making a deathbed confession to incriminate an innocent man. The last line is a tacked on one that makes no sense, and the whole thing reads like a Probability Zero piece for Unknown.

If there are passing references to the war in other stories (such as Frederic Brown’s), it is front and centre in The Goddess’ Legacy by Malcolm Jameson. This starts in wartime Greece with the narrator observing a Greek waiter paying a bribe to a Gestapo officer:

The part played by Herr Scheer in the furtive transaction was no mystery at all. He was simply a murderous, blood-sucking leech of the type all too frequent in Europe these days. I had known him for some time as the traveling representative of an optical house in Berlin and as such had often had business dealings with him. But with the coming of the troops of the occupation forces he promptly dropped the mask and showed himself in his true colors. Anton Scheer had been the advance man of the dreaded Gestapo. It was from his long-prepared secret lists that hundreds of victims for arrest and spoliation were selected, and from those same lists that the few Hellenic Quislings were appointed to puppet administrative posts. Now that he was the resident chief of Hitler’s secret operatives, his cruelty and rapacity knew no bounds. It was also common knowledge that his zeal for his beloved Fuehrer and Fatherland was not untinged by keen self-interest. In other words, Herr Scheer could be “had.” Enough money, discreetly conveyed, would unlock the tightest prison gates.  p. 100-101

The narrator knows the waiter, called Mike of the Acropolis, from his moonlit visits to those same ruins, and the story goes on to detail Mike’s interaction with the corrupt Nazi and Italian occupiers. These latter subsequently (spoiler) fall foul of his Mike’s Goddess, Pallas, and a well-known mythological monster.
This smoothly written story demonstrates an intimate knowledge of Greek mythology and also chillingly illustrates the realities of Axis occupation (a bleaker view than I expected). Given these attributes I’m surprised this one didn’t appear in the slicks.

Compliments of the Author by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore has a shake-down artist called Tarbell accidentally killing a magician, thereby coming into possession of a special book that gives the owner ten ‘lives’, or warnings of imminent peril. The magician’s familiar, a cat, tells Tarbell he will need them as it is going to kill him.
Between this novel setup and a good last line Tarbell uses up his lives in a number of stock pulp situations: there are scenes in a newspaper office, a high stakes card game, and a stockbroker’s office. The one non-standard scene is where Tarbell goes through a door and finds himself in a surreal landscape with three demons.
This is entertaining if fairly standard pulp fare.

There is a huge amount of Interior artwork in this issue, probably the most I’ve seen in any of the issues of Unknown I’ve looked at so far. All of it, bar a two-page piece by Orban for the Kuttner/Moore novelette is spot, quarter, or half page work. None of it is bad but none particularly grabbed me either. I note in passing that the Jameson story has a spoiler illustration—makes a change from spoiler blurbs I guess.⁴
Of Things Beyond, Campbell’s editorial, begins by talking about the sciences and shortly afterwards the “nonsciences”. There is then a section on hypnotism before it ends with this:

Telepathy exists. There are too many of those accidental, freak occurrences, plus the studied, mathematical evidence of scientific experimenters, to make it possible to doubt. Meteor falls were reported for centuries before science would admit that meteors existed, and did fall. No one who saw a meteor fall could point to a falling meteor and say, “There, that is what I saw.” But when tens of hundreds of reports come in—something real lies behind them.
Clairvoyance exists—and has been reported too frequently for doubt.
It seems fairly probable that levitation is possible. What gravity is, we don’t know—only that an indefinable, but tangible and measurable something pulls us downward. There have been a considerable number of reported, detailed instances of controlled levitation, of men who lifted and floated in air, or lifted weights without material Prevision and prophecy has been reported, and checked, a goodly number of times. Some men can, somehow, not controllably and at will, however, see the future.
What other powers lie among the immaterial sciences—no one is even trying very hard to find out!  p. 6

An early sign of years of Campbellian nonsense to come.
There is Poetry by Ruth Stewart Schenley (this one has an affecting finish), Arte Harbison (I didn’t get it), and Marvin Miller. The latter is a gloomy one where the narrator reflects that, if he was sure there was no afterlife, he would kill himself. I think we can take it from this that Marv wasn’t a party animal.
—And Having Writ— has a couple of positive mentions of Boucher’s The Compleat Werewolf (another of the 1943 Retro Hugo finalists) and a complaint about a story called Census Taker (by Frank Belknap Long in the April issue) that is missing from the contents page. Campbell replies, “We forgot to make sure the census of stories checked the contents page.”
Finally there are number of ‘wartime’ advertisements, but these are just an excuse for companies to flog the stuff they sell:

Quite a good issue.  ●

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1. Fred Smith’s review of this issue, in Once There Was A Magazine— (Beccon Publications), states that The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag is “not quite peak Heinlein” but “is a page-turner full of rather startling ideas”. He adds that the “original plot [. . .] would not be susceptible to close scrutiny!” Of the novelettes he thought the Kuttner was the better, finding the Rice “strictly lightweight”, but admits that the latter is “a nice contrast to some of the more grisly stuff!” He thought that Brown’s short story was the best of that group, finding the rest “fairly minor”, before adding that Jameson’s piece is “slightly more substantial”.
Smith has this comment to make on the pseudonym used for the Heinlein piece:

Robert A Heinlein at this time used the pseudonym ‘Anson MacDonald’ when writing science fiction which did not fit into his planned ‘future history’ and it was slightly surprising, therefore, that he used his own name for his first Unknown pieces. It was even more surprising then that his second novel for the magazine should have been published under the byline ‘John Riverside’ considering how popular he had become and what a ‘draw’ his given name would be.  p. 40

Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, in The Annotated Guide to Unknown & Unknown Worlds (Starmont, 1991), says of the Heinlein piece, “Although there are several paper tigers running through the story—e.g. seemingly important clues turn out not to be not so important by the end—and although Hoag’s realization dawns on him a little too abruptly for it not to seem merely convenient, the story has impressive philosophical underpinnings.” Of the others, the Frederic Brown piece is the only one he really seems to rate: “One of the few witty war stories to appear in the magazine that wasn’t rendered obsolete with the armistice.” I presume he means “surrender”. He seems to have also liked the Rice: “Touching and amusing, though one has to appreciate Rice’s talent for spinning a fantasy story out of almost nothing fantastic.” Of the others, the Miller has “an unremarkable idea”, the Bok is “forced”, and the Jameson is “very formulaic”.
Dziemianowicz gives the length of Hoag as 40,000 words (and my OCR gives 40,300, so it is probably only just a novel).
I also learned from his review that Babette Rosmond “became editor of Doc Savage in 1944 and The Shadow in 1946.”

2. When I originally read The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag millions of years ago I noted that “the nature of reality part at the end doesn’t work as well as the [rest].” The other thing that I noticed from those old scribblings is how little of Heinlein I’ve read: half a dozen novels and about a collection’s worth of short stories. I think giving up half way through Stranger in a Strange Land put me off him.

3. This passage from Rice’s story finishes with the line “and I thought wildly, “This is how it feels in a dive bomber.” See what I mean by uneven?

4. The cover image above is a colour-shifted and manipulated version of the December copy (after changing and filling in the background texture I copied and pasted the text and date). I did this as there are no decent images on the internet. If anyone can provide a decent scan of a very good or fine issue, front and back, I’d appreciate it (uncompressed tiff format image, 300 dpi, no preprocessing by the scanner, and lean on the issue so it is perfectly flat, thanks).  ●