Spider Kiss Read Free

ends meet. And when you found a new market, you kept it to yourself till you'd become part of the stable that produced the bulk of fiction they needed. And then you told your buddies.
    That was the situation with Crestwood Publishing, the prototypical schlock New York publishing company. There were many little shops like Crestwood during the Fifties. Some of them got the entire contents of their magazines in a package from Scott Meredith's agency, essentially a closed market unless you happened to be represented by Meredith. Others bought "over the transom" and didn't much care about quality. And there were hole-in-the-wall companies like Crestwood, uptown at 1790 Broadway, just before you hit the Park. In the Forties, they'd published comic books.
    How I found out they were starting up a string of fiction pocket-sized magazines, I don't remember. But I went down from West 82nd (between Amsterdam & Columbus) one afternoon, and I met W.W. Scott, and overnight I wrote a fast hardboiled story for him, and Scotty liked it…and I was home free.
    I contributed three, maybe four or five, stories a month to the mystery magazines. Scotty took 'em all. Ran 'em under a plethora of bylines—Jay Charby, Landon Ellis, Cordwainer Bird, Ellis Hart, Jay Solo—and between Bob Silverberg and myself, we could glut the entire table of contents. (Not to mention the other stories I was writing for Crestwood's sf magazine, Super-Science Fiction , and the semi-slick rugged men's adventure magazine they published.)
    It was a bonanza. Bill Scott paid two cents a word, often three cents; and the check was instant. I could stay up all night writing a 7000 word crime novelette, take it in the next morning, Scotty would read it while I waited, and if it was a go he'd get the bookkeeper to cut me my check for a hundred and forty on the spot. And I'd rush home and pay the rent.
    The stories for Guilty and Trapped were straight out of the Manhunt school. (For those born too late to remember Manhunt , it was to hardboiled crime fiction of the Fifties what Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine has been to the more literary aspects of suspense fiction since its inception. It was a tough, utterly unsentimental magazine, in pocket-size, and it paid terrific wages for the time. Everybody wanted to hit Manhunt . Not only because it was a saucy payday, but because they commanded all the headliners—Craig Rice, Mickey Spillane, Evan Hunter, Richard Prather, Hal Ellson. To be found in that company meant you had arrived.) They were usually one-punch stories, gritty and streetwise, very much of the period and loaded with stereotypes. But the Crestwood books were identifiable from all the others, particularly Manhunt , by the derangement of W.W. Scott's penchant for blood-drenched titles.
    "I'll See You in Hell!"
"The Cheap Tramp"
    "Die Now, My Love"
"Kill Them One by One"
    "This Is Your Death"
"Make Me a Widow"
    "Kooch Dancer"
"Naked on the Highway"
    These were the least of Bill Scott's inventions. Silverberg and I would make our trips regularly to the Crestwood offices; and because we lived near each other, we would schlep each other's stories in. If I was working, and Bob was going down to see Scott about something, he'd take my latest novelette. If I had a check to pick up, I'd stop by and grab Bob's latest offering, and deliver it. And we'd always pick up copies of the latest issues of Guilty and Trapped , issues in which appeared the yarns we'd written just six weeks earlier! Improbably, they were already in print.
    And we would marvel at how Scotty had retitled us.
    Since we had written so many stories, and since we didn't know in what order Scott was going to publish them, we would try to figure out which story emblazoned on the cover as "Psycho Killer" was the one we'd titled "Last Dream Before Morning" only six weeks ago.
    But "Horror in the Night" and "Blackmail Girl" were pale offerings. When Bill Scott was at full flower he could warp