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For several years, hiding under a cloak of anonymity, the most penetrating critic of the field of magazine science fiction was known as ‘William Atheling, Jr’. it soon became a challenge to guess his real identity. And that was no easy game, for Atheling’s dissection did not spare even his alter ego, the noted science fiction writer James Blish.

Here, then, is a collection of William Atheling’s critiques of SF magazines covering the period 1952 – 1963. no subject is too sacred or taboo for Atheling’s shredding typewriter: from sex to God, from religion to satirical poetry. No author, however fragile, is spared the bloody mark of his relentless ;ash; from Anderson to Heinlein to Wyndham, and all stops in between.

A vastly entertaining collection in its own right, The Issue at Hand is also a first-class primer for new writer and seasoned professional alike.

James Blish, in his incarnation as ‘William Atheling, Jr’ has written more than his share of the most incisive criticism of contemporary science fiction.

Following on form The Issue at Hand, this new volume of Atheling’s critical writings skewers literary malefactors of many kinds, including some well-known authors whose great popularity is all the more puzzling because there seems to be so little reason for it.

Atheling does not stint on praise where it is due, but in other cases, the sins and errors of the filed are dispatched with his trademark rapier-like incisiveness.

Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.

Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales‘s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.

The third volume, The Dark Angel, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from “The Lost Lady” (1931) to “The Hand of Glory” (1933), as well as “The Devil’s Bride”, the only novel featuring de Grandin, which was originally serialized over six issues of Weird Tales.