At some time during the life of many readers of this column, and quite a while before that for the younger ones, we experienced the death of virtually all fiction magazines.

During much of the first half of the 20th century, the pulps (named for the cheap pulpwood paper on which they were printed) and the slicks (for the corollary shiny paper on which they were produced) combined to produce hundreds of magazines each month, tens of thousands of stories every year.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, John P. Marquand and many others could earn $100,000 a year – in 1930s dollars – just from magazine work. The glossies that published them (Collier’s, Scribners, Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and the rest) were delivered to homes and picked up at railroad stations and newspaper stands. For the less affluent (and, often, less educated), Black Mask, Argosy, the Shadow, Weird Tales, and other pulps filled the racks with garish covers and thrilling, if overheated, prose.

Intellectuals believed the popularity of radio would knell the end of literature, but it didn’t happen. The next nail in the coffin of literacy was identified as movies, made so well and in such numbers that it was assumed they would lure those who loved the printed word away from books and magazines. It still didn’t happen.

What killed the vast majority of fiction magazines was the introduction to American mass culture of the paperback book, inexpensive (25 cents) and convenient. Generically referred to as pocket books, they could fit into a man’s suit pocket or a woman’s, well, pocketbook.

It is into this abyss that Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine decided to leap. The first issue bravely poked its head into the air in December 1956 and, against odds longer than Nathan Lane winning the swimsuit competition in the next Miss America pageant, continues to be published to the present day.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, a huge anthology compiled by the current editor of the magazine, Linda Landrican, has just been published. “Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense” (Pegasus, 542 pages, $16.95) collects 34 of the best tales from the digest-size periodical.

The editor (as well as readers of the magazine, who were polled for their favorite stories),was evenhanded in making selections that would represent the history of the magazine. Hard- and softboiled, noir and whimsical, suspense, crime, and detection are all represented.

Lawrence Block, a frequent contributor, is represented with a splendid Matt Scudder story, “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” which is laced with compassion and insight. In it, a woman who lived on the street leaves a legacy of $1,200 to the baffled former cop. A lawyer hands him the check, and he heads off, as he does most days, to get drunk.

“I made a point of stretching my drinks,” Scudder says,

mixing my bourbon with coffee, making a cup last a while … but that never really works. If you’re going to get drunk you’ll manage it somehow. The obstacles I placed in my path just kept me up later. By two-thirty I’d done what I had set out to do.I’d made my load and went home to sleep it off. I woke … with less of a hangover than I’d earned.

The story ran in 1977, and Scudder continues as a favorite of current mystery readers, as witnessed by last year’s luminescent “All the Flowers Are Dying.”

Even earlier, in 1965, Edward D. Hoch, the most prolific and consistently high-level short story writer of the past half-century, produced one of his famous (and often anthologized) stories for AHMM, “The Long Way Down,” on which an episode of the TV series “McMillan and Wife” was based. In it, a man evidently defenestrates from the 21st floor of a New York office building. When colleagues race down the elevators to the street below, all is normal. He has simply disappeared during the steep drop somewhere between the pavement and the office with its shattered window.

The Sara Paretsky story about V.I. Warshawski ran in AHMM soon after the publication of her first novel, and the story is a good one. Happily, there is also a first-rate story by Evan Hunter and another under his Ed McBain pseudonym. The superb Donald E. Westlake is here, too, and so is a fine tale by the underappreciated Loren D. Estleman.

Inevitably, with this many stories, some – how does one say it? – may not gleam quite as brightly as sunlight on new-fallen snow.

The temptation, impossible to resist for most editors, is to use work by bigname authors, and the excellent Ms. Landrican has succumbed to the siren call. The first story is by the occasionally brilliant Jim Thompson, who, as evidenced by “The Frightening Frammis,” also can be painfully terrible. Here, there are more coincidences than in a full season of “Murder She Wrote,” using language that was becoming dated faster than the ink was drying.

A woman describes her husband as “a double-distilled jerk … scared to death that someone might make a play for me.” This is from 1957, not 1927, sounding like dialogue from one of the lesser pulps.

Being ever curmudgeonly, I also had a moment of frustration with the introduction, in which a story from the first issue of AHMM, “A Bottle of Wine,” is mentioned because it was immediately selected for the classic TV series “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” I thought I’d better read this story first because that’s pretty cool. It’s not in the book. Don’t show the gun in the first act if you’re not going to use it in the second.

Look. Forget those last few paragraphs. They make it seem that I’m looking for something to complain about, which I’m not. It’s a wonderful collection, and ridiculously inexpensive for all those delightful stories.

You could go out and buy a Hitchcock DVD for the same price as this book. Less than two hours versus several satisfying evenings. It should be an easier decision than whether to order the celery tonic or the Puligny-Montrachet.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.