Bloodhound Detective Story Magazine

I think I might have mentioned this publication in passing before, when I featured a cover from the US detective magazine Manhunt.  Because Bloodhound was a UK reprint of Manhunt, featuring stories (and covers) from around 1953-54.  It didn't, however, reprint complete issues, instead featuring a selection of stories from the US original each month.  These sorts of reprint magazines were very common in the UK in the fifties and sixties, their origins lying in the immediate post-war era, when direct imports of US magazines and comics were blocked, so as to protect the UK publishing and printing industries, which were struggling to recover from World War Two.  But while the import of complete magazines might have been banned, the reprinting, on British presses, of them wasn't.  The format of these reprint magazines varied with some pretending to be original publications - like Bloodhound - while others presented themselves as 'UK editions' of the US originals, usually replicating complete issues, minus the ads and letters pages.

Various anomalies occurred as a result of these reprints - sometimes a UK edition might use the title of one US publication, but its contents would be drawn not just from its namesake, but also its US stablemates, for instance.  This would sometimes entail the use of covers from one US title bearing the title of a sister magazine in the UK, used to illustrate different stories.  One of the most interesting cases was the UK edition of Science Fiction Adventures, put out as a stablemate to UK sf titles New Worlds and Science Fantasy.  It outlasted its US progenitor, continuing to put out issues long after the original had folded, commissioning original stories one the supply of reprints had dried up.  For its part, Bloodhound lasted for fourteen issues between May 1961 and July 1962.  The above cover is from the second edition, dated June 1961. (The cover had previously seen service not just on the original US magazine, but had also been used during the 1953-54 UK reprint run of Manhunt, which had reprinted the first thirteen issues of the original, in order, but about six months behind the US publication schedule.  It seems that Bloodhound recycled the contents and some of the covers of these reprints).