Anthony Boucher

• Born: August 21, 1911
• Birthplace: Oakland, California
• Died: April 29, 1968
• Place of death: Berkeley, California

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator; police procedural

Principal Series: Fergus O’Breen, 1939-1942; Sister Ursula, 1940-1942

Contribution

Anthony Boucher entered the field of mystery and detective fiction in 1937, just as the Golden Age of that genre was drawing to a close. The five novels he published under the Boucher pseudonym and two others under the name H. H. Holmes were typical of one branch of the field at the time: intellectually frothy entertainments offering several hours of pleasant diversion. Boucher’s plots were clever murder puzzles that could be solved by a moderately intelligent reader from the abundant clues scattered generously throughout the narrative. The murders were antiseptic affairs usually solved in the end by an engaging deductionist. The characters (or suspects) were often intriguing but always only superficially developed. The settings were potentially interesting but somehow unconvincing. Boucher was, however, one of the first writers to bring a high degree of erudition and literary craftsmanship to the field of popular mystery and detective fiction.

Boucher was much more important to the field as a critic and as an editor than as a writer. As a mystery and detective critic with columns in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, Boucher showed that he could recognize talented writers and important trends in the field. As an editor, he had a penchant for extracting the best from the contributors to the journals and anthologies that he oversaw.

Boucher’s greatest contributions to the mystery and detective field, however, did not come through his novels or short stories. After a successful but exhausting stint as a plot developer for radio scripts for shows featuring Sherlock Holmes and Gregory Hood, Boucher began editing and writing book reviews in the fields of both science fiction and mystery and detective fiction. As an editor, he excelled, creating The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and turning it into one of the first literate journals in that field. He brought the same skills to True Crime Detective, which he edited from 1952 to 1953. He encouraged many young talents in both the genres of science fiction and mystery and detective fiction, including Richard Matheson, Gore Vidal, and Philip José Farmer.

The Mystery Writers of America recognized Boucher three times as the top critic of mystery and detective crime fiction. As a critic and an editor, he was gentle, humorous, and always compassionate, and he was usually able to provoke the best efforts of those whose work he assessed. In no small way, he contributed through his criticism and editing to the emergence in the 1950’s of a real literature of mystery and detective fiction.

Biography

Anthony Boucher was born William Anthony Parker White on August 21, 1911, in Oakland, California. He was the only child of James Taylor White and Mary Ellen (née Parker) White, both physicians and both descended from pioneers of the California/Oregon region. His maternal grandfather was a lawyer and a superior court judge, and his paternal grandfather was a captain in the United States Navy. Despite being an invalid during most of his teenage years, Boucher was graduated from Pasadena High School in 1928 and from Pasadena Junior College in 1930. From 1930 to 1932, he attended the University of Southern California (USC), majoring in German. He spent most of his time outside classes at USC in acting, writing, and directing for little theater. Boucher was graduated from USC in 1932 with a bachelor of arts and an undergraduate record sufficient for election to Phi Beta Kappa and the offer of a graduate scholarship from the University of California at Berkeley. He received his master of arts degree from that institution in 1934 on acceptance of his thesis, “The Duality of Impressionism in Recent German Drama.”

The academic life apparently having lost its appeal for Boucher after he received the master of arts degree (he had planned to be a teacher of languages), he embarked on an unsuccessful career as a playwright. When his plays failed to sell, he tried his hand at mystery writing and sold his first novel to Simon and Schuster in 1936 (it was published the following year). He adopted the pseudonym “Boucher” (rhymes with “voucher”) to keep his crime-fiction career separate from his still-hoped-for career as a playwright. During the next six years, Simon and Schuster published four more of Boucher’s murder mysteries. During the same period, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published two of his novels under the pen name of H. H. Holmes.

During this phase of his career, Boucher married Phyllis Mary Price, a librarian, in 1928. They had two children, Lawrence Taylor White and James Marsden White. By 1942, Boucher’s interests had shifted from the writing of mystery fiction to editing and science fiction. During the remainder of his career, Boucher edited several periodicals in both the mystery and science-fiction fields, including True Crime Detective (1952-1953) and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949-1958). He also edited many anthologies in both fields, wrote radio scripts for mystery shows, and had several book review columns. His reviews of mystery and detective books won for him the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery criticism in 1946, 1950, and 1953. Boucher died in his home in Berkeley, California, on April 29, 1968.

Analysis

Anthony Boucher began writing mystery and detective fiction as a way to support himself while he pursued a never-realized career as a playwright. All five novels published under the Boucher pseudonym and those published as H. H. Holmes between 1937 and 1942 are well-constructed murder-detection puzzles featuring a deductionist hero or heroine and often a locked-room theme. The characters in his novels are not well developed, are almost exclusively Caucasian with bourgeois attitudes and goals, and are always secondary to the puzzle and its solution. Only rarely do the novels mention the social and political issues of the period during which they were written, and they offer no particular insights into the several potentially interesting subcultures in which they are set. In short, the Boucher-Holmes novels are examples of much of the Golden Age mystery and detective literature, in which the crime and its solution through logical deduction are paramount.

Taken collectively, the Boucher-Holmes novels are the epitome of one branch of Golden Age mystery and detective fiction. They are amusing escapist works of no particular literary merit. Boucher, an only child from a comfortable middle-class background, did not have the worldly experience of a Dashiell Hammett. Thus, his characters were portrayed in a narrow world in which ugliness, if it existed at all, derived from character flaws, not from social realities. He did not possess the poetic insight into the human condition of a Ross Macdonald or a Raymond Chandler, so his characters lack depth, and the situations that he created for them are generally unconvincing.

Boucher was much more successful in his short stories, in which characterization is less important than in novels. Nick Noble, an alcoholic ex-cop who was featured in “Black Murder,” “Crime Must Have a Stop,” and “The Girl Who Married a Monster,” is a much more engaging character than any of those appearing in Boucher’s longer works. Fergus O’Breen and Sister Ursula are also more believable when they appear in short stories. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Playboy, and Esquire are only a few of the many journals that published Boucher’s short stories.

The Case of the Seven of Calvary

In many ways Boucher’s first novel set the pattern for those that followed. Set on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, The Case of the Seven of Calvary (1937) introduces several promising characters whose personalities prove to be disappointingly bland. The novel demonstrates Boucher’s acquaintance with literature in four languages, with ancient heresies combated by the Roman Catholic Church, and his intimate knowledge of several forms of tobacco usage. Virtually nothing comes through, however, concerning academic life at Berkeley in the 1930’s or the mechanics of the little-theater movement, in which most of the characters in the novel are involved and with which the author had considerable experience. Still, the novel is well plotted, the deductionist (a professor of Sanskrit) sufficiently Sherlockian, and the clues abundant enough to make the puzzle enjoyable.

The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars

Boucher was heavily influenced by Arthur Conan Doyleand fascinated by Sherlock Holmes, as demonstrated in all of his novels, but particularly in the third, The Case of the Baker Street Irregulars (1940). Again, Boucher introduces a cast of initially fascinating but ultimately flaccid characters, most of them members of an informal Holmes fan club (a real organization of which Boucher was a member). Again the plot is clever, this time revolving around various Doyle accounts of the adventures of the sage of Baker Street. The hoped-for insights into the subculture in which the novel is set—in this case, the film industry in Hollywood—are again absent. Boucher does have his characters make several innocuous political observations, vaguely New Dealish and more or less antifascist, but one of the primary characters, a Nazi spy, comes off as a misguided idealist and a basically nice fellow. The deductionist in the novel is an Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) homicide lieutenant who appears in several of Boucher’s novels, A. Jackson (his first name is never given).

The Case of the Solid Key

In his other appearances in Boucher’s novels (The Case of the Crumpled Knave, 1939; The Case of the Solid Key, 1941; and The Case of the Seven Sneezes, 1942), Jackson has considerable help in solving his cases from Fergus O’Breen, a redheaded, yellow-sweater-wearing private detective. Despite the sweater and the hair, O’Breen is surely one of the most colorless private eyes in all of mystery fiction, his blandness exceeded only by that of A. Jackson. In The Case of the Solid Key, considered by his fans to be Boucher’s best, O’Breen and Jackson deduce the perpetrator of an ingenious locked-room murder from among some potentially exciting but typically undeveloped characters, including a Charles Lindbergh-like idealist and a voluptuous film star (Rita La Marr, no less) who remains incognito during most of the novel. Once again, Boucher sets the action of the novel against a backdrop of the little-theater movement, the actual workings of which are largely unexplored in the novel. The Case of the Solid Key also includes some unconvincing dialogue concerning politics and social issues, with Boucher’s own New Deal convictions emerging victorious over the selfish, big-business attitudes of a spoiled rich girl who always gets her comeuppance (a stereotype that appears in several of Boucher’s stories).

Rocket to the Morgue

Boucher created a potentially more engaging but characteristically incomplete deductionist, Sister Ursula, in two novels published under the pseudonym H. H. Holmes. Sister Ursula, a nun of the order of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany, helps Lieutenant Terence Marshall of the LAPD homicide division solve murders in Nine Times Nine (1940) and Rocket to the Morgue (1942). The characters in the latter novel are drawn in part from the science-fiction writers’ community in the Los Angeles of the early 1940’s and are thinly disguised fictionalizations of such science-fiction luminaries as John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. The plot revolves around another locked room and is amusingly complicated and pleasantly diverting. The novel contains the obligatory spoiled rich girl, several conversations mildly critical of the socioeconomic status quo, and several comments mildly lamenting the imminent outbreak of war.

Principal Series Characters:

• Fergus O’Breen is a private investigator, around thirty, with red hair and a fondness for yellow sweaters. He has a sharp, analytical mind and is attracted to young, not-too-bright women. He is a heavy smoker and a recreational drinker.
• Lieutenant A. Jackson is with the homicide division of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). He is around thirty, tall, handsome, single, and intelligent, but he always has the help of an amateur sleuth in solving his murder cases.
• Lieutenant Terence Marshall is also with the homicide division of the LAPD. Tall, handsome, and happily married, he is a closet intellectual. He can be seen as a married version of Lieutenant Jackson in the Fergus O’Breen series.
• Sister Ursula is of the order of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany. Of indeterminate age, she is compassionate, devout, an amateur sleuth par excellence, and instrumental in the solution of Marshall’s cases.

Bibliography

Nevins, Francis M., Jr. “Introduction: The World of Anthony Boucher.” In Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher, edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr., and Martin H. Greenberg. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Discusses the rules and conventions unique to Boucher’s fiction and the character types that inhabit it.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Provides perspective to Boucher’s work.

Sallis, James. “The Compleat Boucher.” Fantasy and Science Fiction (April, 2000): 36-41. Review of a 1999 collection of Boucher’s complete science-fiction and fantasy works, appraising the author’s career and the importance of the collection.

Spencer, David G. “The Case of the Man Who Could Do Everything.” Rhodomagnetic Digest 2 (September, 1950): 7-10. An examination of the works of Boucher that focuses on his Fergus O’Breen series.

White, Phyllis, and Lawrence White. Boucher: A Family Portrait. Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Historical Society, 1985. Biographical study of Boucher and his family, revealing the influences of his upbringing on his work.