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Those readers who regularly visit this site will probably recognise the name of Anthony Boucher, either as the writer of a number of stories for John W. Campbell’s Astounding and Unknown magazines in the 1940s, or as one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). As I plan to rewrite some of my early reviews of that latter magazine, it seemed like a good time to read this “bibliobography” of the writer.
The book itself consists of two parts: the first is a comprehensive biography of the man and his work, the second is a straight bibliography. The first part is further subdivided into four sections: The Man, The Author, The Editor, and The Critic. We can already see from this structure that Boucher was so much more than just a writer and editor of SF, something that Gordon Van Gelder notes in his short Introduction:

What I like most about Jeffrey Marks’ thorough and much-needed biography is that it makes clear how small a part of Tony Boucher’s overall career was his work on F&SF. If I really wanted to get to know Boucher, I’d have to add to my magazine editing an additional career writing mystery novels, then spend several years writing scripts for radio dramas, and I’d also need to break some ground as a translator, help found a professional writer’s organization, and spend decades as a prominent and erudite reviewer. In my spare time, perhaps I could host a radio series like his “Great Voices” program on Pacifica, edit a series of “Best Detective Stories of the Year,” and . . .  p. 1-2

The first section, The Man, is a twenty page biographical essay which gives a broad outline of Boucher’s² life, and it initially describes his childhood, his precocious intellect (he knew eight languages by the time he graduated), and his problems with asthma.

He met his wife (Phyllis Mary Price) while a college student at Berkley, but their relationship was initially problematic:

Phyllis found her first few dates with Boucher cognitively exhausting and wasn’t sure if she would continue dating him. However, he persisted and she finally became used to the constant banter and erudite knowledge. Her trick, she would later say, was to just enjoy it without trying to keep up with his mind.  p. 14

The rest of this section details an initially shaky career writing reviews and mystery fiction in the early 1940s—he was only able to marry Phyllis when he sold his first novel—but his financial situation improved when he started writing for radio towards the end of the 1940s. When this job ceased (he and a co-writer were let go) he moved on to editing F&SF, and also became the primary mystery reviewer for The New York Times (“His family estimated that he could read a book with full comprehension in 2 to 3 hours”).
Throughout all these multiple (and often parallel careers), Boucher had to cope with the asthma that had plagued him since childhood:

Boucher’s asthma problems hounded him all of his life. He could not make morning appointments, because in the first few hours after waking, he found it difficult to breathe. It would take several hours for Boucher to be able to get into a normal breathing pattern every day.  p. 26

Despite this, and his many other jobs (translation, book editing, etc.) and activities (politics, etc.), he also collected operatic recordings, amassing 9000 titles by the time of his death (this hobby led to another reviewing job with Opera News and a radio program). Boucher was also a parent, was a lay reader with the Catholic Church, and had an active social life—one wonders where he found the time and energy for all these activities.

The second section, The Author, describes, in detail, Boucher’s stories. Most of this concerns his mystery fiction and, to be honest, I found the discussion of this rather boring—the impression given is of far too many gimmicky locked-room stories. That said, the ‘Nick Noble’ series sounds interesting, and I may dig it out.
There is also some interesting detail about Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue (the novel is not SF but features pulp SF writers):

Not only does Rocket to the Morgue depict the pitfalls of mystery fandom in the 1940s, the author also borrowed conversations held at the Manana Literary Society surrounding the idea of blurring the boundaries between mystery and science-fiction. Chapter three of Rocket to the Morgue contains a heated discussion over the continued segregation of science fiction and the detective story, pushing Astounding Stories’ editor John W. Campbell’s belief that the genres could not be commingled. The Campbell character, Don Stewart, is visited by Lieutenant Marshall and gives a soliloquy on how the rules of science fiction would alter any attempt to have a locked room mystery. Stewart suggests that a time machine could be used to alter the alibis, a device that Boucher would use later in his O’Breen short stories. The murderer could disassemble and reassemble himself atom by atom in the locked room. The character also discusses a method by which the character could enter the fourth dimension, enter the room, and leave by the fourth dimension again.
[. . .]
The final chapter finishes with a somber note to a fun-filled romp through the science fiction community of the 1940s. Boucher sets the final chapter on December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor’s attack. The seemingly innocent conversation between the characters is laced with the knowledge that in a few hours the United States will be at war following the Japanese attack.  p. 56-57

The third section is titled The Editor, but leads off with a potted history of Boucher’s SF writing (The Quest for St Aquin, etc.). Marks notes, as he does elsewhere, how Boucher’s liberal political ideas would occasionally find their way into his work:

Boucher used elements of civil rights in [Robinc]. The story includes some early respectful portrayals of gay men. In a time where genre fiction relegated homosexuals to victims or villains, such a move was risky; however, Boucher saw this as a part of the social justice that he championed through his writings.  p. 68

Marks also makes this more general point about Boucher’s SF:

Beyond Boucher’s passions for religion and mystery, two themes repeated throughout many of Boucher’s science-fiction works. The first was the concept of time travel, not an uncommon plot device in the genre. In a great many of his stories, Boucher looked at a society from the point-of-view of the outsider who travels to a future world. This viewpoint allowed the author to comment on the society itself and what man can become.
Given that he wrote most of his short science-fiction works during World War II, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that the other topic in many of his shorter works was totalitarian governments.  p. 69-70

Also in this supposed ‘Editor’ section is an account of Boucher’s translation work for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which began with his work on Georges Simenon’s short stories. This did not end well:

Simenon had not been able to speak English prior to the war, but in 1945, he moved to Canada and later the United States. His English improved as he stayed here, in what some critics call his best period. His grasp of English allowed Simenon to read the translations, and he was not pleased with the results from his novels or short stories. Too much had been removed or added. Simenon switched publishers in the early 1950s to maintain more control over his translated works.
Despite his work for the French author’s reputation in the United States, Boucher had to defend himself against Simenon’s charge later that he hated the author.
.
My dear God, sir!
I have spent well over 20 years under the impression that I was one of the foremost Simenon enthusiasts & advocates in America. I have reviewed, at a fast rough count, 49 Simenon books. Out of such a large number, there are, I’ll admit, a handful that I haven’t cared much for; but my enthusiasm for the corpus of your work has been so evident that the Times selected me to write the long front-page feature article on The Bells of Bicetre last spring — which your publishers quote on the jacket of The Blue Room.  p. 74-75

There were also translations of other writers, the most famous of which was Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Garden of Forking Paths in 1948.
Also in this ‘Editor’ section is information on Boucher’s radio plays, his membership of The Baker Street Irregulars (a Sherlock Holmes society), and the founding of the Mystery Writers of America.
Eventually there is an account of Boucher’s editorship of F&SF. What did I learn from this?

1. Boucher and McComas’s initial approach to Spivak (the eventual publisher of F&SF) was in January 1946.
2. They initially had stories by John Dickson Carr and H. P. Lovecraft lined up for “Fantasy and Horror”.
3. The stories from Cleve Cartmill and Stuart Palmer in the early issues of F&SF came via Boucher’s personal friendship with the writers.
4. After many delays in launching the magazine, the suggestion to add SF to the mix came in February 1949, in a letter from general manager Joe Ferman (father of later editor Edward L. Ferman).
5. McComas had to get an advance from his sales job so he and Boucher could fly to New York from the West Coast for the 1949 launch party.
6. The first issue sold 57,000 copies.
7. F&SF’s future looked in doubt in 1953 after McComas retired. He wrote to Boucher saying:

“F&SF is losing money all over the place and prognosis is for worsening, rather than improvement. JWF [Joe Ferman] blames this largely—almost solely—on our editorial job. We blame it on poor distribution. Mainly, with such matters as poor promotion . . . .  p. 110-111

8. F&SF was the first magazine “to have wrap-around cover design,” something later copied by Astounding.
9. The circumstances that led Boucher to resign as the editor of F&SF were complex:

Boucher’s continuing health problems, combined with his family’s health, along with problems at the magazine finally made him step down as editor in 1958. “I have been terribly overworked & in pretty bad health (my latest achievement has been coming down with erysipelas), & partly because Mother got much worse through a series of strokes & is now incapable of signing or even discussing anything.”
Boucher’s problems with the magazine at that point were two-fold.
First, he had a weekly column to write for The New York Times Book Review, which involved reading, critiquing, and writing about 2 to 10 books a week. Additionally, the money at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had not improved much, although the magazine was now on sound financial footing. “Just too many damned quarrels with Ferman, mostly about money,” Boucher wrote in 1958.
The science-fiction community was saddened, but understanding, about Boucher’s decision. Isaac Asimov wrote, “Whatever is best for you, Tony,—that do. I know you have health problems and are generally overworked and I want you alive more than I want you as an editor. But how all s.f. will miss your editorial hand.”  p. 112-113

There is a final part to this ‘Editor’ section which covers Boucher’s anthologies and introductions (and also his editorship of the short lived True Crime Detective, a 1951-3 magazine published by a division of Mercury Publications, publisher of F&SF).³

The fourth and final section, The Critic, begins with his reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Here Marks points out that Boucher was a critic and not a reviewer:

Boucher’s columns were extraordinary for the way he dealt with not just the book at hand, but its place in the genre. The only way to do justice to his reviews is to let them speak for themselves. In this clip from one of his columns, he discusses the emergence of the spy novel in 1943. Obviously in the midst of world war, espionage came to the forefront of everyone’s mind, and mystery was no exception. Not only did Boucher relate the books of 1943 to previous mysteries, but he also tied the trend to world events.
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The most interesting current phenomenon within the scope of this column is the extraordinary development of the spy novel . . . . To be exact, of 103 novels I’ve reviewed in 1943, at least 34 have had espionage or sabotage as a dominant element . . . . Spy novels were formerly the literary stepchildren of the mystery trade.

At this point Marks also provides one of the few examples in the book which shows Boucher in a bad light, which is when the Chronicle fired him for bad-mouthing the publication to other writers. The publisher’s letter was blunt:

What I want to tell you is that I’m afraid your contributions to The Chronicle’s book section had better cease. It has come to me that on more than one occasion you have expressed yourself—once quite publicly to a group of writers—as wholly dissatisfied with the arrangement you have with the paper, and while certainly you are privileged to be dissatisfied I see no sense in continuing a connection you yourself regard as unsatisfactory.
The point is not altogether whether The Chronicle’s remuneration is, as you put it to a group of people, “a pittance.” It’s rather, I think, that The Chronicle had never paid anything to contributing reviewers until the time when you replaced, temporarily, Mr. Doyle. At that time I agreed to see if a space rate couldn’t be arranged—this for the first time for anyone. Further, when Mr. Doyle returned, The Chronicle continued, at my suggestion, to pay you space for such reviews as you did in other fields—again a “first” here. Perhaps The Chronicle should do better; perhaps it shouldn’t. The point is that this department did make some arrangement to pay you something, and it does not seem to me within the bounds of propriety that while it was doing so you should express yourself publicly as you have done.
Further, it is reported to me that you stated flatly that “Chronicle reviewers” had to write “to policy.” Entirely aside from the question of just how this might enter into the reviewing of detective stories, it is a fact that the only changes ever made in any reviews you wrote for the paper were on the grounds of (a) what seemed to me to skirt perhaps too close to libel, and (b) what seemed to me to skirt too closely to the edge of good taste. Still further, I have been able to find no other Chronicle reviewers who have this complaint to make, or, for that matter, any who feel that you are authorized to speak for “Chronicle reviewers.” Again it does not seem to me proper that anyone who either feels this to be true or says publicly that it is true, should continue to do reviews for the paper.  p. 129

The rest of the section goes on to detail Boucher’s science fiction book reviews, and his eventual arrival at the big time with a job at the The New York Times Book Review as a mystery reviewer. It concludes with an overview of his opera radio programs.
The bibliographic part of the book finishes with The end and beyond, which tells of Boucher’s death in early 1968:

His last ailment came on fast; Boucher suffered a fall and was rushed to the hospital with a broken rib. The X-rays revealed some problems in the lungs and he remained in the hospital. Phyllis White would later remember his last days: “He never knew about the cancer because it was very hard to diagnose him and by the time that they figured it out, he was out of it and couldn’t be told anything. One of the doctors said to me, while they were all trying to figure out what was the matter with him, ‘that everybody and his brother wants to get in on this.’ I thought how much my husband would have enjoyed that. Like someone saying with relish, ‘this will puzzle them at Scotland Yard.’” Boucher was diagnosed as having cancer, and he passed away within days.
Anthony Boucher died of lung cancer on April 29, 1968, at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Despite his attacks of asthma, Boucher had been a lifetime smoker. He was frequently seen holding a pipe in family photos.  p. 156-157

The aftermath of his death is also covered—the founding of the mystery convention Bouchercon, the memorial SF and mystery anthologies,⁴ etc.—and concludes with this passage:

Even with the tributes and conventions, Boucher’s most enduring legacy has been his impact on the following generation of mystery reviewers. Though no one individual critic has Boucher’s influence in reviewing, the people who now review for Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine and the Times bear a resemblance to Boucher’s columns. Many of today’s review columns are in a similar format to Boucher’s work at The New York Times. Additionally, most reviewers do a yearly round-up of top books of the year as well. In today’s world with the increase in the number of subgenres in mystery Boucher’s rule of treating each category with the same respect and consideration despite personal preferences is a standard that still holds true today.  p. 160

The remainder of the book contains forty-odd pages of bibliographical information.

This volume is, as you can probably gather from the detail above, a thoroughly researched work. Nevertheless, I have a few reservations: first, it is probably best treated as a reference book rather than a casual read—as I have already said it is rather dry bordering on dull in places, and I could only dip into it for half an hour or so at a time; second, structurally it is a mess—if you look at some of the sub-sections above, they have no relation to the sections they appear in (the ‘Editor’ section in particular is a dog’s breakfast). It would have been better to have had more single topic sections, and those framed by a chronological account of his life. Finally, the manuscript could have done with another set of eyes proofreading it—there are a number of typos, etc.
Probably a volume for historians, who will be glad to have it.  ●

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1. The Google Play offering was the only ebook option I found, and is the cheapest way of obtaining the title.

2. Boucher’s real name was William Parker White.

3. There is a page of True Crime Detective covers here.

4. The two anthologies, Special Wonder (called “Special Wonders” here) and Crimes and Misfortunes, were edited by J. Francis McComas, who was assisted (according to Marks) by R. Bretnor and Randall Garrett.