Upcoming classic thrillers, Library of America.

On January 3, the Library of America announced some of its fall 2023 releases, which included the following:

(1) Five Classic Thrillers 1961–1964 (The Murderers by Fredric Brown, The Name of the Game Is Death by Dan J. Marlowe, Dead Calm by Charles Williams, The Expendable Man by Dorothy B. Hughes, The Score by Richard Stark [Donald Westlake])

(2) Four Classic Thrillers 1964–1969 (The Fiend by Margaret Millar, Doll by Ed McBain [Evan Hunter], Run Man Run by Chester Himes, The Tremor of Forgery by Patricia Highsmith)

Below are some critics' reactions to the works in these volumes.

Re Brown's The Murderers: Sgt. Cuff [John Winterich] in 30 Sept. 1961 Saturday Review dubbed it "highly amative."

Re Highsmith's Tremor of Forgery: Terrence Rafferty in the 4 Jan. 1988 New Yorker dubbed the book "nihilistic."

Re Himes's Run Man Run: Sgt. Cuff in the 31 Dec. 1966 Saturday Review regarded this as a "[t]aut, devilish, ably-written slice of life—and death."

Re Hughes's Expendable Man (Edgar nominee, Best Novel): Kirkus lauded its "savage momentum."

Re Marlowe's The Name of the Game Is Death: Anthony Boucher in the 11 Feb 1962 New York Times believed that Marlowe had reached "an impressive new high."

A walk with Anthony Boucher.

Jeffrey Marks's Anthony Boucher:
A Biobibliography (McFarland)

Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association has scheduled a July 21 walk of South Berkeley (CA) locations associated with mystery/sci fi author-editor-critic Anthony Boucher (aka William Anthony Parker White). The walk will be guided by Randal Brandt, a librarian who curates the California Detective Fiction Collection at UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library.

Boucher picks the best mysteries of 1951.

In the 2 Dec 1951 New York Times, author-critic Anthony Boucher (aka William Anthony Parker White) listed "Boucher's Choices"—his selections for the best mysteries of 1951. They were:

• John Dickson Carr, The Devil in Velvet. "swashbuckling romance . . . strict detection." 
• Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad, . "adept . . . spy thriller."
• Dorothy Salisbury Davis, A Gentle Murderer. "distinguished."
• Cyril Hare [Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark], An English Murder . "adroit . . . social satire."
• Geoffrey Household, A Rough Shoot and A Time to Kill. "realistic political melodrama."
• Michael Innes, The Paper Thunderbolt. "funny and chilling."
• Eric Linklater, Mr. Byculla. "Deft."
• John Ross Macdonald [Ross Macdonald, Kenneth Millar], The Way Some People Die. "a worthy successor to Dashiell Hammett."
• William McGivern, Shield for Murder. "Complex and memorable study of a rogue cop."
• Ngaio Marsh, Night at the Vulcan. "Marsh's best to date."
• Elliott Paul, Murder on the Left Bank. "Fun."
• Ellery Queen, The Origin of Evil.  "intricate ingenuity."
• John Sherwood, Mr. Blessington's Imperialist Plot. "Ruritanian spy-melodrama."
• Bart Spicer, Black Sheep, Run and The Golden Door.  "appealing variants on the hardboiled story."
• Julian Symons, The 31st of February. "Striking satire."
• Lawrence Treat, Big Shot. "A notable novel about detectives."

Remembering Adam West: The Detectives.

Adam West, ca. 1961

Although Adam West, who died June 9 at age 88, is best known for his portrayal of the Caped Crusader, he had a long series of other television appearances. One was his role as Detective Sergeant Steve Nelson in The Detectives, the series starring Robert Taylor as head of a squad of city detectives and featuring writers such as Anthony Boucher and Gene Roddenberry. In "Strangers in the House" (1962), Nelson and his colleagues look into the case of a night watchman run down by a gang of young car thieves. Sharp-eyed viewers will spot Tige Andrews (The Mod Squad), John Karlen (Cagney & Lacey), and Chris Robinson (General Hospital) in the cast.

Foxwell on mystery reviewing, EQMM blog.

Today on the EQMM blog "Something Is About to Happen," I discuss "The Not-So-Simple Art of Mystery Reviewing," including a look back at some eminent reviewers (such as Walter R. Brooks, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy B. Hughes, Howard Haycraft, and Anthony Boucher).

Philip K. Dick speaks.

The Best of Philip K. Dick
(Echo Point Books, 2013)

Pacifica Radio's From the Vault archival program is featuring a 1976 conversation between sci-fi author Philip K. Dick and Pacifica Radio's Mike Hodel. Topics include Richard Congdon, Harlan Ellison, Richard Lupoff, Kurt Vonnegut, the business of writing, A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle, and the first story sold by Dick (to Anthony Boucher who was, in Dick's words, "a great writer, a great editor, a great anthologizer, and a great person").

August Derleth: Best mysteries of 1969.

Essential Solitude: The Letters of
H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth
Hippocampus P

In the Dec. 6, 1969, issue of the Capital [WI] Times, August Derleth (creator of the Holmes-like Solar Pons) listed his selections for the best fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books of 1969. Mysteries and sci-fi appeared under the subtitle "Entertainments" rather than the "Fiction" category. It may have been ethically questionable that he listed H. P. Lovecraft et al.'s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos—which was issued by Arkham House, the publishing firm he cofounded.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo and Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand were two of his fiction selections, whereas two of his sci-fi picks were Fritz Leiber's A Spectre Is Haunting Texas and Douglas Warner's Death on a Warm Wind. His mystery selections included:

Allingham, Margery. The Allingham Casebook. Campion and Charlie Luke short stories
Bernkopf, Jean F., ed. Boucher's Choicest. Some of Anthony Boucher's picks for best mystery short stories
Carr, John Dickson. The Ghosts' High Noon.
Carter, Philip Youngman. Mr. Campion's Farthing. Carter was Allingham's widower
Christie, Agatha. By the Pricking of My Thumbs.
Davies, L. P. Stranger to Town.
Fish, Robert L. The Murder League.
Gardner, John. A Complete State of Death.
Kahn, Joan, ed. Hanging by a Thread.
Marric, J. J [John Creasey]. Gideon's Power.
Marsh, Ngaio. Clutch of Constables.
Queen, Ellery, ed. Queen's Minimysteries.
Simenon, Georges. Maigret in Vichy (aka Maigret Takes the Waters)
Stout, Rex. Death of a Dude.
Whitney, Phyllis A. The Winter People.

Newly digitized Baker Street Four-Wheeler.

Christopher Morley. Library of
Congress, Prints & Photos Div.

The Houghton Library blog at Harvard brings word of its digitization of A Baker Street Four-Wheeler: Sixteen Pieces of Sherlockiana (1944, ed. Edgar W. Smith), which features goodies such as "Sonnet to Sherlock" by author-critic Anthony Boucher and "Sherlock Holmes's Prayer" by BSI founder Christopher Morley. "Strengthen me," writes Morley as Holmes, "not to astonish the good Watson merely for theatrical pleasure." Although this work lists "The Man Who Was Wanted" as a tale penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, it was not; go here for an explanation of its history.

Boucher et al.'s Macabre (1958).

A doctor races against time to find his daughter, who has been kidnapped and buried alive. The film, which stars Jim Backus and is directed by horror meister William Castle, is based on the book The Marble Forest by Theo Durrant (aka author-critic Anthony Boucher and other members of the Northern California chapter of MWA. Thanks to Jerry House and Jeffrey Marks's Anthony Boucher: A Bio-Bibliography for additional details on The Marble Forest).

The return of Hughes's The Expendable Man.

Today marks the reissue of Dorothy B. Hughes's Edgar-nominated The Expendable Man (1963) by New York Review of Books Classics; this edition has an afterword by Walter Mosley. In Crime & Mystery, H. R. F. Keating called the book, which centers on the death of a female hitchhiker, "one of the great trick novels of crime fiction." Anthony Boucher thought it "a splendid novel."

Boucher: Best debut mysteries of 1962.

In his NYT column of 2 Dec 1962, Anthony Boucher selected what he considered to be the best debut mysteries of the year:

• Daniel Broun, Counterweight (Edgar nominee)
• Kenneth Cook, Wake in Fright (film 1971)
• Robert L. Fish, The Fugitive (Edgar winner)
• S. B. Hough, The Bronze Perseus (aka The Tender Killer; appears on Barzun & Taylor's list of classic crime novels)
• Mark McShane, Seance (filmed as Seance on a Wet Afternoon, 1964; adapted as an opera, 2008)
• Estelle Thompson, A Twig Is Bent

Other authors mentioned, without book titles: Dick Francis (probably referring to Dead Cert, which is on the Barzun-Taylor list), Colin Watson (probably referring to Coffin, Scarcely Used), and Alan Williams (probably referring to Long Run South).

Info on Harvard's sci-fi collection.

Cover from Nightmare Tales
(1892) by Helena Blavatsky,
part of Harvard's sci-fi
collection

Harvard has provided further details on the 3000-volume science fiction collection within Houghton Library's Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection. Two covers on the Web site are Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (which has thinly disguised versions of Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard) and Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe.

Also see this cover from Nathan Schachner's Space Lawyer (a joke must be lurking somewhere in there).

Exhibition: SF in crime fiction.

The exhibition "Bullets across the Bay: The San Francisco Bay Area in Crime Fiction" at UC Berkeley's Doe Library is on display until February 29, 2012, including authors such as Anthony Boucher, Dashiell Hammett, John D. MacDonald, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, and Julie Smith. Article about the exhibition here.

Orion reissues Margaret Millar's Beast in View.

Happy to see that Orion has just reissued MWA Grand Master Margaret Millar's Edgar-winning Beast in View (1955), as she often has been overshadowed by her famous writer husband, Ross Macdonald. Summed up Anthony Boucher in the Dec. 4, 1955, New York Times re Beast in View: "Devilishly devious trick-plotting given substance by acute and terrifying psychological insight." Stark House Press has republished Millar's An Air that Kills/Do Evil in Return.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Charlotte Armstrong's The Chocolate Cobweb (1948).

 . . . [W]ho is to guarantee that evil itself wouldn't answer?
—Charlotte Armstrong,
The Chocolate Cobweb 53

 At the urging of author Dorothy Cannell, I read Charlotte Armstrong's The Chocolate Cobweb (1948) and thought its edge-of-the-seat suspense and masterful writing fitting for Patti Abbott's Forgotten Books series. The Chocolate Cobweb was filmed as Merci pour le chocolat (dir. Claude Chabrol, 2000) and features Isabelle Huppert.

Art student Amanda Garth is diverted when she learns that she may have been switched at birth with the son of noted artist Tobias Garrison. Via this episode, she wangles an introduction to Garrison and his immediate circle: his fluffy wife, Ione; his remote son, Thone; and his old actress friend, Fanny Austin. But all is not well. Was the death of Thone's mother, Belle, really an accident? Is the motherly Ione implicated in cold-blooded murder? And are dark events happening all over again?

Charlotte Armstrong Lewi (1905–69) received the Edgar for Best Novel for A Dram of Poison (1956), a favorite book of critic Anthony Boucher. Her novel The Unsuspected (1946) is on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mystery works and was filmed with Claude Rains. Author Jan Burke, in a Clues column, fittingly dubbed Armstrong's work "suburban noir."