Anthony Boucher was a lot of things, including a writer of
limericks as we've seen from Luca Conti's posting. He was
also one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, one of the most important magazines in
the field. But mainly, he was one of the best and most
insightful reviewers of mystery novels ever to put his
thoughts on paper. His columns in The New York Times Book
Review are a gold mine, and I spent a lot of hours during my
graduate student career sitting in the stacks of the library
and going through back issues, reading and taking notes. I
figure those notes were a lot more valuable than any I ever
took in class.
Among other things, Boucher was the first to take paperback
originals seriously and to do reviews of them in a national
publication. He reviewed writers that everyone else was
ignoring. John D. MacDonald, Charles Williams, and Jim
Thompson, for three.
Bill Crider
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 24 Aug 2000 EDT