The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

Aspects of Mystery Fandom
With old-time radio expert Martin Grams, Jr.., Nevins brought it up to date in 2002.
Another successful Nevins bibliographic project was reprinting Anthony Boucher’s
1940s reviews from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Annotated bibliographies have increasingly taken the form of “Companions,”
books that also treat an author’s work in considerable depth and provide biographical
material. Perhaps the earliest was The Agatha Christie Companion (1984), which
authors Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo called a “four-year labor of love.” Sometimes
the emphasis is on the author’s character, as in The Cadfael Companion (1991)
by Robin Whiteman, about Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael. A major part of The Tony
Hillerman Companion (1994), edited by Martin Greenberg, is a 200-page “concordance”
of all the characters in Hillerman’s fiction by Elizabeth A. Gaines and Diane
Hammer.
Another example is Sharon A. Feaster’s The Cat Who… Companion (1998) devoted
to the cat mysteries of Lilian Jackson Braun. It includes an interview with Braun,
plot summaries of her books, an alphabetical list of characters in the series, and
even a map of its setting, fictional Moose County. The format of The Dick Francis
Companion (2003) by Jean Swanson and Dean James is similar to Feaster’s, but they
added some features appropriate to a guide to Dick Francis: a gazetteer to the racing
locations mentioned, a list of the horses in the books, and, fittingly for an author who
so often grabbed readers with his first sentence, a list of memorable opening lines in
the Francis canon.
While the Cold War was still hot, Andy East published The Cold War File (1983),
a listing of the work of eighty authors of spy novels. His range was great, from the
literary espionage novels of John Le Carré to such sexy novels of Ted Mark as The
Man from O.R.G.Y.
One of the most ambitious of all fan-bibliographers was Michael L. Cook of Evansville,
Indiana. His first “project” was Murder by Mail: Inside the Mystery Book Clubs
(1979) with histories and complete lists of offerings of the Detective Book Club, the
Mystery Guild and the Unicorn Mystery Book Club. A revision in 1983 updated the
offerings of the first two clubs, still active, and added several lesser-known clubs.
The long title of Cook’s Monthly Murders: A Checklist and Chronological Listing of
Fiction in the Digest-Size Mystery Magazines in the United States and England (1982)
aptly describes his bibliography of about one hundred periodicals. For the computer
age, William G. Contento updated this work in the CD-ROM Mystery Short Fiction
Miscellany: An Index (2003), adding to it information from his Crime and Mystery
Anthologies, compiled with Martin H. Greenberg, first published as a book in 1990.
Two somewhat-related 1983 bibliographies of Cook’s were Mystery, Detective, and
Espionage Magazines and Mystery Fanfare: A Composite Annotated Index to Mystery
and Related Fanzines 1 63–1 1. The first book included descriptions of fan magazines,
along with hundreds of pulp and digest-sized fiction magazines. The second
book covers almost fifty fan magazines.
Arguably, Cook’s most daunting indexing project, one undertaken with Stephen
T. Miller, was Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in US
Pulp Magazines, 1 15–1 4, published in two volumes in 1988. Cook died June 14,
1988, at age fifty-eight, shortly before it was published. The first volume is a chrono-
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