The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

Aspects of Mystery Fandom
series. First, Susan Oleksiw, who became series editor, wrote the book that was the
prototype: A Reader’s Guide to the Classic British Mystery (1988). It included brief
plot descriptions of about 1,000 British mysteries. There were also appendices that
listed settings, occupations, and the period in which the mystery takes place. Finally,
Oleksiw picked 100 outstanding books in her field. Her book was followed by my
A Reader’s Guide to the American Novel of Detection (1993), Gary Warren Niebuhr’s
A Reader’s Guide to the Private Eye Novel (1993), Jo Ann Vicarel’s A Reader’s Guide
to the Police Procedural (1995), Nancy-Stephanie Stone’s A Reader’s Guide to the Spy
and Thriller Novel (1997) and Mary Johnson Jarvis’s A Reader’s Guide to the Suspense
Novel (1997).
No subject seems too obscure for fans wishing to share their enthusiasm with
others. John Kennedy Melling’s Murder Done to Death (1996) is the definitive book
about parody and pastiche in detective fiction. John E. Kramer wrote Academe in
Mystery and Detective Fiction (2000) concerning mysteries set on college campuses.
Jon L. Breen’s Novel Verdicts (1984) is an annotated listing of courtroom mysteries.
Though a non-lawyer, Breen shows a remarkable knowledge of the law as well as
wide reading. He analyzes eighty-six Erle Stanley Gardner novels that have courtroom
sequences. With the growth of legal mysteries following the success of Scott
Turow’s Presumed Innocent (1987), Breen published a second edition of his book in
1999. The number of courtroom mysteries had risen from 421 in 1984 to 790 fifteen
years later.
Combining a love of sports and mysteries stories, I wrote a series for TAD, beginning
in 1972, about mysteries with sports backgrounds. It was an idea inspired by
an earlier article I published in World Tennis, “Tennis and the Mystery Story.” Tom
Taylor’s The Golf Murders (1996) is the ultimate book about golf mysteries.
Scholarship is not all humorless. Bill Pronzini, as those who know him are aware,
is as much a fan as a writer of fiction. He’s a collector of pulp magazines and other
mysteries and searches for examples of funny, bad writing, what he calls “alternate
classics.” He uses these in his “Gun in Cheek” series, one book of which is subtitled
“An Affectionate Guide to More of the ‘Worst’ in Mystery Fiction.” Illustrations
include: “The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach,” from Michael
Avallone’s Meanwhile Back at the Morgue, and “He poured himself a drink and
counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives,”
from Brett Halliday’s The Violent World of Michael Shayne. Bill Deeck, to whom I
previously referred, captured the best of the worst of James Corbett in his The Complete
Deeck on Corbett (2003).
Cover art can be an important bonus to mysteries. A feature of Nehr’s book on
the Doubleday Crime Club was the color reproduction of ninety-four of their best
dust jackets. John Cooper and Barry Pike compiled two books with some of the best
British dust jacket art. Art Scott is one of the leading experts on American paperback
art and conducts popular slide shows, with examples, at Bouchercons. Scott is the
leading expert on the work of Robert McGinnis, arguably the best artist to illustrate
the covers of paperback mysteries. With Dr. Wallace Maynard, he published the wellillustrated
The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis (2001). Equally beloved is the
artwork that was on the covers of mystery pulp magazines. Among the best collec-
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