The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

DAPA-EM (1 3–)
George Kelley, center, proves to Frank Denton, left, and Jeff Meyerson, right, that he’s
attending a Bouchercon.
and discovered a previously unknown pseudonym for Phoebe Atwood Taylor. Her
book about the Doubleday Crime Club received an Edgar nomination and won an
Anthony. Her DAPA-EM magazine, The Apron String Affair, was replete with “typos”
and spelling errors, about which fellow members kidded her. She responded by asking
for a moratorium on commenting on these, typically making a mistake when she
wrote, “Typo’s can happen to anyone.”
At the1980 Bouchercon, when Jon Lellenberg chided John Nieminski for not
wearing his convention badge, Nieminski immediately echoed the bandit chief in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, saying, “Bahdgis? We doan need no steenking bahdgis.”
Behind Nieminski’s scholarly exterior was a sense of humor that delighted his
friends and those who read his magazine, Somewhere a Roscoe, whose title came
from S. J. Perelman’s parody of private eyes. Though he was not a professional writer,
Nieminski’s writing was often compared to Perelman’s. He was also a serious bibliographer.
Without a computer database system, Nieminski lovingly, using thousands
of 3x5 cards, prepared indexes to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Saint Mystery
Magazine.
George Kelley’s “non-appearance” at Bouchercons became legendary. He had
cancelled several times, but though he often attended and was seen by most of the
membership, the joke continued to circulate that he had disappeared again. Kelley,
a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, had one of the largest collections
of paperback books in the world and donated 25,000 to his school’s library.
Andy Jaysnovitch’s compulsive collecting of books, magazines, videotapes, and almost
everything else has also become legendary.
Bill Crider wrote that he liked books about alligators in the sewers, and he even
wrote an article about them. This became an in-joke in DAPA-EM, and at one Bouchercon,
Criderwas presented with a hand puppet in the form of an alligator that was
promptly named “Bill, Jr.” Now retired chairman of the English department at Alvin
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