The Heirs of Anthony Boucher Marvin Lachman

The Nineteen-Seventies
9 Mystery*File (1974–)
No other fan magazine has risen, phoenix-like, from self-imposed ashes more often
than Steve Lewis’s Mystery*File. Lewis, a mathematics professor at Central Connecticut
State College, started it in the spring of 1974 as “a combination fanzine and
sales list.” After seven issues, it had its first hiatus but soon reappeared, though not
always as an independent magazine. It was part of Don Miller’s Mystery Nook, where
Lewis was briefly Associate Editor, and then in The Mystery Fancier’s preview issue
of November1976, continuing for TMF’s first six years. Sporadically, it was Lewis’s
magazine in DAPA-EM. Sometimes his magazine would be called Fatal Kiss, and occasionally
Fatal Kiss would be the title of the review portion of his magazine.
Lewis resumed publishing Mystery*File as his own magazine with issue #26 in
December 1990. Ten of twenty-four pages consisted of Lewis’s mystery and movie
reviews. Another five of the pages were “Fatal Kiss: A Letter Column.” However, he
also had reviews by Dorothy Nathan, Kathi Maio, and Sue Feder, plus Ellen Nehr’s
column “Murder Ad Lib,” consisting of reviews and interviews. Beginning with #29,
Maryell Cleary wrote a column “Vintage Crime” in which she discussed classic writers
such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, and H. C. Bailey.
There was another hiatus after issue #34 in 1991, but when Deadly Pleasures began
in 1993, Lewis was part of it, suspending his own magazine again, with a review
column under the punny
title “Fatal Quiche” in the
second and third issues.
The latter column was
numbered Mystery*File
#35. Lewis then did reviews
as Mystery*File
#36–38 in the next three
issues and again in the
twelfth issue with what
was apparently intended
as #39, though it was not
numbered.
In December 2003
Lewis began his most
ambitious incarnation
of Mystery*File with issue
#40. He said it was
Steve Lewis, founder of Mystery*File, and one of his
columnists, DAPA-EM “den mother” Ellen Nehr.
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“not to be an up-to-date
newsletter for the field,
but a place where old