I finished reading The Compleat Boucher, a collection of al of Anthony Boucher’s short fantasy and science fiction.  It helps give a sense of the man.  There are some references to liberal politics, for example, and a lot of complaining against tyranny—which was relatively common during this era of science fiction.  There’s also a fair amount of Christian references—the story of Balaam seems to have been a favorite—and some light mocking of Catholicism.  Of course, there are many references to Berkeley and to academia, as well as Sherlock Holmes: “The Greatest Tertian” imagines a Martian anthropologist sifting through the ruins of Earth after the fourth planet had invaded and deducing that Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare were the same person, the greatest of humans, and surely would have prevented the invasion if he had been alive.  (For Baker Street Irregulars, he rewrites some of the Holmesian cannon so that the master’s failures are explained by the action of Martian spies.)  The Manana Club makes an appearance, as does Dr. Deringer, the Holmesian character from Rocket to the Morgue.

Two themes predominate.  First, Boucher was inordinately fond of stories about time travel and its paradoxes.  He also dealt with the trouble that came from magic—in these cases magic being an obvious stand in for scientific and technological advancement.   In all but one story, magic created more problems than it solved—in fact, it was usually the decision to conjure where the protagonist went wrong.  The magicians or demons or fairies or other creatures called upon to perform the magic also warned their masters that there was no way to specify their wishes clearly enough to avert catastrophe, but they never listened.  And so the hero of “The Scrawny One” is transformed intot he richest man in the world—just as he asked—by being put inside the dying body of the world’s richest man, while the demon took over the old body.  The one force in the world that could obey magic was love, as was the case in “Nellthu,” a short short story from 1955.  The woman in the tale—the only one in all of Boucher’s stories to have magic work for her—wished that the demon she invoked would fall totally and unselfishly in love with her—which meant that the demon kept her well, made her beautiful and good in bed, and let her fool around, serving her all day every day.  Love, too, was the one force that could undue time paradoxes, as was the case in “Transfer Point” (1950).

Boucher’s most widely acclaimed story is “The Quest for St. Aquin,” (1959), but I don’t think it his best.  Indeed, he had dealt with similar themes in the 1954 story “Balaam,” which is tighter.  In my estimation, he produced his best works in the early 1940s, with the stories published in 1943 and 1945 having the most to recommend them: “Pelagic Spark,” “Expedition,” and “Sanctuary,” all from 1943, and the weird tales, “The Pink Caterpillar” and “Mr. Lupesco” from 1945.  (It’s no surprise that his best work would have been produced relatively early, since this would have been when he was most under the influence of the Manana Club.)  He published his best potential story in 1943, “We Print the Truth,” which only failed because at certain moments Boucher chose not to tell his story but to comment on it as a story.   This . . . tweeness, I guess is the word, seems common to mystery writing of the time, and it unfortunately infected a lot of his writing.  “St. Aquin,” I think, was sometimes played for jokes—especially insiderish jokes—at the expense of the story.  Naiveté also marred much of his science fiction.  He imagined aliens from other planets as mammals or insects, for example, which while not as clichéd as BEMs was still uninspired.

What was inspired, I would argue, was his attempts at mixing the genres of mystery and science fiction.  John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, famously said at about this time that the two could not be mixed, because science fiction allowed one to play too much with the premises and so cheat the reader.  Asimov later took up the challenge and proved that one could write a science fiction mystery, and he’s widely credited with creating the new form, but I think in that Boucher is poorly served.  He seems to have been reluctant to completely take on Campbell—even referencing approvingly his statement in one story—and his mysteries did not always use as well worked-out science fiction as Asimov’s but he was clearly doing science fiction mysteries.

And this mixing, I think, had a lot to do with Fort.  The classic mystery is composed in the Holmesian fashion, to show that what was improbable was possible—was in fact the truth.  Boucher’s mysteries are meant to prove that some parts of the impossible are possible—just as he said in Rocket to the Morgue.  The mysteries, for instance, prove that time travel is possible.   There’s a connection here, too, with weird tales, in that Boucher sometimes does not allow himself a simple, rational explanation for the weirdnesses at the heart of the stories—but shows that the supernatural, too, is alive in the human world.

That weird tales and Fort were in his mind is unmistakable.  He wrote a number of stories for Weird Tales, which meant he was keeping up with that market.  His stories also referenced Fort.   In “The Chronokinesis of Jonathan Hull,” for example, a man of the future writes “The Co-ordinating Concordance to the Data of Charles Fort,” which implies that Fort’s ideas were later confirmed.  More subtly, “The Tenderizers,” posits—in a classic Lovecraftian manner—that there are some msyerious “they” controlling weird writers, making them tell of horrors so that the “they” can savor the fine bouquet of our fear.  And after they have been used up, the writers are harvested—which accounts for Ambrose Bierce’s mysterious disappearance in Mexico.  Any reader of Fort would remember that he suggested—jokingly—some cosmic force was collecting Bierces.  The stories “Sanctuary” and “The Pink Caterpillar” reverse the tale, reporting on mysterious appearances.  Another of Boucher’s stories plays with the classic Fortean maxim, “I think we are property.”  In “Conquest,” humans ingratiate themselves with a race of alien giants by becoming their pets—and thus will be able to sabotage the giants when galactic destroyers show up.

For the current purpose of understanding the San Francisco Forteans, another of Boucher’s Fortean references may be most useful.  In 1952’s “The Anomaly of the Empty Man,” Lamb, private detective who thrives on bizarre cases is bamboozled by his current one and so goes to the “Monkey Block”—Montgomery Block, an artist’s enclave on the edge of China Town and North Beach—right near where Robert Barbour Johnson and some others lived.  He is looking for a particular studio, “Verner’s Varieites,” which is run by the eccentric Dr. Verner, who oversees singers and sculptors and writers.   Verner is “Half Robert Burton and Half Charles Fort.”  He had been a world traveler and lover of many women and now stood at a lectern, writing—with a quill pen--The Anatomy of Nonscience, a sequel to Fort’s four books.  In general, Boucher suggests that Forteanism was common in the arts community of San Francisco—an expected part of the weirdness, maybe affected, maybe not.  But, I think that Kenneth MacNichol may also have been a model for Dr. Verner.  We know that Boucher was fond of using real people as models, that MacNichol had traveled the globe and gone through many loves, and was a dedicated Fortean.  He also worked right near the Monkey Block.  This San Francisco Fortean again connects mystery and science fiction writing.  He is related to Sherlock Holmes—they are supposed to be cousins—but uses the more Fortean mantra, that some part of the impossible must be possible.

It’s impossible that Boucher got this idea from the San Francisco Forteans—he was using it when he was in LA—but it captures nicely what he got out of Fort.

Anthony Boucher was something of an iconoclastic thinker—although less so, and certainly less Bohemian, than most of the Bay Area Forteans we’ve met to this point.  He was a liberal Catholic—not so unusual in those days—for women’s rights, civil rights, and even relatively sympathetic to homosexuals.  It may have only been a defense mechanism explaining why he was a pedant living in Berkeley but not a professor, nonetheless his argument for being a popular writer was cogent.  As his wife Phyllis remembered, according to the introduction to The Anthony Boucher Chronicles:

He used to say that the heresy of our age is the perceived dichotomy between art and entertainment: if something is one, it cannot be the other.  Things that are now being studied in school were in their own time great popular successes.  The public avidly awaited the next installment of a current Dickens novel.  There was a popular following of the Elizabethan theater and if the Greek theater.  He used to say that you could get a better idea of just what it was like to be alive in that time from reading the fiction of an earlier period than you could from reading factual history.

There is great truth to this argument.  Lawrence Levine has shown how Shakespeare was transformed from an object of popular enjoyment to the epitome of the high culture during the nineteenth century.  Eric Lott’ Love and Theft argues that the story was, perhaps, messier than Levine makes it out to be, but there is little doubt that the nineteenth century saw an increasingly rigid distinction between high and low culture.  The rise of mass culture tended to blur that distinction in the first part of the twentieth century, but, broadly speaking, the upper classes were not yet willing to give up on the earlier division, and so saved it by altering the hierarchy: the late 1930s through the 1950s saw a focus on the lines of demarcation between high brow, low brow and the newly conceived middle brow.  In this taxonomy, mysteries—for example Agatha Christie’s—could sometimes reach the middlebrow, but the great mass was lowbrow—“The pulps are the backbone of the American mystery novel,” he wrote in a 28 February 1943 column for the San Francisco Chronicle—and certainly science fiction and fantasy were lowbrow, fit for working men and adolescents, but not for the more refined.  (Boucher was also a fan of comics.)

Boucher was astute enough to see that some of such lowbrow entertainments were as good as that aimed at a highbrow audience and, more importantly, that the very lines defining the categories did not reflect the transcendental value of different works, but were historically contingent.  Shakespeare was always dense and intelligent—although the plays had scenes specially constructed to entertain the masses—but there was intelligent and worthwhile work being published in the pulps, too, which had to be entertaining for general readers but still could deal with important themes.  In that same San Francisco Chronicle article, he suggested that pulps send copies of their works to reviewers, as a way of bridging the divide between low- and middlebrow.  “Fantasy is an essential part of the tradition of the English short story—see any anthology for proof,” he wrote in a 15 November 1942 review of Clark Ashton Smith’s Out of Space and Time for the Chronicle.  “It has its writers and its readers, and the general editorial opposition has driven them, the supercilious might say, underground into a few pulps.  Don’t be too hasty to sneer at the word ‘pulp.’  These pulps provide the only steady market that would publish the work of a latter-day Bierce or Machen or Poe.”  Boucher wrote Rocket to the Morgue in part to publicize the really smart things the Southern California science fiction writers were saying and doing and thinking.

As I said earlier, that book was also Fortean—and admiring Fort was another of Boucher’s iconoclastic stances.

Boucher had what might be called an ironic appreciation of Fort.  “Few fields can be so diverting as good honest crackpottery,” he wrote in a 20 June 1943 review of The Challenge of the Great Pyramid in the Chronicle.  He enjoyed Fort’s work, calling him “the noble science-heckler of the Bronx” and thinking it “excellent” that others continued to collect and compile books of Fortean material.

Fortean thinking to Boucher, it seems, was one way of comprehending the unknown.  In a review of William Oliver Stevens Unbidden Guests” A Book of Real Ghosts for the 6 January 1946 Chronicle he suggested that Stevens’s preference for psychic theories was too restrictive and understanding ghosts required other interpretative framework, from psychoanalysis to Christianity, from Einsteinian physics to Fortean musing.

That the unknown was worth comprehending, Boucher had no doubt.  He knew (interesting) mystery writers who dabbled in the subject” H.F. Heard, he reported in a 27 January 1946 column for the Chronicle (Forteana seemed to be on his mind that month), was a mystical philosopher who composed his detective stories by automatic writing.  Kendell Foster Crossen and Bruce Elliot were practicing magicians; Stuart Palmer was “one of the few men willing to admit that he actually saw a sea serpent.”

Science fiction, too, dealt with the unknowable—in the process making it knowable.  While reviewing the science fiction anthology The Portable Novels of Science in the 7 October 1945 Chronicle, Boucher had an opportunity to discuss how scientifiction devotees, as he called them, in emulation of Hugo Gernsbeck, had thought about atomic bombs, space ships, time travel, and mutants for a long time before the rest of the world caught up.  Fort, he suggested, might be similarly visionary.  For example, Boucher reviewed John Alden Knight’s Moon Up—Moon Down in the 4 October 1942 Chronicle, which he compared to Fort in its eccentricities.  Knight’s book was about the periodicity of animal activity—which, based on his initial research on when to go fishing, and expanding from there—he decided was driven by some unyet-known factor.  The review starts with a story from Edmund Pearson—who?—about Fort.  Apparently, Fort looked up one of his own books at the NYPL and found an odd call number.  He asked the librarian, who told him that it referred to “eccentric literature.”  That classification can work for Knight and “that noble science-heckler of the Bronx,” but might someday have to lead to changes—just as Darwin’s book might once have seem eccentric.  (Probably not, since this shows little understanding of the history of biology: Darwin was not eccentric, but stood in an identifiable tradition; many just considered him wrong.)

Fantasy, of course, dealt with the uncanny as well—that was the basis of so many other Bay Area Forteans connection of Weird Tales and Fort.  But it also had a more ironic way of creating Forteana: by creating characters, known to be fake, but taken as real, just as Sherlock Holmes was.  In his 5 December 1953 review of the Lovecraft collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep in the Chronicle, he wrote: building on Bierce, Arthur Machen, and Robert W. Chambers, Lovecraft created the Cthullu Mythos “which dominated pulp fantasy during his lifetime and achieved an independent reality of its own almost comparable to the Holmes saga.”

But while he admitted Fort’s diligence, Boucher saw his work as limited: not only was it only one way to comprehend the unknown—apparently both competing with and complementing his own Christian Faith—but also he thought that Fort’s style undermined his work.  In a review of R. DeWitt Miller’s Forgotten Mysteries for the Chronicle (4 May 1947), he bemoaned Fort’s cryptic documentation and dim documentation.”

It is not known exactly when Boucher first came into contact with Fort, although it is likely when he went to Los Angeles and met the Mañana Society.  Certainly, this is how he presented it in Rocket to the Morgue.  In that novel, the main character, Lieutenant Marshal, is told about Fort when he confronts the science fiction author based on Robert Heinlein, who offers teleportation—citing Fort—as one science fiction explanation for a locked room mystery (76).  “Locked rooms,” Marshal said at another point, “fit into the Fort pattern if pattern it can be called.”  Inspired by the ingenious explanation, Marshal begins to explore Fort more and comes to see the world in Fortean terms (151).

In the course of the mystery, he meets Hugo Chantrelle—based on the occultist and racketeer Jack Parsons—and in him sees the possibilities and problems with Forteanism (112):

For Hugo Chantrelle was an eccentric scientist.  In working hours at the California Institute of Technology he was an uninspired routine laboratory man; but on his own time he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.  The rocketry of Pendray, the time-dreams of Dunne, the extra sensory perception of Rhine, the sea serpents of Gould, all these held his interests far more than any research conducted by the Insitute.  He was inevitably a member of the Fortean Society of America, and had his own file of unbelievable incidents eventually to be published as a supplement to the works of Charles Fort.  It must be added in his favor that his scientific training automatically preserved him from the errors of the Master.  His file was carefully authenticated, and often embellished with first hand reports.

Ultimately, its Fortean thinking that solves this locked room mystery.  The key was that an investigating doctor was wrong when he said it was impossible for Hilary to stab himself—he had (as Boucher really did) unusually jointed arms that allowed him to reach around his back easily.  Hilary’s brother-in-law Wimpole—based on that great charlatan L. Ron Hubbard—was nonplussed: “And I bit.  A good Fortean like me, and swallowing Science as gospel.”   The phrase that hung over the whole book was from Dr. Derringer, “Eliminate the impossible.  Then if nothing remains, some part of ‘impossible’ must be possible.”  This was clearly derived from the Holmesian mantra, but had a Fortean twist—making not the improbably the case, but the impossible.  Science did not know everything: the world was yet filled with mysteries.

Fort provided not just a way of thinking about the world, though, but also a way of living in the world.  For instance, he discussed otherwise unreported UFO activity in San Diego with Miriam Allen de Ford.  (Worth considering is trying to understand better the connection between Boucher’s Forteanism and his Catholicism.)

He mentions in a footnote to Miriam Allen De Ford’s “Charles Fort: Enfant Terrible of Science,” which he published in the January 1954 issue of FSF that he investigated a stone-fall case in Oakland in 1943.  He thought that the coverage provided by the local press was “misleading and sometimes outright mendacious” and decried the loss of Fort.  But, as compelling as Forteanism was, it was not enough to restructure the rest of his life: it was a useful exercise, but did not determine a lifestyle.  On 3 August 1944 he wrote to de Ford that he had let the matter of the stone drop (a pun!): “A combination of factors (travel, then a long illness, then pure damned inertia) kept me from following it up.  Sorry.”

Boucher’s interest in science fiction and fantasy did not dwindle, though.  He wrote a poem for Weird Tales, reviewed science fiction and fantasy for the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News.  During his time in Los Angeles, in the late 1930s, he became acquainted with the Mañana Literary Society, which was a club of science fictioneers (as they often called themselves), including Robert Heinlein, Cleve Cartmill, Ed Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and others.  Boucher wrote about the Society in his mystery Rocket to the Morgue (which was published under a different pseudonym: H. H. Holmes; that was not a reference to Sherlock, at least not explicitly, but the borrowed pseudonym of murderer, Herman Mudgett—who, incidentally, was the subject of the recent The  Devil in the White City.)

Rocket to the Morgue is interesting in a number of ways.  It gave some clues to Boucher’s interest in Forteana—indeed, it is a very Fortean book.  It also gave a glimpse of the science fictioneers at work during the late 1930s.  (It was published in 1942 and set in 1941.)  It is self-referential: one of the characters is Anthony Boucher, another member of the Society, and his wife.  The book also recasts the Sherlock Homes mythos into the world of weird fiction and science fiction tales.  It is set in a world where science fiction was given a huge lift by author Fowler Foulkes, who created the character Dr. Derringer.  Derringer did for science fiction what Holmes did for mysteries—made them possible, was the epitome of the genre, was so believable that he almost seemed to be alive and, indeed, seemed to come to life in the course of the mystery.  At the time the story took place, Fowler Foulkes had died and his literary empire was being run by his son, Hilary.  Writing about the all the ways that Hilary frustrated those who hoped to adapt Derringer to different media or to continue his exploits in new stories gave Boucher a chance to comment on the manager of the Holmes character, Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur, who also jealously protected his father’s legacy and often confounded the plans of fans who wanted to use Sherlock Holmes in new ways.

Boucher’s most famous intervention into the world of weird tales, though, was as co-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Originally conceived as only a fantasy magazine, FSF, as the cognoscenti knew it, became the successor to John W. Campbell’s Astounding—even as that magazine continued publishing.  It can be arguably said to be the standard-bearer of science fiction magazines during the 1950s, and certainly so of the fantasy—or weird—tale, with Weird Tales itself ceasing publication in the middle 1950s, after years of decline.  The magazine published a couple of Bay Area Forteans, Garen Drussai and Miriam Alan de Ford (who published an article on Fort).  Toward the end of his life, Clark Ashton Smith had George Haas facilitate correspondence with Boucher; Smith was having trouble finding new markets for his work, and hoped Boucher could help.  (Apparently, he couldn’t.)  Other Fortean inflected stories also appeared here.

Boucher edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction until 1958.  He stayed active in the field—and in mystery—up to his death from lung cancer on 29 April 1968.