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.
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.
