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Common Knowledge

Legal name: White, William Anthony Parker
Other names: Holmes, H. H. (pen name)
Boucher, Anthony (pen name)
Mudgett, Herman W. (pen name)
Birthdate: 1911-08-21
Date of death: 1968-04-29
Gender: male
Nationality: USA
Birthplace: Oakland, California, USA
Place of death: Oakland, California, USA
Places of residence: Oakland, California, USA
Education: University of Southern California
University of California, Berkeley
Occupations: writer
editor
literary critic
Awards and honors: Hugo Nominee (Professional Editor, Retro-Hugo, [1951], 2001)
Disambiguation notice: Also wrote under the names Herman W. Mudgett and H. H. Holmes.

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Reviews

Rocket to the Morgue (American Mystery Classics) by Anthony Boucher

A Roman à clef* of Sci-Fi Writers
Review of the Penzler Publishers American Mystery Classics eBook edition (July 23, 2019) of the Duell, Sloan and Pearce hardcover original (1942).

This is the way it was in Southern California just before the war, when science fiction was being given its present form by such authors as Robert A. Heinlein (still the undisputed Master), Cleve Cartmill, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and many others. (And this is as wise a place as any to add hastily that no character in this novel is based specifically on any actual writer—nor is any character quite devoid of some factual basis.) - from the Afterword by author Antony Boucher.

Although Antony Boucher's Afterword tries to distance him from direct 1-to-1 correlations between his fictional characters in Rocket to the Morgue and the real-life science fiction authors they were based on, F. Paul Wilson's Introduction to this 2019 AMC edition states them explicitly. You can also read them in a section of the Wikipedia entry for the book.

So the fun of this is primarily the fictional depictions of authors such as Robert A. Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard as murder suspects Austin Carter and D. Vance Wimpole in the book. The Wimpole character is already portrayed as a shifty, lecherous and unlikeable character, and this is well before the time when Hubbard invented his Scientology grift in 1953.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/RocketToTheMorgue.jpg
Cover of the original first edition published under the pseudonym H.H. Holmes by Duell, Sloan and Pearce in 1942. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

The detective Terry Marshal and his consultant Sister Ursula play rather minor roles throughout. It is a bit of a locked room mystery with various murder attempts on Hilary Foulkes, the son and literary executor of (fictional) sci-fi author Fowler Foulkes. Foulkes Jr. is despised by the rest of the literary community for exorbitant fees charged for the use of his father's copyright material. That scenario reminded me of the story of Stephen Joyce, the grandson of James Joyce, who held a similar iron hand over his grandfather's estate until the works entered the public domain in 2012. However, the situation in Rocket to the Morgue (1942) pre-dates the litigations and bans of the Joyce estate, which were mostly in the late 20th century.

Overall, this was goofy fun with most of the drama and interest coming from its real-world parallels.

Footnote
* From French: a novel with a key. Usually a novel where pseudonyms are used for the names of real life people. Sometimes the plot is a fictionalized version of events which actually happened. One therefore needs a "key" i.e. the secret code to identify who or what someone or something is based on.

Trivia and Links
There is a short section in this book devoted to a listing of "What If" speculative or alternate history literature, a sub-genre of fantasy and sci-fi. It was especially interesting to learn that Winston S. Churchill once wrote a speculative fiction piece If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg, written as if by a future historian in a world where the North had lost the American Civil War. The piece originally appeared in Scribner's Magazine in 1930 and was later collected in the anthology If It Had Happened Otherwise (1931).

This edition of Rocket to the Morgue is part of the Otto Penzler American Mystery Classics series (2018-ongoing). There is a related Goodreads Listopia here with 57 books listed as of early June 2024. There are currently 72 titles listed at the Mysterious Press online bookshop. The official website for the series at Penzler Publishers seems to show only the most recent and upcoming titles.… (more)

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alanteder | 6 other reviews | Jun 2, 2024 |

The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth… by Various

The Contents are below. Fantasy and Sci-Fi was a favourite magazine of mine at the time.
Introduction (Best from F&SF 8) - (1959) - essay by Anthony Boucher
Ministering Angels - (1955) - shortstory by C. S. Lewis
Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot - (January 1958) - shortstory by Reginald Bretnor
Backwardness - (1958) - shortstory by Poul Anderson
The Wait - (1958) - shortstory by Kit Reed
Origin of the Species - (1958) - poem by Karen Anderson
The Up-to-Date Sorcerer - (1958) - shortstory by Isaac Asimov
Epithalamium - (1958) - poem by Doris Pitkin Buck
A Deskful of Girls - (1958) - novelette by Fritz Leiber
Eripmav - (1958) - shortstory by Damon Knight
The Watchers - (1958) - poem by Anthony Brode
Poor Little Warrior! - (1958) - shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss
The Better Bet - (1958) - poem by Anthony Brode
The Omen - (1958) - shortstory by Shirley Jackson
Ye Phantasie Writer and His Catte - (1958) - poem by Winona McClintic
Gil Braltar - (1958) - shortstory by Jules Verne
In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner - (1958) - poem by Karen Anderson
The Grantha Sighting - (1958) - shortstory by Avram Davidson
Theory of Rocketry - (1958) - shortstory by C. M. Kornbluth
C. M. Kornbluth: A Memorial Bibliography (Recommended Reading) - (1958) - essay by Anthony Boucher
A New Lo! - (1958) - essay by Ron Goulart
Gorilla Suit - (1958) - shortstory by John Shepley
Captivity - (1958) - novella by Zenna Henderson
The Men Who Murdered Mohammed - (1958) - shortstory by Alfred Bester
Valise Macabre - (1957) - poem by Winona McClintic… (more)

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DinadansFriend | 2 other reviews | May 31, 2024 |

The Best From Fantasy And Science Fiction Sixth Series by Anthony ed. Boucher

F/SF

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beskamiltar | Apr 10, 2024 |

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,… by William Lindsay Gresham

The golden age of Science Fiction - When our astronauts where rocketeers that conquered space in V2 🚀 lookalikes wearing fishbowl helmets. The good old times when nuclear was atomic, robots were clunky metallurgic automatons regularly to be seen carrying off beautiful maidens, and computers, despite having already utilized a tantalizingly exotic particle called the positron - which clearly did nothing to streamline their design - remained massive objects on the scale of the then contemporary ENIACs and EDVACs. Many a grandmaster of Science Fiction left his/her mark in this magazine. Amongst the quaint and quirky, the cliched and trite banalities there are pearls to find.
The stories might be of varying quality, yet the importance these magazine held for, then, upcoming new writers can not be overestimated - the golden age of science fiction has passed but left a fantastic legacy.… (more)

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nitrolpost | Mar 19, 2024 |

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