Anthony Boucher

Anthony Boucher was the pen name of William Anthony Parker White, an American science-fiction and mystery editor, author, critic, and translator whose influence on both genres during the mid-twentieth century was substantial enough to give his name to the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention. Born in 1911 in Oakland, California, Boucher published his first mystery novel, The Case of the Seven of Calvary, in 1937. He went on to write a series of detective novels featuring the amateur sleuth Fergus O'Breen, contributed steadily to the science-fiction and mystery short-story magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, and produced one of the standard 1940s detective novels, Rocket to the Morgue, drawing on his close acquaintance with the early Los Angeles science-fiction community. His enduring impact, however, came through editing. From 1949 until 1958 he co-founded and edited The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, alongside J. Francis McComas, helping to establish what became one of the most respected fiction magazines in the field. His parallel work as the longtime mystery-fiction reviewer for the New York Times (1951-1968) gave him a central role in shaping mainstream critical reception of crime fiction during the genre's mid-century maturation. Boucher was also a pioneering translator who brought significant works of Spanish-language and French detective fiction into English, including Jorge Luis Borges's first English-language publication in the United States. He died in 1968, and the mystery-writing community's long-running annual convention — Bouchercon — was named in his honor and continues to draw thousands of attendees worldwide.