Read an Excerpt
Introduction by F. Paul Wilson
For the longest time I thought it was “Boo-SHAY.” I’d seen the name “Anthony Boucher” a lot: On the masthead of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, and I’d read his Far and Away and The Compleat Werewolf collections of SF and fantasy fiction. I was studying French in school, so it seemed natural to use the French pronunciation. Only when I attended my first Bouchercon did I learn to pronounce it “BOW-chur.”
Bouchercon is an annual gathering of mystery readers, writers, and collectors, and I was confused as to why they’d name it after a sci-fi guy. But to these folks, Anthony Boucher was a mystery guy—he not only wrote mysteries, he reviewed them for the San Francisco Chronicle, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and the New York Times. Oh, and he helped found the Mystery Writers of America. So, yeah, he was a mystery guy too.
Rocket to the Morgue combines both these passions.
When Otto Penzler, the esteemed publisher of this line of classic mystery novels, emailed me saying he thought I’d be “a great choice” to write an introduction to Rocket to the Morgue, I wondered why. I’d never heard of the novel and I’m not known as a mystery writer. I started in science fiction, moved into horror fiction, and for the last quarter century or so I’ve busied myself with weird thrillers. But it was Otto, and it was Boucher, and the novel had “rocket” and “morgue” in the title, so I said I’d give it a read.
Am I ever glad I did.
A little background: the man born William Anthony Parker White did most of his writing under the name Anthony Boucher; in the early 1940s his Boucher pen name adopted the pseudonym “H. H. Holmes” (which is, in turn, the pseudonym of a late 19th century serial killer) to write mysteries, including Rocket to the Morgue. (Confused? Wait . . .)
Rocket is set in 1941 Los Angeles, less than a year before the USA entered World War Two. It can be categorized as a locked-room mystery, but it’s so much more than that. It’s a firsthand peek into the innards of what came to be known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction, written by a man who hung out with the writers who forged that age and became household names within the genre. Not only did he know those writers, he peopled the novel with thinly disguised versions of them.
But I knew none of this when I opened the copy Otto sent me.
Chapter one is a commonplace domestic scene that introduces the detective protagonist, Lt. Terence Marshall. He’s soon faced with a locked-room stabbing that defies explanation. He turns to an unorthodox consultant.
But chapter two drops us, in medias res, into a clichéd space opera starring Captain Comet and his robot companion Adam Fink—
Hold on. Captain Comet sounded an awful lot like Edmond Hamilton’s Captain Future from that period, and I remembered a whole series of stories by the Binder brothers about a robot named Adam Link.
Turns out Boucher has us watching over the shoulder of pulp writer Joe Henderson as he types out his latest novel while talking to his agent, M. Halstead Phyn, specialist in SF and fantasy.
Interesting . . . was this a tip of the hat by Boucher?
Then, in a progression of vignettes, we meet various pulp writers who all have a reason to hate a certain Hilary Foulkes, ruthless executor of his father’s huge literary estate. All typical mystery fare until Boucher drops a bombshell:
It happens during the opening of the novel’s second day when a character drops the name “Don Stuart,” editor of two magazines, Surprising Stories and The Worlds Beyond.
I almost drop the book.
Don A. Stuart was the pseudonym of John W. Campbell, under which he wrote the timeless Who Goes There? (adapted into The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing). In 1941, under his real name, he was editor of not one but two magazines: Astounding Stories and Unknown Worlds. No question: He was talking about John W. Campbell—my mentor.
Decades later, when I was trying to break in, Campbell was also the only editor who told me why he was rejecting my stories. His rejections became my only writing course. I made my very first sale to him in 1970.
Imagine my shock to see Boucher’s characters talking about this Don Stuart fellow—knowingly and with respect as the editor who was forcing science fiction to grow up. Which is exactly what Campbell did, starting in 1937, as editor of Astounding.
From that point on I started putting the characters under a microscope. Half the fun of the novel (at least for me) was sussing out who was who.
No question that one of the early major suspects, Austin Carter, is Robert A. Heinlein, known as “the dean of science fiction.” The detective interviews him in Carter’s office where the writer has a wall chart to keep track of all the interrelated stories he pens under his own name. Fact: In 1941 Astounding published a chart delineating the course of Heinlein’s “Future History” stories.
The scene also gives insight into how the pulp writers played the game. The average pay rate was a penny a word, with an occasional bonus of a quarter of a cent to half a cent per word. Austin Carter explains his use of multiple pseudonyms:
“So whatever’s outside the series is by Robert Hadley—that is, in a one-cent market or better. I don’t like to hurt the commercial value of those names, so whenever I sell a reject for under a cent, it’s by Clyde Summers.” Fact: Heinlein did just this with his pseudonyms “Anson MacDonald” and “Lyle Monroe.” In fact, these pseudonyms have cameos in the novel.
Elsewhere, in conversation with the character named Joe Henderson—seen earlier writing Captain Comet space operas—someone mentions “annihilating galaxies left and right.” Well, the writer who penned the deliberately juvenile Captain Future novels was Edmund Hamilton—or rather, Edmund “World Wrecker” Hamilton, as he was known.
As for agent M. Halstead Phyn, specialist in SF and fantasy, he might be Julius Schwartz, but I’m going with Forrest J. Ackerman, an agent and a fixture around the LA science fiction community at that time.
The only writer character I had no feel for was Matt Duncan. He may well represent a real person, but I know too little about him to make a guess.
So, Boucher has Heinlein, Hamilton, and Forry Ackerman on stage, with John W. Campbell in the prompt box.
But who does writer “D. Vance Wimpole” represent? He’s got crimson hair and blue eyes and can dash off a thirty-thousand word novella like most people scratch out a shopping list. He’s also a cad, a conniver, and a pathological liar.
There’s only one answer: L. Ron Hubbard. Before he invented Dianetics and Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard was a redheaded, prodigiously prolific writer, known for the speed at which he could compose, who sold to a wide array of SF, fantasy, adventure, and western pulps. His reputation was that of a chronically broke womanizer who wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the nose.
An amazing cast. Rocket to the Morgue made me very happy. In fact, it made me want to run up to every science fiction fan I know and shove a copy at them, shouting, “You have got to read this!”
The mystery element made me happy too. I’m usually pretty good at sussing out the perp, and I thought I’d solved the second murder (yes, there are two), but I was wrong. I like when a book fools me.
If you’re not into science fiction, or if you think science fiction began with Star Trek or Star Wars, ignore all my backgrounding and simply enjoy Rocket to the Morgue as the murder mystery Anthony Boucher intended it to be. But if you’re a well-read fan, or simply interested in the history of the genre, a double treat awaits.
F. Paul Wilson
The Jersey Shore
Summer 2018
