Dreams of Justice Read Free

Matter of Quality’ (which used the detective story of private murder to examine the self-conscious class structure of England), was a finalist in the C.W.A.’s 1962 awards. (Both were published in this country.) Despite these well-deserved honors, he has so far received little recognition.
    “‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold’ should establish him firmly beside Ambler and Greene in the small rank of writers who can create a novel of significance, while losing none of the excitement of the tale of sheer adventure.”
    But Boucher also made a point of promoting lesser-known writers, often British (“The macabre intellectuality of the fantasy, the almost outrageous skill of the writing, the brilliance of the concept and treatment make this one of the finds of the season,” he wrote about “The Daffodil Affair” by Michael Innes. “The true mystery fan may frown more than a little, but the readers of Norman Douglas, Evelyn Waugh, John Collier or the early Huxley will acclaim a new treasure”).
    Other courageous genre-crossers like Sally Benson were also praised for their work. “It is not a nice world that Miss Benson presents here,” he said about a short story collection called “Women And Children First.” “It is a world of possessiveness and pretension and petty cruelty, a cat-eat-cat existence. It is a world that you will recognize and remember.”
    Newcomers to the mystery field such as Ed McBain, Arthur W. Upfield, Jim Thompson, Vin Packer and David Goodis were also recognized. Reviewing 23-year-old Ira Levin’s first novel, “A Kiss Before Dying” in the New York Times, Boucher commented on its “...superlatively enviable sheer professionalism. Levin combines great talent for pure novel writing—full-bodied characterization, subtle psychological exploration, vivid evocation of locale—with strict technical whodunit tricks as dazzling as anything ever brought off by Carr, Rawson, Queen or Christie.”
    “He used to say,” his wife Phyllis White remarked, “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 of the Greek theater. He said 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 a factual history.”
    “It is not true, as some suggest, that Boucher was a gentle critic who did not give negative reviews,” writes Francis Nevins. According to Phyllis White, he felt that his first responsibility was to the reader who paid for the books he reviewed, and that if he just spoke kindly of everything it would be of no value. Nevertheless, Boucher took pains to help writers and often wrote letters of suggestion and encouragement.
    “If the book was a weak effort with some saving grace,” Nevins adds, “he’d pinpoint the flaws precisely and take pains to note the good side: ‘...a slow-moving routine plot, weakly detected, but partially redeemed by a convincing first-hand picture of northernmost Alaska.’ To the hopelessly shoddy or inept work he’d give short shrift but usually with a dash of wit, as when he called a particularly boring John Rhode novel ‘the dreariest Rhode I have yet traversed.’
    “Surprisingly, George Bagby is something of a bore in ‘Another Day—Another Death,’ he said about a popular writer. “The telling is crisp and amusing, as always. But this time, Inspector Schmidt faces a weak plot, resolved largely by happenstance. Bagby keeps acting as foolishly as any Idiot Heroine of a bad crime romance; and pivotal characters are kept almost entirely offstage. (We are given less than 3,000 words to become acquainted with the murderer.) Unexpected performance