Short Story Wednesday: BEST DETECTIVE STORIES OF THE YEAR: 23rd Annual Collection, edited by Anthony Boucher (Dutton, 1968)

Best Detective Stories of the Year: 23rd Annual Collection edited by Anthony Boucher (William White) (Dutton, 1968, 253pp, hardcover)

• 9 · Introduction · Anthony Boucher · in 1968
• 13 · By Child Undone · Jack Ritchie · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine October 1967
• 27 · Kessler, the Inside Man · George Fox · ss Esquire October 1967
• 44 · Good Man, Bad Man · Jerome Weidman · ss The Saturday Evening Post July 1 1967
• 65 · Long Way Up, Short Way Down · Ken W. Purdy · ss Playboy November 1967
• 80 · The Beddoes Scheme [Acting Sergeant Maynard Bullock] · James Powell · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine October 1967
• 111 · The Dead Man · Jorge Luís Borges; translated by Anthony Kerrigan · ss The New Yorker January 7 1967
  translated from the Spanish (“El muerto”, Sur, November 1946).
• 118 · B as in Burglary [Mitch Taylor; Bill Decker] · Lawrence Treat · nv Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine July 1967
• 141 · Rink: a 1001st Precinct Mystery · Ron Goulart · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine November 1967 [Ref. Ed McBain]
• 151 · File #1: The Mayfield Case [Daniel Kearny Associates] · Joseph N. Gores · ss Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine December 1967
• 173 · Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot · Grendel Briarton · vi The Baker Street Journal June 1967
• 175 · A Delicate Balance · James McKimmey, Jr. · nv Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine May 1967
• 203 · The Road to Damascus [Daniel John Calder; Samuel Behrens] · Michael Gilbert · nv Argosy (UK) June 1966
• 229 · The Best Driver in the County · Jack Ritchie · ss Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine September 1967
• 241 · The Oblong Room [Captain Leopold] · Edward D. Hoch · ss The Saint Magazine July 1967
• 255 · Honor Roll · [uncredited] · notable stories not included in the 1968 volume

Sixth and last of the volumes in this series edited by "Anthony Boucher" (and this one even copyrighted in 1968 by his widow, Phyllis White), Boucher notes in his introduction his series of distracting illnesses over the last year and more, and apologizes for not including the innovation in the series he added upon succeeding David Cooke and "Brett Halliday" as editor, the Yearbook of the Detective Story...there are thus intimations that Boucher suspected this might be among his last works.

Also notable, the degree to which old favorites, among writers and magazines, are depended upon, and larger than even usual percentage of the book devoted to variously humorous crime fiction. He hadn't taken a story from Manhunt, a pale shadow of its glory days by the mid-'60s, since the '64 volume, nor any from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in this volume, nor do either have any citations in the "Honor Roll', leading to suspicions he might not have read their issues for '67 (or at least not charitably) and, lamenting the folding of The Saint Mystery Magazine in '67, he cites it as his second-favorite, after Ellery Queen's, with which he had a long and collegial relationship (ranging from publishing the first English-language translation of Borges's fiction in that magazine in the 1940s, to co-founding The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as Mercury Press's second fiction magazine per se, after EQMM in 1941, in 1949).

Ron Goulart, for example, began his professional career in the informal writer's workshop Boucher ran in his San Francisco Bay-area house, and Goulart's first professional sale was a reprint of his humor piece "Letters to the Editor", originally published in the U.C. Berkeley campus humor magazine Pelican, to F&SF in 1950. His story in this volume is an expert lampoon of Evan Hunter's "Ed McBain"-written "87th Precinct" series, with a special attention to, among other details, the incessance with which characters "cradle" their telephones rather than simply hang up. Likewise: "It bothered [Lt.] Terse sometimes that Megapolis City had the same street names as New York City. He had learned to work with it."

Jack Ritchie, another writer with at least a certain humorous touch to any of his impressive array of short stories, has two stories in this volume, the first being lead-off story "By Child Undone", Ritchie's slick and rather deft bit of fair-play detection writing (not his common mode); I guessed the gimmick, but not too long before Ritchie had the protagonist learn what it was. 

While the closing story is the only selection from The Saint magazine, and a clangorous one it is, Edward Hoch's early masterpiece "The Oblong Room", one which I first read in a "Hitchcock" anthology when I was about ten. The years have been kind to this bit of suspense fiction, and an early Captain Leopold story, with rather smoothly sensible handling of the potential kink and sexual minority aspects of the story helping to distinguish it deftly from too many of the other stories of the time, or since. Turns out to be far more sadly twisted than any of those aspects would drive...a very good story, and one which earned its Edgar Award for best short story of its year. It also deserved better proofreading than it got in this volume, with far more notable typos than the other stories seem to have...glad my first read, all those decades ago, looked less like the result of an optical scan of a grey photocopy. I suspect Boucher might well've passed by the time the galley of this one had been prepared, or was too close to it.

"Grendel Briarton" (Reginald or R. Bretnor) is represented here by one of his Ferdinand Feghoot pun stories, which Boucher is quick to note were a particular indulgence of his own in F&SF during his editorship, and Boucher was happy when Robert Mills, Boucher's successor as F&SF editor (and managing editor working with Frederic Dannay at EQMM, editor of Mercury Mystery Book/Magazine and Venture Science Fiction, both sadly folded as Mills stepped in at F&SF, and the continuing into the '60s Bestseller Mystery magazine)...happy when Mills continued to publish "feghoots", notable, Boucher notes, for not being solely pun stories, but pun stories (rather loosely) keyed to historical or "future-historical" events to spin their puns out of. This first post-F&SF example (Boucher somewhat disappointed Avram Davidson and Edward Ferman didn't share his enthusiasm for the series) appeared in the Sherlockian club organ The Baker Street Journal, and is about what one might expect from the series, cheerfully indulging in Holmes puns more heavily than any previous example chose to bang on about its targets. As someone who likes a good pun story...Fredric Brown could do them very well at times...this example is a bit of understandable nostalgia at play, and harmlessly brief. 

And in presenting Anthony Kerrigan's translation of Jorge Luis Borges's "The Dead Man", Boucher notes that Borges is his favorite living writer of any kind. Kerrigan, translating for the 1967 US version of A Personal Anthology, isn't quite as deft at the task as Borges himself and Norman Thomas di Giovanni would be a couple of years later, but essentially every predecessor is that much better than currently in-print Penguin's Anthony Hurley's butchery as to forgive nearly everything, in comparison. The Borges, which as Boucher notes, is an example of Borges making "the synopsis into an art form," also is part of JLB's career-long tribute to narrators from Lady Murasaki's on over to those from the earliest Arabic literature who continue to wish you to know things they describe might just have happened another way entirely. It's simply a pity that Boucher either didn't care for Borges's fantasy fiction, or, even more likely, didn't think F&SF readers would appreciate it. I certainly would've. This is, as Borges readers probably remember, a revenge story among the Argentine/Uruguayan criminal element.

Boucher is also very happy to feature one of Lawrence Treat's Homicide Squad/Alphabet stories, as every Boucher volume has, which Boucher credits as creating the template for police procedurals (more arguable than Boucher allows, but perhaps in terms of modern policing, more true than not) and the first of Joe Gores's DKA File stories, thus introducing the private detective procedural (same caveats, though in terms of realistic private detection, hard to argue with).

More to come after other tasks and needs attended to!

For more of today's Short Story reviews, please see Patti Abbott's blog.