The Order of Martha of Bethany (Anthony Boucher) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Anthony Boucher is remembered in the science-fiction community primarily for his editing, with and later without J. Francis McComas, of the first nine years of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Earlier, he sold some SF stories to Astounding Science-Fiction and to various pulp magazines; these have been collected in a volume with his fantasy stories by the New England Science Fiction Association (Compleat). But Boucher also wrote mystery fiction, including two novels, two short stories, and a novella with a nun detective--these, under the pseudonym of H. H. Holmes, between 1940 and 1946. Poul Anderson, one of the major science-fiction writers of the second half of the twentieth century, met Boucher at a science-fiction convention in 1950 (Anderson, "Autobiographical" 24); and Anderson sold him, for F & SF, a number of stories after that magazine's founding in 1949 (Anderson, Going 111). Anderson's significance for this essay will be explained later.