Anthony Boucher (1911–1968)

The golden age of Science Fiction - When our astronauts where rocketeers that conquered space in V2 🚀 lookalikes wearing fishbowl helmets. The good old times when nuclear was atomic, robots were clunky metallurgic automatons regularly to be seen carrying off beautiful maidens, and computers, despite having already utilized a tantalizingly exotic particle called the positron - which clearly did nothing to streamline their design - remained massive objects on the scale of the then contemporary ENIACs and EDVACs. Many a grandmaster of Science Fiction left his/her mark in this magazine. Amongst the quaint and quirky, the cliched and trite banalities there are pearls to find.
The stories might be of varying quality, yet the importance these magazine held for, then, upcoming new writers can not be overestimated - the golden age of science fiction has passed but left a fantastic legacy.… (plus d'informations)

The titular Irregulars are serving as advisors on a new Hollywood adaptation of Sherlock Holmes’s work, a movie project that has their hackles up because it’s a hard-boiled story and the screenwriter is an ass with no respect for the source material. Plenty seem to share the negative opinion of the screenwriter: warnings with references to Holmes start coming in, and then, murder! Now the Irregulars test their detective mettle to solve the crime, with or without help from the police. I enjoyed this a great deal; I don’t know everything about Sherlock, probably just the more obvious references presented here, but I did find all of the clues fair when they were explained. Worth reading if you like Holmes or Holmes-adjacent fiction.

This book was recommended to me by a browse on the American Mystery Classics website.… (plus d'informations)