FAQs
What exactly is Bouchercon?
Bouchercon is the Annual World Mystery Convention, where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a long weekend of education, entertainment, and fun.
The first Bouchercon took place in 1970 in Santa Monica and the Guest of Honor was Robert Bloch of Psycho fame. Recent Bouchercons have been held in Chicago, Anchorage, Baltimore, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and this year in St. Louis.
What happens at Bouchercon?
Our days are built around panel discussions and other programming, on a wide variety of topics designed to allow lots of interaction among readers and writers. There are typically four or five programs to choose from at any given moment. They can be humorous or serious, educational or entertaining, and most often are a little bit of everything.
There are many author signing sessions, there's a book room, and each year includes special events such as award ceremonies, movie nights, and parties. And always, there are a lot of people just hanging out and enjoying each other's company.
Why is it called Bouchercon you ask?
It's named for Anthony Boucher, a renowned writer and reviewer of mysteries. Boucher wrote a vast amount of mystery criticism, from the early 1940's till his death in 1968. He is considered the most influential critic in modern mystery history. Boucher's critical writings set the tone for modern mystery reviewing.
Boucher's influence began right away, in that many of the books he recommended became winners of the Edgar awards, the annual awards for mystery fiction presented by the Mystery Writers of America. He was often the first writer to identify famous talent. He was the first translator of Borges into English, in the 1940's, nearly 20 years before anyone else outside of Argentina was aware of his existence. He championed Ross MacDonald as the leading private eye writer of the 1950's, a dozen years before MacDonald achieved mainstream fame in 1969.
Boucher started a tradition of separate, but equal, subgenres of crime fiction. A Boucher year end round up of the best books of the year, would break the books down into categories such as classic puzzles, police procedurals, private eye, suspense, spy fiction, comic mystery novels, social commentary novels, and so on, and cite the best books in each category. No one category of crime fiction would be privileged over any other by Boucher. He believed that good books in any subgenre were especially worthy of respect.
He plotted more than 100 radio episodes for The Adventures of Ellery Queen, while also providing plots for the bulk of the Sherlock Holmes radio dramas, as well as having created his own mystery series for the airwaves, The Casebook of Gregory Hood. In addition, Anthony Boucher also edited True Crime Detective magazine (1952 53), half a dozen detection anthologies and, in succession, three major American lines of crime fiction: the Mercury Mysteries (1952 55), the Dell Great Mystery Library (1957 60) and the Collier Mystery Classics (1962 68). The Mystery Writers of America elected him their President for 1951, and three times voted him the Edgar Allan Poe award for excellence in criticism (1946, 1950, & 1953).
