I was informed by his son that Victor Berch died on Friday, October 30, 2015. He was 91. Victor is well known to many people in the collecting community and he will be sorely missed.

   Victor had a massive collection that filled his house from top to bottom.

   He collected dime novels and was well known among those collectors, being close personal friends with Edward Le Blanc and Ed Levy, of Charlton Publications.

   He collected paperbacks of every kind, including much early porn, having amassed large quantities of Greenleaf, Brandon House and Olympia Press pbs, as well as many obscure soft-core pbs from the early 60s. One of his specialties was Lancer Books and he had a massive collection of Lancer and all its companion imprints.

   He collected pulps. I first met him through pulp fan Will Murray. Victor had initiated a correspondence with Will and eventually, realizing that they both lived in eastern Massachusetts, they decided to meet for lunch. Will called me afterwards and told me what a fascinating person Victor was, so I expressed an interest in meeting him, too. When Will mentioned my name to him, Victor said “Is that the Ken Johnson who did the SF Pornography index?” and expressed a desire to meet me. Will brought him to my place and after admiring my somewhat modest collection and chatting about obscure bibliographic matters, Victor sat back and asked “So, what can I do to help you with your research?”

   This, I learned, was typical of Victor. He loved helping other people with their research and was always generous with his time and expertise. A few years back, some people researching Louisa May Alcott made a breakthrough in identifying the potboiler stories she had written at the beginning of her career. Eventually several books were compiled from these stories; it is my understanding that the final volume consisted entirely of stories located by Victor Berch.

   Victor was born in 1924. He served in the Merchant Marine in World War II. He graduated from Brandeis University with a Master’s Degree in Mediterranean Studies. In his course of study he learned to read and/or speak Spanish, French, Latin, Greek (ancient and modern), Russian, Arabic and Hebrew. I believe he could also read Egyptian Hieroglyphics. None of this prepared him for his professional career, however. In his wayward youth, Victor had been a book scout for George Gloss of the Brattle Book Store. It was that expertise that got him the job of Rare Book Librarian at Brandeis in 1966.

   Victor was married and had two sons. His wife Sarah died several years ago, of Huntington’s Disease.

   Victor had a health scare in 2007 and decided to begin disposing of his collection. A collector from New York bought all his dime novels and pulp magazines and wrote him a five-figure check. I got first crack at his paperbacks. He sold me his sleazy digest PBs at far below what he could have gotten for them on eBay, but he knew that I would put them to good use in my research. Bruce Black flew out from Illinois and bought 8 or 10 boxes of paperbacks, mostly porn. Even after that there was still a ton of stuff there and it took several more visits before I finally reached bottom. There was still so much stuff left that it hardly looked like anything was gone.

   Unfortunately, Victor fell down the stairs in 2008 and broke his hip. He was in rehab for a couple of months, then moved into an assisted living facility in Brookline. He never fully recovered and became less mobile over time. He never lost his enthusiasm for research, however, and continued feeding information to Al Hubin for his Crime Fiction updates.

   About 20 years ago Victor discovered that the Library of Congress had microfilmed a large amount of old magazines, including many early pulps. Through inter-library loan he had Brandeis borrow a huge amount of them and printed out the contents pages. He compiled a few indexes of short-run titles and published them in the Pulp APA but the bulk of them remained untapped. He passed them on to me when he started dumping his collection. For the last 6 years I’ve been slowly borrowing the same microfilms, annotating those contents pages, and sending the info to FictionMags. So in many ways Victor’s research efforts will continue to bear fruit for years to come.

   This hastily written tribute can barely express how much his friendship meant to me. I have gratefully acknowledged his help in all of my paperback indexes. I have become a better bibliographer from his example but my expertise still pales in comparison. He has inspired many of us to do better work, dig deeper, and leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of knowledge. He will be missed.

Editorial Comment:   I learned the sad news from Al Hubin in an email from him waiting for me when I got up this morning. I knew Victor was slowing down, but I heard from him several times over the summer, always cheerful and asking how I was doing. While his death wasn’t surprising news, it was still a shock, as it always is when someone you have called a friend for over 20 years passes away.

   Here’s a list of the projects and articles Victor did for Mystery*File over the years, some his own projects, some in collaboration with others, including myself. Some have needed some updating for a while now. The fault is mine, not Victor’s.

Pulp Author CHARLES W. TYLER, by Victor A. Berch.

MASTERPIECES OF MYSTERY: A Bibliographical Account, Presented by Victor A. Berch.

THE STORY OF ALLEN HYMSON, by Victor A. Berch & Allen J. Hubin.

INTERNATIONAL POLYGONICS, LIMITED (IPL): A Checklist of Publications
compiled by Victor A. Berch.

Victor Berch on ROBERT EDMOND ALTER.

More on Phyllis Gordon Demarest, from Victor Berch.

A NOTE ON THE WORD “DETECTIVE” by Victor A. Berch.

WHO WAS ARTHUR MALLORY? – A 76-Year Old Pseudonym Revealed, by Victor A. Berch.

MURDER CLINIC: Radio’s Golden Age of Detection, by Victor A. Berch, Karl Schadow & Steve Lewis.

A COMPLETE SET OF FINGERPRINTS: An Annotated Checklist of the Fingerprint Mystery Series published by Ziff-Davis, by Bill Pronzini, Victor Berch & Steve Lewis.

A Checklist of HARPER’S SEALED MYSTERY SERIES – Compiled by Victor A. Berch.

A Checklist of Aldine’s Tip Top Detective Tales, by Victor A. Berch.

JAMES DARK – Hong Kong Incident. Signet D2935, paperback original; 1st US printing, August 1966. First published in Australia as Assignment: Hong Kong by Horwitz Publications Inc., Australia, paperback, 1966.

   There were in all 16 recorded adventures of undercover spy Mark Hood, of which this is one of the earliest. The author of all but one of the Hood books, ostensibly James Dark, was J. E. Macdonell, who according to his Wikipedia page, “wrote over 200 novels, in at least 7 different series under several versions of his own name and several pseudonyms.” In Australia, where Horwitz was based, the Mark Hood books were published under Macdonnell’s own name.

   The gimmick for Mark Hood was that he worked undercover as an international playboy, as as such, according to the Spy Guys and Gals website, he was an expert in “Auto racing at Le Mans, karate competitions in Tokyo, sail fishing in the Bahamas, and, most famously of all, one of the greatest living cricket players in England.”

   This was the first one I’ve read, and in Hong Kong Incident, of the skills above, he shows off only auto racing (in Chapter One), plus karate or some other Asiatic fighting ability. I’ll have to take the other website’s word for it about any of the other talents.

   The reason he’s in Hong Kong is to be there where a Chinese dissident crosses the border and get him safely to Geneva. The first he does; the mission goes wrong when it comes to the second. Otherwise, of course, there wouldn’t be a story, which when it finally gets around to it, is about keeping a Chinese submarine from blowing up part of the American fleet. Before that the story takes place in a rice paddy, an ancient Chinese cemetery and a couple of exotic bars, with ladies in them to match.

   Dark is OK with short action scenes and quick descriptions of local countrysides. He’s not so good in placing the action in a grander scale: Dark seems to know Macao, Hong Kong, and Kowloon in particular, with China looming somewhere across the border, but to me, the setting was all one big jumble. His characters? One-dimensional at best.

   On the other hand, Dark’s other books, many written under Macdonnell’s real name, are naval adventures, and here he really seems to know what he’s talking about. The last third of this book would be grand stuff, I think, for fans of naval fiction, naval personnel, naval armament and the like. I don’t happen to be one, but I got by. Overall, I’m glad this one was only 128 pages long. I don’t imagine I’ll read another.

      The Mark Hood series —

Spy from the Grave, 1964. [No US edition; written by R. Wilkes-Hunter]
The Bamboo Bomb, 1965.

Come Die with Me. 1965.
Hong Kong Incident. 1966.
Assignment Tokyo. 1966.
Spy from the Deep. 1966, No US edition.

The Throne of Satan. 1967.
Operation Scuba. 1967.
Operation Jackal. 1967. No US edition.
Spying Blind. 1968.
The Sword of Genghis Khan. 1967.

The Invisibles. 1969.

Operation Ice Cap. 1969.
Operation Octopus. 1968
The Reluctant Assassin. 1970. No US edition.
Sea Scrape. 1971.

   Except where there was no US edition, all were published by Signet as paperback originals in this country. Dates are those of the US editions. (In some cases the US edition came before the Australian one.) Books published the same year are listed alphabetically, so this list may not be completely correct chronologically.