Otto Penzler, Author New Millennium Press $23.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-893224-56-8
The extraordinary novella by thriller king David Baldacci that leads off this exceptional anthology of new fiction centered on crime and football is alone worth the book's cover price. ""The Mighty Johns"" is one of the more remarkable stories...
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Otto Penzler. Vintage Crime, $25 (848p) ISBN 978-0-307-47449-0
The literary ghost comes in all shapes, sizes, and predispositions, and an impressive variety flits through Penzler’s latest mountain-sized omnibus (after Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!). There are urban ghosts in Fritz Leiber’s “Smoke Ghost” and rural...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Amazon/Thomas & Mercer, $14.95 trade paper (374p) ISBN 978-1-612183-00-8
Give Penzler (The Big Book of Ghost Stories) credit for an interesting angle for this anthology of 81 crime stories, each no more than a thousand words. As he notes in his introduction, “It is hard to hide clues and have enough reasonable suspects...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30 (624p) ISBN 978-0-544-30222-8
The 32 selections in Penzler’s rich compendium of early American mystery stories feature a wide range of criminal activities. Organized chronologically, the volume opens with Washington Irving’s “Story of the Young Robber,” a gripping tale of...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $25 (960p) ISBN 978-0-307-74396-1
Penzler’s thoughtful introduction makes plain why this intelligently assembled anthology of 68 short stories will be catnip for fair play fans, since the locked-room story “is the ultimate manifestation of the cerebral detective story.” He also...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $25 trade paper (864p) ISBN 978-1-101-97113-0
Penzler’s ambitious sixth Big Book (after 2015’s The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories) appropriately deviates from the template of earlier volumes, given its focus on a real-life criminal. The opening section, “The True Story,” gathers primary...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Pegasus Crime, $26.95 (540p) ISBN 978-1-68177-458-9
How many different kinds of crime stories can be centered on books and bookstores? At least 15, based on the number of entries in this superior reprint anthology, each of which originated as a special Christmas publication issued by Penzler’s...
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Edited by Otto Penzler, read by Jeffrey Cummings, Brilliance Audio, unabridged, 10 CDs, 12 hrs., 5 min., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-4418-8024-6
Jeffrey Cummings brings a contagious energy to his narration of these 15 tales of murder, suspense, and other acts of criminality all set, in one way or other, in the world of golf. Anthologist Penzler has gathered a sharp who's who collection of...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage Black Lizard, $25 (827p) ISBN 978-0-307-74089-2
Penzler's latest monster-sized anthology of monster stories is sure to call attention to the living dead the same way that his Vampire Archives (2009) spotlighted the undead. The 57 stories mostly feature the two main types of fictional zombie: pre–N
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage, $25 trade paper, (672p) ISBN 978-0-345-80298-9
Penzler mines the rich vein of American and British Christmas stories from the 19th to the 21st centuries for this impressive collection of 59 short stories featuring authors still in their prime as well as others mostly forgotten by today's readers.
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Edited by Otto Penzler. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, $40 (800p) ISBN 978-1-101-87261-1
The breadth of this anthology, which spans over a century and includes everything from straight pastiches and parodies to fully developed whodunits, is but one of its virtues. Among the 83 selections, Penzler (The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries)...
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Edited by Otto Penzler, read by Jeff Gurner, Oliver Wyman, and Pete Larkin. HighBridge Audio, unabridged, six CDs, 7.5 hrs., $29.95 ISBN 978-1-61174-464-4
This compilation features original writing—never before available on audio—from the pages of Black Mask, the pulp fiction magazine credited with giving birth to the hard-boiled detective genre. Dashiell Hammett’s classic thriller, The Maltese Falcon—
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Otto Penzler, Author, Thomas H. Cook, Author . Vintage $14 (544p) ISBN 978-0-375-71302-6
Penzler and Cook's annual compendium of crime journalism showcases 20 essays on some notorious cases, as well as some major criminal justice and political issues, by well-known writers such as Scott Turow and James Ellroy and public figures such
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Edited by Stephen J. Dubner, Ecco, $14.99 paper (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-149086-6
From sitting face-to-face with a cartel hitman to an unsolved kidnapping, the stories collected here are some of the best depictions of the worst of humanity. Guest editor Dubner (co-author of Freakonomics) wisely opens with a pair of pieces from...
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Edited by Leslie S. Klinger. Pegasus Crime, $39.95 (1,152p) ISBN 978-1-68177-861-7
These five novels, all wildly popular when first published, offer a window on the world of manners and attitudes in America in the 1920s. They can still be enjoyed as mysteries, or they can be read as historic documents, enriched by Klinger’s...
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Linda A. Fairstein, Author, Otto Penzler, Author, Thomas H. Cook, Author . Harper Perennial $14.95 (384p) ISBN 978-0060815530
Fans of crime reporting will devour this diverse collection, featuring 15 of the year's best crime stories, written by noted journalists such as Tom Junod (Esquire
), Sean Flynn (GQ
) and Steve Fishman (New York
). Articles (and the crimes they...
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Erle Stanley Gardner. Penzler, $25.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-6131-6174-6
At the start of this fast-paced entry in the American Mystery Classics series, first published in 1940, Perry Mason rushes to his L.A. office to meet a potential client after a stranger awakens him in the middle of the night with an urgent phone...
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Erle Stanley Gardner. Penzler, $15.95 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-1-61316-248-4
A chance sighting of an oddity—eight look-alike brunettes, all wearing dark clothes and a fur around their necks, standing on consecutive corners of the same street—involves legendary L.A. defense attorney Perry Mason in one of Gardner’s cleverest...
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Stuart Palmer. Penzler, $15.95 trade paper (216p) ISBN 978-1-61316-104-3
Originally published in 1941, Palmer’s eighth whodunit featuring New York City schoolteacher and amateur sleuth Hildegarde Withers, an entry in Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series, works best as a Hollywood satire. Hildegarde is on...
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Edited by Otto Penzler. American Mystery Classics, $17.95 trade paper (416p) ISBN 978-1-61316-542-3
Penzler follows up 2023’s Golden Age Bibliomysteries with another stellar anthology that places stories from the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Vincent Bénet beside works from the biggest names in 1920s and ’30s detective fiction. Bénet...
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