Editors
Otto Penzler
For more than thirty years, Otto Penzler has been recognized as the most knowledgeable and influential member of the crime writing community. Among his achievements and contributions to the mystery genre are:
- Founded The Mysterious Press, a publishing house entirely devoted to mystery and crime fiction, in 1975. Among the authors it published (works published in America for the first time–not reprints) were Eric Ambler, Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Len Deighton, James Ellroy, Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, H.R.F. Keating, Peter Lovesey, Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, Ellis Peters, Ruth Rendell, Mickey Spillane, Ross Thomas, Donald E. Westlake and Cornell Woolrich. By the 1980s, it was publishing more than 100 titles a year and the imprint was affiliated with major publishers in England (with Century-Hutchinson-Arrow), Italy (Mondadori), Sweden (Bra Bocker) and Japan (Hayakawa). The Mysterious Book Club became a division of The Book-of-the-Month Club, and Mysterious Audios, an imprint with Dove Audio Books. He currently has his own imprint, Otto Penzler Books, with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in America and with Grove/Corvus in England.
- Founded The Mysterious Bookshop, an independent store entirely devoted to mystery and crime fiction, in 1979. After 31 years, it remains the largest and most successful book store of its kind in the world.
- Hosted a television series of great crime films for the Turner Classic Movies channel.
- Co-authored with Chris Steinbrunner the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, for which he won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, given by the Mystery Writers of America, in 1977.
- Edited The Lineup, selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2010.
- Wrote “The Crime Scene,” a weekly column for The New York Sun (for nearly five years) and a monthly column for Hayakawa Mystery Magazine in Japan (for 25 years); has written several books and hundreds of articles about various aspects of the crime genre.
- Edited more than fifty anthologies of crime fiction, both of reprints and newly commissioned stories, including the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories of the Year.
- Assembled the world’s finest collection of mystery fiction–60,000 first editions.
- Served on the Board of Directors of the Mystery Writers of America for fourteen years; was named Publisher of the Year by the Romance Writers of America; was presented with a Raven by the Mystery Writers of America (its highest-non-writing award) and the Ellery Queen Award (for lifetime achievement).
