Otto Penzler Discusses The Mysterious Bookshop and American Mystery Classics

We were delighted to discuss all things mysterious with Otto Penzler in this episode. 

Otto Penzler joins Tea, Tonic & Toxin to discuss the Golden Age of Mystery.

Otto Penzler is president and CEO of MysteriousPress.com and proprietor of New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop.

Widely regarded as a leading authority on crime, mystery, and suspense fiction, he founded The Mysterious Press in 1975 and later launched Penzler Publishers, including American Mystery Classics and Scarlet. A prolific editor and publisher, he has received two Edgar Awards, the Ellery Queen Award, and the Raven.

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Otto Penzler is president and CEO of MysteriousPress.com and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. Long regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on crime, mystery, and suspense fiction, he has spent decades shaping the field as a publisher, editor, bookseller, and champion of both classic and contemporary crime writing.

In 1975, Penzler founded The Mysterious Press, a publishing house that became one of the most respected names in mystery and suspense fiction. He sold the company to Warner Books in 1989, reacquired the imprint in 2010, and continued publishing literary crime fiction through Grove/Atlantic. Since January 2021, The Mysterious Press has again been independently owned. Through MysteriousPress.com, in partnership with Open Road Integrated Media, he publishes both original works and classic crime fiction.

In fall 2018, Penzler established Penzler Publishers, which introduced American Mystery Classics, a line dedicated to bringing distinguished mystery and detective novels back into print, many after decades of unavailability. In September 2020, he launched Scarlet, an imprint devoted to psychological and domestic suspense. Charles Perry serves as publisher of all Penzler Publishers imprints, and Luisa Smith is editor-in-chief of Scarlet.

Penzler’s contributions to the mystery world extend well beyond book publishing. For seventeen years, he published The Armchair Detective, the Edgar Award-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction. He also created Otto Penzler Books and The Armchair Detective Library, fu

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Transcript

Sarah Harrison: 0:11

Welcome to Tea, Tonic and Toxin, the only book club and podcast dedicated to exploring mysteries chronologically, from Edgar Allan Poe to the present. We're discussing the best mysteries and thrillers ever written, as well as interviewing some of the world's most talented contemporary mystery and thriller writers. I'm your host, Sarah Harrison.

Carolyn Daughters: 0:33

And I'm your host, Carolyn Daughters. We aim to educate, entertain, and reignite interest in exceptional and often overlooked authors who shaped the genre. Check us out at teatonicandtoxin.com and on our socials to find tons of great content and take part in the conversation. We love hearing from listeners, and we're excited you're joining us on our journey through the history of mystery.

Sarah Harrison: 0:57

Today's sponsor is Linden Botanicals, a Colorado-based company that sells the world's healthiest herbal teas and extracts. Their team has traveled the globe to find the herbs that offer the best science based support for stress, relief, energy, memory, mood, kidney health, joint health, digestion, and inflammation. U.S. orders over$75 ship free. To learn more, visit lindenbotanicals.com and use code MYSTERY to get 15% off your first order. Thanks, Linden Botanicals! Carolyn, I'm excited about our guests this evening.

Carolyn Daughters: 1:34

I am as well. We have wanted to get this particular guest on our show for a while.

Sarah Harrison: 1:40

We have with us the famous Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Bookshop. We are so excited. Thanks for joining us, Otto.

Otto Penzler: 1:53

It's a joy to be here, and that fame is pretty much limited to my own brain.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:01

I will say, not just limited to your own brain. You are one of the leading authorities on crime, mystery, and suspense fiction. You founded The Mysterious Press, which we're going to talk about. We're also going to talk about Penzler Publishers and American Mystery Classics. You've won two Edgar Awards, which is huge. You've won an Ellery Queen Award and a Raven Award.

Sarah Harrison: 2:25

I mean all the awards.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:26

All of them. A lot.

Otto Penzler: 2:29

There are a lot of lifetime achievement awards from other organizations, too. I don't like to brag, but I really like to brag.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:40

And you have so much to brag about.

Otto Penzler: 2:42

So no, that's the way I look at it, too. It wasn't. I think it was Muhammad Ali who said it ain't bragging if it's true

Sarah Harrison: 2:51

Oh, there you go.

Carolyn Daughters: 2:54

So maybe we should just start by talking about The Mysterious Bookshop. Or maybe The Mysterious Press. So you founded The Mysterious Press in 1975 tell us about this press and what, what prompted the founding of this press and what were you seeing in crime fiction at that moment, maybe that others weren't seeing in the same way?

Otto Penzler: 3:16

Well, I don't want to take too much credit for being this genius who had an idea that nobody else had. I had by that time, I had written most of the Encyclopedia of mystery and detection, which went on to win the Edgar a couple years later. But because of that, I had been writing to every living author, and if not, then a close relative or an agent or somebody to make sure that everything was right. So as a result, I got to know pretty much every living person of any fame in the mystery world. And one of the people that I got to know was the greatest mystery editor of all time, Joan Kahn, who had her own imprint at Harper. In those days, it was Harper and Row, now it's Harper Collins. And so we had lunch together several times, and I was constantly complaining that mystery fiction wasn't being given the credit that it ought to have. Everybody knows the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards and so on. But if you look at the at the winners of those awards from the 1920s and 30s, T.S. Stribling The Forge, Caroline Miller, Lamb in his Bosom. Nobody knows those people. Nobody remembers them. But everybody knows Dashiell Hammett, everybody knows Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. So I thought, mystery fiction deserves more credit than it deserves. And I guess I was whining about it a little too much, because Joan Kahn at one of those lunches said, well, Otto, stop complaining about it. Start your own company. I. Just do that. What's writer? I didn't know anything about publishing.

Sarah Harrison: 5:04

You were a sports writer. Amazing.

Otto Penzler: 5:07

First at The New York Daily News, and then I became publicity director at ABC Sports.

Sarah Harrison: 5:13

You own and run The Mysterious Bookshop. What drew you to mystery in the first place?

Otto Penzler: 5:18

I just made every mistake it's possible to make. I had no money. I was a sports writer. Believe me when I tell you there was no money. So I went to my friends and my brother and asked them if they wanted to buy a share in this non-existent company. And they did, and I started publishing books. The only person in the mystery world that I knew was Robert L Fish, who is not very well remembered today, but he was a grand master. He won an Edgar for one of his books, most famous for a book called Mute Witness, which became the movie Bullet with Steve McQueen. He was a member of the Baker Street Regulars the Sherlock Holmes fan society as I am. And so I asked him, I said, I want to start this publishing company. Would you give me a book to publish? And he said, Well, Harper Collins published. Harper & Row publishes me pretty well. I can't give you one of those. But I talked him into letting me do a short story collection, because no publisher wants to do short story collections, but I did, and that was the first book. I made the contract with him in 75 and published it. It came out in 1976 to tell you how little I knew about publishing. I got the yellow pages. You guys are too young to remember what Yellow Pages.

Carolyn Daughters: 6:46

I remember the Yellow Pages.

Otto Penzler: 6:51

In those days, it was the Yellow Pages. And I looked up printers, and I found one that I knew how to find on the subway. And so I had all these tear sheets, which were basically pages torn out of Playboy magazine, which is where Bob was selling these stories, and went out of the printer and handed him these pages, and I said, I want you to make a book. And he said, but where? But it has to be typeset. I said, Well, isn't that what you do? You're a printer. He said, we're a printer, but not a typesetter. Oh, there's a difference. And he said, you're new to this, aren't you? And he took me into his office, and for about 10 minutes, gave me a quick tutorial on publishing. And that was really the beginning.

Sarah Harrison: 7:44

How'd you transition from your career in sports writing? What drew you to mystery and The Mysterious Bookshop in the first place?

Otto Penzler: 7:51

I was a heavy reader in mystery fiction. I didn't. I was an English major at The University of Michigan. And so if you're an English major, you read T.S. Eliot and Ulysses and Russian novelists and Ezra Pound and so on. And I had never read mysteries. So when I after I graduated and came back to New York, I want to keep reading, because I always read. I loved reading. And I thought, well, everybody reads mysteries, why don't I try that? Because I wouldn't read, but I didn't want to keep hurting my brain. And I bought the complete Sherlock Holmes, and absolutely, absolutely fell in love with it, and I realized that I had been missing something. And I remember to this day, it was a two-volume set, but all in one volume, one a big fat volume of the complete Sherlock Holmes. And I remember reading The Hound of the Baskervilles. I remember the book. I remember where I was, and there was this scene where Dr. Mortimer comes to visit 221B Baker Street to talk to Sherlock Holmes because somebody that he knows, an aristocrat, had been murdered with his throat horribly ripped out, and Holmes said, Well, tell me about it. And he did, and he said there were footprints around the body. And Holmes said, were there footprints of a man or a woman? And Dr. Mortimer said, Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound. And I got goosebumps. Whoa, this is something else. So I started, and I was always a collector. I liked collecting books. I kept all the books from the time I was five years old on, and I started collecting first editions of mystery fiction. Started collecting all of literature, English and American. American and so on. But I realized pretty early that I couldn't afford it. I didn't have time, money, space, none of that. So I narrowed it down to mysteries. And so I became very involved in reading and collecting mysteries, and which is how I got asked to co-write The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection.

Carolyn Daughters: 10:24

When you were writing that encyclopedia, you must have learned a lot in the process of it. I'm guessing part of it was you sharing your knowledge base, but you also researching. What did you learn in writing that book that surprised you or that you thought, I have to share this with the world?

Otto Penzler: 10:46

Well, there were a lot of surprises. There still are at The Mysterious Bookshop. I was surprised at the number of famous writers who had written mysteries that we don't think about as mystery writers. The greatest example being Charles Dickens. Probably more than half of his books would legitimately qualify as mysteries. I know I've been asked for this many times, but I'll get it out of the way. How do you define mystery? And a lot of people think it means a detective story. A detective story is one sub-genre of mystery fiction. I define it. I edit a series of books called the best crimes mystery stories of the year, and at the beginning of that, in my introduction every year, I define it as any work of fiction in which a crime or the threat of a crime is integral to the plot, or the tone of the book, not tone the plot or something else, but mostly the plot.

Carolyn Daughters: 12:00

So what are some of the characteristics of a great mystery from your perspective?

Otto Penzler: 12:08

Pretty much the same criteria that you would bring to any literary work. You have to have characters that you care about. If somebody is murdered, you don't really lose sleep over it, unless you got to know that person and care about them. It's like 100,000 people were killed in World War II in one bad day. It's a statistic. If you know one of those people, then it's a tragedy. And it's the same with mystery fiction. You have to know who the characters are, so that's really the first thing I look for. Well, maybe the first thing is style. Does the writer write something in a way that I've never heard before, that has a lyricism to the prose that transcends writing a mere puzzle. So, yeah, between style and character, then you have the basis for a really good book. And mystery fiction is harder to write well than general literature, because you have to have a serious plot. Basically in the Greek ideal of a beginning, a middle, and an end, that arc that has to be in the book. And if you have all of those elements with a really puzzling, interesting plot, you have a great detective novel.

Sarah Harrison: 13:42

I love that you brought up Dickens and The Hound of the Baskervilles already. Those were early episodes, actually, of ours. That's one of the things that made me excited to talk to you is that two of the additions from this year that I have personally, and they're probably more in existence, were Penzler editions. We just read Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice, and I also have The Fabulous Clipjoint, which are both from your publishing company. I don't see them in your background at The Mysterious Bookshop, but I see the books that look like them in your background.

Otto Penzler: 14:19

They're here, I promise you.

Sarah Harrison: 14:23

That's fantastic. And you wrote the introduction to all of those. And I was reading Home Sweet Homicide.

Otto Penzler: 14:32

I don't mean to correct you, but Lawrence Block wrote the introduction to The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown.

Sarah Harrison: 14:37

My bad. I was reading your introduction to Home Sweet Homicide.

Otto Penzler: 14:43

Home Sweet Homicide, yeah, and then two introductions to about half the books. But one of the things that we've really been great at this, this is a series. We're talking about it as if everybody knows, but the series is called American Mystery Classics, and we've been publishing them at the rate of one a month for almost eight years. In December, we'll be publishing our 100th book in that series. I love these. They're the Golden Age, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s books that deserve to be reissued and introduced to a new audience. And so I write the introductions to about half, but we've had A.J. Finn, who's a big bestseller, The Woman in the Window was on The New York Times list for a year and a half. He wrote an introduction. The great Joyce Carol Oates wrote an introduction to The Cat Saw Murder. Sarah Paretsky wrote the introduction to a book by Dorothy B. Hughes Ride the Pink Horse, a famous noir film. And so we try to get really significant writers who are appropriate to that book in some way to write an introduction. It's hard to get too many people to do to do them on sometimes on short notice, so I wind up writing a lot of them, but these are all books that I've read before. But in order to write the introduction, have to read the book again, right? Sometimes it's hard to find enough time to do that, but it's all worth it. I love that series. They're all behind me in my office at The Mysterious Bookshop.

Carolyn Daughters: 16:30

Sarah mentioned Home Sweet Homicide by Craig Rice and The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown. We also read The Three Coffins (The Hollow Man) by John Dickson Carr. Our first book in 2027 is slated to be Cat of Many Tales by Ellery Queen. How do you decide? I know that these novels deserve rediscovery, but are you aware of them. Are people bringing them to your attention and saying, Hey, here's one. It may not be on your radar, but you should check this one out. How are you coming up with this list of one a month?

Otto Penzler: 17:12

Carolyn, can I remind you I wrote an encyclopedia? Never mind. I know these books. I know these books back in the day when I had a regular job, like an eight hour a day job, I read pretty much five books a week in the mystery world for quite a few years. So I've read a lot, and I know these books really well, and the books that I remember liking are the ones that I'm picking to do again. Every now and then, a book that I remember very fondly doesn't really hold up very well, so we put it aside, and we don't, we don't do that. And every now and then, there's a book that I always wanted to read, because a lot of mystery writers were quite prolific. Many of them wrote a book a year. I mean, one of my favorite writers is John Dickson Carr, who wrote probably half of half his books, or more than half were impossible crimes, locked room mysteries, which are the hardest thing to write, to have somebody found murdered in a in the middle of a freshly raked tennis court, right at the at the net, with only one set of footsteps leading to where he was bludgeoned to death. How did that happen? How could that happen? And there and a room that is locked from the inside, the windows, sealed, no secret passages, no hidden closets and things like that, where a villain has told somebody at midnight on Saturday, I'm going to kill you. And the police come. They surround the literally, some of the earlier books. The police come and surround the house. They watch the door to make sure that nobody can get in. And at midnight, you hear a gun go off, and they break down the door and rush in, and there's the victim. It's impossible. It is absolutely impossible, but John Dickson Carr has done it so many times that it's really awesome. The three coffins, by the way, this is really a strange It became our best selling book in that series for the year, because Rian Johnson, who writes the Knives Out series. And the third one featured a book called The Hollow Man, which was published in the United States as The Three Coffins. And it's referred to frequently. Lee and shown on the screen and Rian has become a good friend of The Mysterious Bookshop and wrote the introduction to a different John Dickson Carr book for us. Everybody started to realize that the book was featured in Knives Out.

Sarah Harrison: 20:21

No, that's funny that you mentioned that because we did a Hollow Man episode, and I was just looking at our stats today, and I saw that episode has climbed recently to one of our more listened to episodes over time.

Otto Penzler: 20:34

Rian Johnson is so great. He's first of all a wonderful human being, but also a very talented writer. That was his third movie in the Knives Out series. And I don't think the next book, the next show that he's working on, the next movie that he's writing, I don't think it's going to be a Knives Out. We had a weird lunch together near The Mysterious Bookshop, and he said he told me what he was doing, and it sounds so complicated.

Carolyn Daughters: 21:08

Imagine wanting to do that. So you wrote the encyclopedia. You've got this encyclopedic understanding of all of these books, but in year one of American Mystery Classics, did you know you were going to do this for years? Did you how did you choose in that first year? Okay, I've got to get these are the books I've got to bring to the fore in year one. What were those books? Or, what? How did you choose? Because you have this body of knowledge?

Otto Penzler: 21:43

Well, you can narrow it down a little bit by picking the first of all the best books by authors that I'd read. Like picking an Ellery Queen was easy, because he was probably the most famous American mystery writer of the 20th century, but he wrote 49 books, of which I've read maybe half, maybe a little more, but I had several that were favorites. So so it was easy to pick an Ellery Queen and then like which would which would be the most interesting or exciting for a new reader, somebody who's coming to Ellery Queen for the first time. So I picked a book called The Chinese orange mystery. And the reason I picked it is because it is such a bizarre beginning that it is inconceivable that a writer could make sense of it, and that the reader would understand everything that happened. And what happens early on is somebody is murdered, and when he's discovered, everything in the room is backwards, the rug is turned upside down, the pictures are turned to the wall. The shirt he's the victim is wearing is backwards. His suit, his clothing, is all backwards. His shoes are on backwards. Everything is backwards in that room. Why? Why would a murderer take the time to do that in an office building where people are in and out. In a lot of places, it is so compelling that I had to start with that.

Sarah Harrison: 23:31

Does the status of if the book is in print, still or out of print, ever factor into it? Do you prefer out of print books to bring back, or is it just whatever you're drawn to?

Otto Penzler: 23:43

No, we actually have to take out-of-print books, because if they're in print, that means they're available. That means that somebody else can have a different publisher, have this book on a shelf in a bookshop, and we can't afford the concept of having two variant books of the same title. It's a small enough market for reissues, as we've learned in running The Mysterious Bookshop. This is not the new Michael Connelly or Lee Child or Louise Penny. These are books that were published 75-80 years ago. We make sure that there can't be somebody else. The arrangement that we make with the agent, the every one of these books has an agent who represents the estate of that author. And we make a deal, and part of the deal is that we have exclusivity, so nobody else can have the Chinese Orange Mystery in a in any edition in the United States, but I also but other books to further answer your question, Carolyn, I love locked room mysteries, and I couldn't get, I couldn't sign a John Dickson Carr in time for the first. List, but Clayton Rawson was a great friend of John Dickson Carr and wrote four impossible crimes, all of which featured a character named the great Merlini, who was a stage magician. And so when the police were totally baffled, they would call in Merlini to come in and see if he could solve this impossible crime. I'm publishing, by the way, not in the American Mystery Classic series, but under the mysterious press imprint. I'm publishing a young writer who has understood the concept of impossible crimes and lock room mysteries. His name is Tom Mead, and he has a series character who is a retired magician. And they're set in England in the 1930s much like Agatha Christie. They really follow the Agatha Christie school, and it's a Scotland Yard inspector who is called in when there is a murder and it's impossible. There is no way it could have happened. And he's baffled, so he calls on Specter, this retired magician, to come and help solve the crime. It's set in 1930s London. You think that it's written by John Dickson Carr or Agatha Christie, but it's written by Tom Mead today. We carry his work in The Mysterious Bookshop.

Sarah Harrison: 26:27

Cool. That's awesome. We've noticed. When we go through and we pick out our books, we don't pay much attention to, is it in print or not? We just go through and say, well, what's the next most important book in our book list as we travel through time, and we've noticed a number of are out of print or hard to get, and so I think that's why we've been getting so many of your publications when we go to look for an edition. In fact, we have, we have a collaboration going this year, which is pretty exciting with a local bookstore here in Virginia called The BiblioPub. And so she's looking to source the entire book list, and we pointed her to American mystery classics to say, okay, a lot of them, a lot of them are from here. Thank you for publishing them. It's really wonderful to have those out there.

Otto Penzler: 27:25

One thing I'm very proud of is that some of these books are very hard to find in any edition, even used paperback edition, are pretty hard to find. But one is especially hard. It's by C. Daly King who also writes impossible crimes. And we published a book in this series that had never been published in America before. It was published only in the in the UK, even though he was an American writer. And so Obelists en Route, which is set on a luxury train, had never been published in the United States, and it's in our series. We carry those books in The Mysterious Bookshop.

Sarah Harrison: 28:11

Oh, that's awesome. A train mystery.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:12

We love train mysteries.

Otto Penzler: 28:14

Finding a copy of that took interlibrary loan, wow for us, and took about six weeks for again, because it was published only in England, only in the UK. So we had to wait a long time to get to find a copy of that book for us to be able to digitize it. We had to copy it because we can't destroy the book as a library book. So we had to, first we copied it, and then we got it digitized. And so it's truly the first American edition of this book.

Sarah Harrison: 28:47

That's awesome.

Carolyn Daughters: 28:50

Tell us where you are. Where are you right now?

Otto Penzler: 28:53

I'm in my office at The Mysterious Bookshop. The Mysterious Bookshop is in Manhattan, and the Tribeca neighborhood, it's downtown, about two blocks from City Hall, about four blocks from the World Trade Center. We've been here. I still call this the new store. We've been here for 23 years. We used to be on 56th Street, right behind Carnegie Hall, and we were there for 26 years. So we this month. Oh, good, goodness, that's right, April 13. We open on Friday the 13th of April 1979 so we'll be celebrating our 20 our 47th anniversary.

Carolyn Daughters: 29:40

Amazing.

Sarah Harrison: 29:42

The Mysterious Bookshop almost has my birthday exactly. I don't know if that's too much information for our audience, but that's April 21, 1979.

Carolyn Daughters: 29:52

Keep those cards and cards and letters and gifts coming.

Otto Penzler: 29:56

Yeah, we're almost twins.

Sarah Harrison: 29:58

Yes, I'm twins with The Mysterious Bookshop.

Otto Penzler: 30:01

My office is in the basement. On when I was on 56th Street, I had the most beautiful office in the back of The Mysterious Bookshop. It was big, it was light, 600 square feet of sheer beauty. Now I'm in the basement, no windows. Have to call upstairs on the intercom. Sometimes I have to go out for a while. Is it raining? Do I need my umbrella?

Carolyn Daughters: 30:31

Yes, and Windows. So what? When people are coming into The Mysterious Bookshop, I know that there's a range of reasons they're there and things they're looking for, but what trends have you seen like in, say, even in the last year? What when people come in, what are they asking for? What are they looking for?

Otto Penzler: 30:48

Well, it's interesting. I can't narrow it down to trends. Don't take a year. They take some time.

Carolyn Daughters: 30:54

Years, sure.

Otto Penzler: 30:56

But I would say one of the trends, most recent trends, is, and this is really astonishing to me, and joyful is looking for older books, books from the Golden Age. What's his name? Who writes The Thursday Mystery Club? Richard Osman. I've gotten so bad on names. Huge bestseller, very cozy books, but real fair play detection, real pure detection. For a long time, a lot of the books were hardboiled crime novels. Most of the detection was somebody confessing or somebody ratting out somebody, but now it's detectives doing pure detection work. Anthony Horowitz is great example of somebody who is writing brilliant books of that kind. That's been a great trend. Another trend I've been remember, I've been doing this now for 47 years, so I've gone through quite a few trends. One was the number of women who were writing hardboiled detective fiction in when I started, when I opened The Mysterious Bookshop in 1979, you could count on the fingers of one hand, women who had written tough, hardboiled private eye detective stories. In 1982, Sue Grafton and Sarah Paretsky came out and set a trend that a lot of women writers have followed since then. So that was a welcome addition to the genre where it wasn't so male oriented all the time, and their heroes could be or their protagonists could be male or female, just as some men wrote female detection detectives, but they most men mostly wrote about men women. Mostly wrote about women, but they take different approaches. The two sexes have a different way of looking at things in many, many examples, many, many different kinds of viewpoints that, as a male reader, I've really found eye opening in some ways. I love women because they look at things differently than I do. Even though I've had a lot of influential women in my life, I still, I'm still a guy. I value that another trend that began after I had started this the opening The Mysterious Bookshop was mainstream writers were writing crime fiction, and some of them were good at it, some were terrible at it. But it was interesting to see people trying it, not just leaving it to the writers of pure puzzles, but real writers who regarded themselves as literary figures turning to the detective story, which I found fascinating in a more recent trend, not about the kinds of books that were written, but about the people who are reading them. A lot of young people are reading books, many more than 40 years ago, when I had the store the our readership, I saw an aging, that they were middle aged or older? Of course, they were exceptions. I'm being very general when I say these things, there were certainly lots of exceptions, but by and large, it was middle aged and older. A lot of the older people died, some of our customers passed on. A lot of our middle aged customers started getting older. Older, but I'm going to say as recently as 20 years ago, 15 years ago, is very common. I don't work in the store anymore. I work in my office downstairs at The Mysterious Bookshop, so I'm not in the store constantly. But I'm in the store a lot, and particularly on something like a Saturday afternoon, The Mysterious Bookshop gets pretty crowded. A lot of people come in. And I'm always thrilled when I see young couples or little groups of young people, teenagers or early 20s, looking in, looking at the store, because it's quite a beautiful store, and Oh, wow. Tthey're awed by the sense of being surrounded by books in such a way, in a non threatening way. It's, they're just, they're mysteries. They're not challenges. You don't have to try to understand the deep poetics of Ezra Pound. You can just read a story for fun. And a lot of them get that they a lot of them ask for recommendations that they want something really violent. We get that so we can recommend James Elroy, or they want something, I don't want to be frightened. I like to read books at night before I go to sleep. I don't want to be scared. What can you recommend? And I've read everything by Agatha Christie. What else should I read? Now? Those are the most some of the most common questions that we get, and it's I miss being in the store on a regular basis. The first 15-18 years of The Mysterious Bookshop, I was on the floor helping customers with it all the time. I loved seeing what they bought and saying, You know what, I have a better book for you than have you read books by this author? But, yeah, he's one of my favorite writers. I read them all the time. Well, good for you, and he is a good writer, but let me tell you this writer who is this, who writes the same kind of book, but he's better. And a lot of times they would either put the book back, or mostly they would try the books that I had recommended as well. And it was so gratifying to have people come and say, Boy, you really know my taste. I love that book. What else he write, or she write, or whatever, and it was I miss not being able to do that on a regular basis, but in a way, we do it with American mystery classics, because we're reissuing a book that people may not be familiar with, that we're bringing it to them in a way that they would never have had the opportunity to do it. But instead of doing it with one customer at a time, we're doing it with thousands through the publishing house and The Mysterious Bookshop.

Sarah Harrison: 37:49

You got me thinking about a couple things with that. The first thing I want to go back to is you alluded to the difference between male and female hardboiled authors. Can you give an example? What's one of the things they do differently?

Otto Penzler: 38:05

They're frequently much more empathetic. Okay, they'll say, Well, he's a really bad guy, but, look, he has had a really hard time. He's gone up against some really hard things, and I'm not letting him off, but I understand why he's doing that, and maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we should look a little deeper and say why he's doing this. It's not just about who did it or how, but why. I think it's a little more universal now, but, but back in the 80s and 90s, when hard, well, female writers were writing for the first time, and I recognize much more of that than I would have found in, say, Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, definitely.

Sarah Harrison: 39:05

That's interesting. And the other thing, while we're on the topic of trends, I remember reading the Home Sweet Homicide introduction, and you mentioned a bunch of erroneous advice you were given. Like, don't publish short stories, or there's no interest in, like, humorous mystery stories. And, of course, Craig Rice (Home Sweet Homicide) is extremely humorous. Can you talk a little bit more about the trend of humor and mysteries?

Otto Penzler: 39:32

That's interesting. I guess there is a bit of a trend for more humorous mysteries. For a long time, people thought, wait a minute, somebody is dying. This isn't somebody who's been brutally murdered. That's not a that's not a laugh a minute. We're publishing a book in a few months called Poppy Montgomery Gets Even. Poppy is in her late 70s, and she and her friends are being taken advantage of because of their age, and they get even. And it's hilarious, awesome. Hilarious. Richard Osman is the person I was trying to remember Richard Osman, whose books are very funny and real detective stories and cozy, and they're much loved, and I think he's helping that trend come along. There is a truth to short story collections aren't as much loved by readers as full length novels. I love short stories. I love short stories all the time. I love the series that we publish. I used to read all of them long before I was publishing that kind of book. But I see the difference in sales, and when we sell short fiction at The Mysterious Bookshop, a lot of people say it's really good, but I was so disappointed that it ended so quickly. So I understand that. I still love short stories, so I still publish them. You know that they don't all work really well, but I like publishing them anyway, and I think they deserve to be published. Writers work really hard for no money in the in the third the 20s, 30s and 40s, magazines like Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan and Red Book, they were paying$10,000 for a short story. It's the equivalent of $100,000 now and now writers, they're happy if they get $500 from the few avenues that are open to them. There are so few places that publish short stories we read for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. John Grisham was the guest editor in 2025 it'll be somebody else this year. My memory for names is just humiliating. Anyway, I have a first reader who looks at about 3000 short stories a year, and if you say that, Oh, there's no there's no market for short stories. Most of these are in e-magazines, ezines. So most of them are not very good. They're not edited, they're just published as eBooks, as these stories we look for, I subscribe to over 100 literary journals, Chattahoochee Review and Nebraska Review, Harvard Review, places like that that publish fiction, and generally one or two or sometimes three stories from those magazines will make it into the best of the year, and the author will say, I didn't think I was writing a mystery and, well, not a detective story, but it is. It's a crime story, somebody gets killed, or somebody is badly threatened and doesn't quite get killed, but scared to death because of it. We collect those, I collect those stories every year, and they deserve a different life beyond just something as disposable as a magazine. Tess Garritsen is the wonderful guest editor this year. Oh, good, yes, I love her. She really is the nicest person in the world, awesome and such a good writer, too. Tess agreed to be the guest editor this year.

Carolyn Daughters: 44:05

Wonderful. So can we talk Golden Age of mystery stories for just a moment? When I was a kid, I started reading Agatha Christie, and then I just went through all of the Agatha Christie books and loved them. And in this day and age, people still love Agatha Christie. They love Golden Age mysteries. What are they drawn to in your opinion? Is it the puzzle? Is it the confined setting? Is it that the story is wrapped up with a bow at the end? What are we drawn to? What do you see at The Mysterious Bookshop?

Otto Penzler: 44:43

Well, you've just answered the question, okay, I started after reading my Sherlock Holmes. I also started on Agatha Christie, and found her so compelling. And I started reading other Golden Age writers. The one thing that Golden Age writers. Are limited by is that their major goal in those days was to write puzzles, and they spent less time developing characters that are believable and empathetic. I mean, Hercule Poirot is not a character, he's a caricature, but the stories are the plots are so good, the stories are so good that you read them and you read them for the puzzle, not for the characterization, and not for the brilliant style. Agatha Christie is a perfectly competent stylist, but there's nothing original in her prose. If you read Raymond Chandler, if you want to read original prose, read Raymond Chandler, he understands similes in a way that almost no one, no other writer, mystery or non-mystery, understands them. They're memorable. She had a body that would make a bishop put his foot through a stained glass window, as obvious as a as a tarantula on a slice of pound cake. There's no wonderful thing. But anyway, Golden Age, it's certainly about plot. It's about the puzzle. There's a great comfort, which has not been true in the last decade or so in these detective stories, the bad guy is caught. We see that in the books people buy from The Mysterious Bookshop. Whoever the villain is caught and punished. In real life, that doesn't always happen. So I think a lot of readers are taken by this wonderful, happy turn of events that the villain is not going to get away with it, and justice will be served. Just as an aside, this is a weird thing in Japan, the greatest by far, the greatest publisher of mystery fiction is Hayakawa Publishing Company, which has existed for about 75-80 years, and their number one best seller for more than 70 years in a row is Agatha Christie. And this is a company that published Dick Francis when he was the most popular writer in America. They published Robert B. Parker when he was hugely famous. They published John le Carre. They published P.D. James. They publish pretty much every major mystery writer. But every year, Agatha Christie is their number one, bestselling author.

Sarah Harrison: 47:45

I believe it. She's actually our top episode as well. Just looking at the stats, she's number one.

Otto Penzler: 47:53

She's the template for what a Golden Age writer is. It's a great it's a great puzzle. It's a great plot. Interesting figures, characters in it, and justice is served so and, and it's a and it's a nice setting, whether it's St Mary Mead, this comfortable little village, or wherever Poirot is going. It brings people, she's good enough at what she does to bring people into the setting so that they know where they are and they're comfortable there.

Sarah Harrison: 48:30

I know you have a hard stop coming up here, but I do want to just ask, if I may really quick. So you have American Mystery Classics, that you have the publishing company, but you also have The Mysterious Bookshop, which I feel like has risen to the level of destination bookstore. You mentioned how beautiful it is, a place where, if I was in New York, I would be like, Oh, we have to stop at The Mysterious Bookshop. I've got to see that place. How did the give me a little bit on the timeline, if you would like, when did that arise? You mentioned moving locations once, if you would.

Otto Penzler: 49:08

As I said, we opened in 1979 and I did a lot of writing for, I mean, I wrote for Time Magazine. I wrote for places they asked for an obituary of Tony herleman, and I was listed as Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop. And I went to mystery conventions. I went to, I was very public. I was out there a lot, and people started to find the store. I guess it took 1012, years for it to become a destination store, I now know that it is, in fact, a destination store. We have tourists come in on a very regular basis, I'm going to say every single day, because we're again, we're near the financial center, the World Trade Center and so on. So people stop in. Take pictures. Sometimes they buy books, but a lot, but a lot of people say I've wanted to come here for 15 years. I'm from Sweden, from Norway, I'm from where, all those places that they come from, they take pictures, and they're thrilled to be there. It's great. I mean, how what a what a great feeling it is a place that's known as a destination store.

Carolyn Daughters: 50:26

It's amazing. And so I have one last question. Sarah, may have one or more, but somebody comes into your store and you're not down there, you're up on the floor, and they say, I don't really know much about the Golden Age of mystery. Can you recommend a book for me? Do you have a candidate or two where you would say, I know what to give them, and when they read this, they're going to be hooked.

Otto Penzler: 50:56

It's easy. Agatha Christie. What did you think I was gonna say?

Carolyn Daughters: 51:01

Which one, which Agatha Christie?

Otto Penzler: 51:03

Oh, any of the early books. I would not start with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, because you really should have been reading other books before that. But so many of them have been made into movies. I would say Death on the Nile, be happy to give them that. It doesn't matter, but the more common is, if they want to go to a mystery store, they want to be in The Mysterious Bookshop, but they don't know a lot, but they've read a lot of Agatha Christie. I've read Agatha Christie. Who else should I read? And I will frequently say John Dickson Carr or Ellery Queen. Or Dorothy Sayers, excellent.

Sarah Harrison: 51:46

Nice. Well, my, my final question would be, tell us what your work, what's the next thing coming out? I know you do so many anthologies, so many books, you've got a lot of irons in the fire. What should people look for coming out from you next?

Otto Penzler: 52:02

Well, very excited about we, we've been publishing James Comey, who turns out to be a very, very good writer, a good fiction writer. We were a little concerned that that the left wing would not want to buy his books, or the right wing would not want to buy his books.

Sarah Harrison: 52:20

I'm gonna have to read those books.

Otto Penzler: 52:22

But really his main character is based on his daughter, who is a federal prosecutor, just as Comey was, and she's a great character. And because he knows his daughter so well, although he has two other daughters that are in there a little bit. They're also blended into Nora. So I love, I love that series. But also, we're publishing a writer named Charles Todd, who sets his books in England in the 20s, right after World War One. He's been a New York Times bestseller more than a dozen times. And he has a wonderful character named Ian Rutledge, who was haunted by what happened during World War One, when somebody that he was very close to dying in in the war, and he died because he killed him. He didn't, he wouldn't follow an order, and his senior said, if he's not following an order, he has to die, shoot him. And he did. And through 22 books, he's been haunted, haunted by this. Can you imagine Scotland Yard inspector. They're good detective novels, but talk about a character that comes to life for you, that's certainly one.

Sarah Harrison: 53:53

Well, Otto, it's amazing that we got to talk to you about American Mystery Classics and The Mysterious Bookshop. We've been wanting to for a long time. So thank you so much for getting I stupidly, I think I messaged an Instagram person or something, so that's not the way. I didn't go anywhere. But Carolyn took the right approach and got in touch with you.

Carolyn Daughters: 54:17

We're so happy to have you on the show.

Otto Penzler: 54:19

Oh, thank you. I've enjoyed talking to both of you so much. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much.

Carolyn Daughters: 54:27

Thanks so much for listening. Please help other mystery lovers find our show with a like, subscribe, share, or rating. It's totally free, and it means the world to us.

Sarah Harrison: 54:37

If the spirit of mystery so moves you, we have a few ways you can financially support our labor of love. Click the link in the show notes to support this podcast. Buy your books through our Amazon store, or join our Patreon, where subscribers have access to additional episodes that include bonus content and discussions of the movies inspired by some of the greatest mysteries ever written.

Carolyn Daughters: 55:01

Thanks for joining us on our journey through the History of mystery. Until next time, stay mysterious.