Golden Age Whodunits

Since the early 19th century, whodunnit stories have baffled and intrigued readers, but it was during the years between WWI and WWII – the ‘Golden Age’ of mystery fiction – that the genre flourished, producing its most ingenious plots and timeless classics.With Edgar Award-winning Otto Penzler as guide, delve into an irresistible collection of the finest American whodunits of the era, including household names and master storytellers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart, as well as Ring Lardner, Melville Davisson Post and Helen Reilly.Featuring a murder so baffling that only a stage magician could solve it, a barber who slowly reveals his dark past over the course of a deadly haircut, and an investigation impeded by too many detectives, this anthology features the very best puzzling whodunnits that put the reader's crime-solving skills to the test.

Golden Age Detective Stories

Sometimes, the police aren't the best suited to solve a crime. Depending on the case, you may find that a retired magician, a schoolteacher, a Broadway producer, or a nun have the necessary skills to suss out a killer. Or, in other cases, a blind veteran, or a publisher, or a hard-drinking attorney, or a mostly-sober attorney. or, indeed, any sort of detective you could think of might be able to best the professionals when it comes to comprehending strange and puzzling murders.At least, that's what the authors from the Golden Age of American mystery fiction would have you think. For decades in the middle of the twentieth century, the country's best-selling authors produced delightful tales in which all types of eccentrics used rarified knowledge to interpret confounding clues. And for even longer, in the decades that have followed, these characters have continued to entertain new audiences with every new generation that discovers them.Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler selects some of the greatest American short stories from era. With authors including Ellery Queen, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Anthony Boucher, this collection is a treat for those who know and love this celebrated period in literary history, and a great introduction to its best writers for the uninitiated.

Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries

For devotees of the Golden Age mystery, the impossible crime story represents the period's purest form: it presents the reader with a baffling scenario (a corpse discovered in a windowless room locked from the inside, perhaps), lays out a set of increasingly confounding clues and swiftly delivers an ingenious and satisfying solution. During the years between the two world wars, the best writers in the genre strove to outdo one another with unfathomable crime scenes and brilliant explanations, and the puzzling and clever tales they produced in those brief decades remain unmatched to this day.Among the Americans, some of these authors are still household names, inextricably linked to the locked room mysteries they devised: John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Clayton Rawson, Stuart Palmer. Others, associated with different styles of crime fiction, also produced great works--authors including Fredric Brown, MacKinlay Kantor, Craig Rice and Cornell Woolrich.All of these and more can be found in Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries, selected by Edgar Award-winning mystery expert and anthologist Otto Penzler. Featuring a delightful mix of well-known writers and unjustly-forgotten masters, the fourteen tales included herein highlight the best of the American impossible crime story, promising hours of entertainment for armchair sleuths young and old.

Golden Age Bibliomysteries

Otto Penzler

I'm not usually given to superlatives, but Dangerous Women may be the best, most varied, and colorful mystery anthology of all time

Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything, and proves it once more in this brilliant anthology

Wow, what memorable dames! What terrific short stories! Dangerous Women is a winning collection

It's a joy to watch these talented authors embrace the short story form and produce magic

Prepare to meet the most seductively female and the most shockingly fatal of femme fatales, brought to you by seventeen of today's finest authors of mystery and suspense fiction. Award-winning editor Otto Penzler presents a collection of short and sizzling masterpieces of kisses and kiss-offs, gams and gats. Tale after thrilling tale, they'll prove to you just how sexy and not so gentle the 'gentler sex' can be. 
 
In 'Third Party', Jay McInerney takes you on a wild ride through the Paris night with a party girl built for speed and sin... 'Rendezvous', Nelson DeMille's first short story in twenty-five years, plunges you into a Vietnam jungle where the bloodiest scourge of this man's army is no man at all... back in the USA of 'Louly and Pretty Boy', Elmore Leonard introduces a Depression-era teenage gun moll who loves Pretty Boy Floyd more than she likes knocking off filling stations... a very smart blonde takes her shot in Lorenzo Carcaterra's 'A Thousand Miles from Nowhere', a study in slow-simmered vengeance... and Michael Connelly's colourful and ironic 'Cielo Azul' shows how a nameless woman left dead on a Los Angeles hillside can be the most lethal prey of all. 
 
In other riveting tales, a scorned lover claims an old fling's heart, a little too literally... a lady of mystery offers a suicide pact you almost can't refuse... and a she-demon rises from the grave in a bid to rule the earth... These and a bevy of other very bad girls cast their criminal spells through the powerful voices of Joyce Carol Oates, John Connolly, Thomas H. Cook, Jeffrey Deaver, J.A. Jance, Andrew Klavan, Laura Lippman, Ed McBain, Walter Mosely, Anne Perry, Ian Rankin and S.J. Rozan in stories as irresistible as the anti-heroines that blaze through their pages.

Otto Penzler

Praise for Dangerous Women

Hugely enjoyable

I'm not usually given to superlatives, but Dangerous Women may be the best, most varied, and colorful mystery anthology of all time

Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything, and proves it once more in this brilliant anthology

Hugely enjoyable

I'm not usually given to superlatives, but Dangerous Women may be the best, most varied, and colorful mystery anthology of all time

Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything, and proves it once more in this brilliant anthology

Hugely enjoyable

I'm not usually given to superlatives, but Dangerous Women may be the best, most varied, and colorful mystery anthology of all time

Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything, and proves it once more in this brilliant anthology

Books by Otto Penzler

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter