Otto Penzler

Meet the king of the keys… He was the bard of the barred, the lord of the locked-up, the king of the keys. Robert Adey worked what I could only call an extreme niche of the murder mystery writing trade. Throughout his life (he died in 2015) he had collected notes on his particular area […]

In ‘The Book of Forgotten Authors’ I wrote about discovering just how many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films and TV shows were based on stories he had optioned, but there was another side to him that I did not have space to touch upon in that book. After numerous successful films Hitchcock’s career switched tracks in […]

The Mysterious Bookshop, now on Warren Street in New York, has been going since 1979 and is run by the avuncular Otto Penzler. This makes it the oldest mystery specialist book store in America. It’s a treasure trove of mysteries old and new – a niche market that’s run buy experts in the field, and isn’t […]

To be clear, a written anthology is a set of stories by different authors, often on a common theme. A collection is a set of stories by one author. Some publishers still get the distinction wrong on their covers. The advantage of producing a collection is obvious; the reader gets a kaleidoscopic view of the author’s […]

Otto Penzler is a legend in the US book world. His store, The Mysterious Bookshop in NYC is a counterpart to the late, lamented Murder One in London. He has his own imprint, the Mysterious Press, and has edited a great many fine award-winning anthologies. To help his store along, he periodically asks authors to […]

When it came to filling in the Crime Writer’s Association form for which sub-genre of crime I wrote in, I had to stop and think for a minute. I suddenly felt like Hamlet and the players discussing types of play; comedy-pastoral-allegorical and so on. What was I? Not procedural, that’s for sure, not cosies either, […]