'Big Book Of Christmas Mysteries' Offers Yule Time Fun And Crime

Patrick Anderson at the Washington Post offers a review of Otto Penzler's Big Book of Christmas Mysteries.

Vicious crime at Christmastime?

Murder most foul as kiddies sing and sleigh bells ring?

Poison in the punch? Cyanide in the pudding?

Ye gods, what unspeakable horror!

But what fun, too, in “The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries,” Otto Penzler's collection of 59 notable Christmas crime stories of past and present!

Penzler, writer, publisher and proprietor of Manhattan’s Mysterious Bookshop, draws on his encyclopedic know­ledge of English-language crime fiction to give us a panoramic look at outstanding stories from the late 19th century to the early 21st. There are celebrated writers here — Thomas Hardy, John D. MacDonald, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, Robert Louis Stevenson — and others undeservedly forgotten. Happily, the stories don’t offer much violence and gore; it’s mostly offstage. Indeed, one of the joys of the collection is how many are delightfully funny.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-review-big-book-of-christmas-mysteries-offers-yuletide-fun-and-crime/2013/12/15/4235a956-60e3-11e3-94ad-004fefa61ee6_story.html 

Author, Editor And Publisher Otto Penzler Discusses Crime Fiction In Interview

Otto Penzler discussess crime fiction in an interview at crimefictionlover.com.

Surely there are few people on the planet who are more knowledgeable on the topic of crime fiction than Otto Penzler. The American author, editor and publisher won an Edgar Award back in 1977 for co-writing the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and he picked up another one in 2010 for The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives. He has many more accolades to his name, and ran the Mysterious Bookshop in New York for 25 years. But perhaps he is best known for founding Mysterious Press, publishing thousands of crime fiction titles, and working with writers such as Ed McBain, Len Deighton, PD James, Patricia Highsmith, Lawrence Block and many more.

You can read the rest of the interview via the below link:

http://www.crimefictionlover.com/2012/09/cis-interview-with-otto-penzler/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cis-interview-with-otto-penzler

Otto Penzler On Why The Best Mysteries Are Written In English

 

Otto Penzler, editor and propuietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, offers his view in Publishers Weekly that the best mysteries are written in English.

It is an inarguable fact that virtually everything of interest and significance in the history of detective fiction has been written in the English language, mainly by American and English authors.

This is not chauvinistic, racist, insular, or opinionated; it is merely reportage.

The reason for this is quite simple. For detectives of fiction to succeed as the heroes of stories, there must be real-life detectives from whose exploits may be drawn fictional narratives. These flesh and blood prototypes can exist only in a free democratic society, with which too few countries were blessed in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries. England, thanks to Magna Carta, and America, thanks to its Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution, bestowed the gift of liberty to its citizens, as did France, among countries with enough wealth and literacy to encourage and reward the production of books.

In totalitarian states, including most monarchies, the police force, often a national militia, supported the ruler, controlled the population, and forced it to his (usually) will. Citizens would do practically anything to avoid the eye or reach of the officers of the law, who were the greatest threat to the average person’s freedom and property and therefore the last place they would go for help. As a result, it would have been virtually impossible for an author to establish a heroic protagonist in the image of one of these enforcers of the ruler’s dictates.      

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/tip-sheet/article/53831-why-the-best-mysteries-are-written-in-english.html 

Otto Penzler's 5 Underrated Crime Writers

Otto Penzler offers a list of underrated crime writers for The Daily Beast.

Otto Penzler, proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and editor of "The Great Detectives," a collection of essays written by the world's greatest crime writers, picks the authors he thinks should be more appreciated.  

You can read the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/28/otto-penzler-s-book-bag-5-underrated-crime-writers.html

You can visit the Mysterious Bookshop web site via the below link:

http://www.mysteriousbookshop.com/