Otto Penzler


Otto Penzler is an editor of mystery fiction in the United States, and proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, where he lives.

Biography

Born in Germany to a German-American mother and a German father, Penzler moved to The Bronx at age five after the death of his father. Penzler graduated from the University of Michigan, having studied English literature.
He is the co-author the "Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection" for which he won an Edgar Award in 1977. He also wrote 101 Greatest Movies of Mystery and Suspense. For The New York Sun, he wrote The Crime Scene, a popular weekly mystery fiction column that ran for five years. He has worked with authors including Elmore Leonard, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Sue Grafton, Mary Higgins Clark, Stanley Ellin, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke and Thomas H. Cook.
He founded The Mysterious Press, a publishing house devoted entirely to mystery and crime fiction, in 1975. Among the authors it published are Eric Ambler, Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jerome Charyn, Len Deighton, Stanley Ellin, James Ellroy, Patricia Highsmith, P.D. James, H.R.F. Keating, Peter Lovesey, Ed McBain, Ross Macdonald, Marcia Muller, Ellis Peters, Ruth Rendell, Mickey Spillane, Ross Thomas, Donald E. Westlake and Cornell Woolrich. In the 1980s it was publishing more than 100 books a year and the imprint was affiliated with major publishers in England, Japan, Italy and Sweden. The Mysterious Book Club became a division of the Book of the Month Club and Mysterious Audios an imprint with Dove Audio.
After selling The Mysterious Press to Warner Books in 1989, he created an Otto Penzler Books imprint for Macmillan. He moved the imprint to Carroll & Graf, then to Harcourt. He also established the Otto Penzler Books imprint in London, first with Quercus, then with Atlantic/Corvus, now with Head of Zeus. He reacquired The Mysterious Press name from Hachette in 2009; it is now an imprint at Grove Atlantic.
In 2011, he founded MysteriousPress.com, a publishing house devoted to electronic books featuring such authors as James Ellroy, Donald E. Westlake, Ellery Queen, Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, Charlotte MacLeod and many others.
Penzler founded The Mysterious Bookshop in mid-town Manhattan and after twenty-seven years moved to Tribeca. It is now the oldest and largest mystery specialist bookstore in the world.
In 2002, he hosted a television series of great mystery films for the Turner Classic Movies channel.
He has edited more than fifty anthologies of crime fiction of both reprints and newly commissioned stories, including the prestigious Best American Mystery Stories since 1997.
Penzler served on the Board of Directors of the Mystery Writers of America for fourteen years and was awarded the organization's Ellery Queen Award and a Raven (its highest non-writing award. He won a second Edgar for editing "The Lineup," a collection of profiles of famous detectives, written by their creators.
On April 8, 2010 Swann Galleries auctioned The Otto Penzler Collection of British Espionage and Thriller Fiction. The sale represented a select portion of Penzler's private library with works by Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, William Le Queux, H. C. McNeile, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Dennis Wheatley. Penzler also befriended many noted authors including Ambler, Ken Follett, John Gardner and others, who inscribed copies of their works. “British spy novels are among the greatest of all works in the mystery genre,” Penzler said in the introduction to the Swann auction catalogue. “This is the first auction ever devoted entirely to this important literary genre.”
In Fall 2018, Penzler established Penzler Publishers, which launched American Mystery Classics, a collection of newly-reissued mystery and detective fiction, many of which had been unavailable for several decades. Some of the American Mystery Classics authors include Mary Roberts Rinehart, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen, all distributed by WW Norton.
In 2019, Penzler teamed up with Pegasus Books to launch Scarlet, a joint publishing venture specializing in psychological suspense aimed at female readers. The first title, An Inconvenient Woman, the debut from author Stephanie Buelens, will be released in January 2020, distributed by WW Norton.
Penzler lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Works

Publisher