The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store and never published elsewhere, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

The prompt for the story requires three elements: that it be set at Christmastime, that it involve a crime of some kind, or the suspicion of one, and that it be set at least partially in the bookstore. And from these loose structural guidelines, diverse tales took flight. The dozen tales included in this volume are among the finest to be produced in this annual tradition, sure to charm any reader looking for a holiday-themed escape.

Included herein are the ingenious Snowflake Time by Laura Lippman; Lyndsay Faye's tale of vengeance A Midnight Clear; the challenging brainteaser, A Christmas Puzzle, by Ragnar Jónasson; Hester's Gift, an impossible crime story by Tom Mead; the suspenseful The Christmas Party by Jeffery Deaver; Thomas Perry's hilarious comedy of errors, Here We Come A-Wassailing; and other tales appropriate for the season, collected and introduced by Otto Penzler. The result is, objectively speaking, the finest stocking stuffer that a mystery fan could hope to find.

Depending on who you ask, the term whodunit was first coined sometime around 1930, but the literary form predates that name by several decades. Still, it was in the years between the two World Wars--the so-called Golden Age of mystery fiction--that the style flourished. Short mysteries were published far and wide by a variety of authors, not just those primarily associated with the genre. They appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and other high-end periodicals that still exist today. These tales were, in short, among the most popular diversions in literature and were of the highest caliber.

In this volume, Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler collects some of the finest American whodunits of the era, including household names and welcome rediscoveries. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellery Queen, and Mary Roberts Rinehart are all included, as are Ring Lardner, Melville Davisson Post, and Helen Reilly. The result is a cross section of the whodunit tale in the years that made it a staple in mystery fiction.

The most complete collection of Yuletide whodunits ever assembled - The Edgar Award-winning editor collects sixty of his all-time favorite holiday crime stories--from Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy to Sara Paretsky and Ed McBain.

Anyone who cares about the best mystery writing of the past century and beyond would be lucky to receive this thick volume during the holidays. --The Washington Post

This collection touches on all aspects of the holiday season, and all types of mysteries. They are suspenseful, funny, frightening, and poignant.

Included are puzzles by Mary Higgins Clark, Isaac Asimov, and Ngaio Marsh; uncanny tales in the tradition of A Christmas Carol by Peter Lovesey and Max Allan Collins; O. Henry-like stories by Stanley Ellin and Joseph Shearing, stories by pulp icons John D. MacDonald and Damon Runyon; comic gems from Donald E. Westlake and John Mortimer; and many, many more. Almost any kind of mystery you're in the mood for--suspense, pure detection, humor, cozy, private eye, or police procedural--can be found in these pages.

FEATURING:
- Unscrupulous Santas
- Crimes of Christmases Past and Present
- Festive felonies
- Deadly puddings
- Misdemeanors under the mistletoe
- Christmas cases for classic characters including Sherlock Holmes, Brother Cadfael, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Rumpole of the Bailey, Inspector Morse, Inspector Ghote, A.J. Raffles, and Nero Wolfe.

Depending on who you ask, the term whodunit was first coined sometime around 1930, but the literary form predates that name by several decades. Still, it was in the years between the two World Wars--the so-called Golden Age of mystery fiction--that the style flourished. Short mysteries were published far and wide by a variety of authors, not just those primarily associated with the genre. They appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and other high-end periodicals that still exist today. These tales were, in short, among the most popular diversions in literature and were of the highest caliber.

In this volume, Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler collects some of the finest American whodunits of the era, including household names and welcome rediscoveries. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ellery Queen, and Mary Roberts Rinehart are all included, as are Ring Lardner, Melville Davisson Post, and Helen Reilly. The result is a cross section of the whodunit tale in the years that made it a staple in mystery fiction.

Some of the best-known and most influential pieces of crime fiction have been from African American writers. Be it Walter Mosley's great detective Easy Rawlins, or the mean streets of Harlem at the hands of Chester Himes, the stories and characters in this anthology have shaped the mystery genre with their own unique viewpoints and styles. Contributors to the collection include Robert Greer, Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Cary Phillips, Frankie Bailey, and Richard Wright.

Well worth its impressive weight in gold, it would be a crime not to have this seminal masterpiece in your collection.--New York Journal of Books

In his introduction to The Best American Noir of the Century, James Ellroy writes, Noir is the most scrutinized offshoot of the hard-boiled school of fiction. It's the long drop off the short pier and the wrong man and the wrong woman in perfect misalliance. It's the nightmare of flawed souls with big dreams and the precise how and why of the all-time sure thing that goes bad. Offering the best examples of literary sure things gone bad, this collection ensures that nowhere else can readers find a darker, more thorough distillation of American noir fiction.

James Ellroy and Otto Penzler mined writings of the past century to find this treasure trove of thirty-nine stories. From noir's twenties-era infancy come gems like James M. Cain's Pastorale, and its postwar heyday boasts giants like Mickey Spillane and Evan Hunter. Packing an undeniable punch, diverse contemporary incarnations include Elmore Leonard, Patricia Highsmith, Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, and William Gay, with many page-turners appearing from the past decade.

Delightfully devilish . . . A strange trek through the years that includes stories from household names in the hard-boiled genre to lesser-known authors who nonetheless can hold their own with the legends.--Associated Press

James Ellroy is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy--American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's a Rover--and the L.A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He is also the author of The Hillicker Curse, a memoir.

Otto Penzler is the founder of the Mysterious Bookshop and Mysterious Press, has won two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, and is series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories.

The biggest, the boldest, the most comprehensive collection of Pulp writing ever assembled.

Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train--a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.

Including:

- Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.

- Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel,

one of the masters of the form.

- A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.

- Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many

many more of whom you've probably never heard.

- Three deadly sections-The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames-with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben,

Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman

Featuring:

- Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.

- A kid so smart-he'll die of it.

- A soft-hearted loan shark's legman learning-the hard way-never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.

- The uncanny Moon Man and his mad-money victims.

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler--detective fiction's best editor and champion (The Washington Post)--returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants.

Behind the velvet curtains of horsedrawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. With his latest title in the Big Book series, Otto Penzler is cracking cases and serving up the most thrilling, suspenseful Victorian mysteries.

This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

The Vampire Archives is the biggest, hungriest, undeadliest collection of vampire stories, as well as the most comprehensive bibliography of vampire fiction ever assembled. Dark, stormy, and delicious, once it sinks its teeth into you there's no escape.

Vampires Whether imagined by Bram Stoker or Anne Rice, they are part of the human lexicon and as old as blood itself. They are your neighbors, your friends, and they are always lurking. Now Otto Penzler--editor of the bestselling Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps--has compiled the darkest, the scariest, and by far the most evil collection of vampire stories ever. With over eighty stories, including the works of Stephen King and D. H. Lawrence, alongside Lord Byron and Tanith Lee, not to mention Edgar Allan Poe and Harlan Ellison, The Vampire Archives will drive a stake through the heart of any other collection out there.

Other contributors include:
Arthur Conan Doyle - Ray Bradbury - Ambrose Bierce - H. P. Lovecraft - Harlan Ellison - Roger Zelazny - Robert Bloch - Clive Barker

A great recurring character in a series you love becomes an old friend. You learn about their strange quirks and their haunted pasts and root for them every time they face danger. But where do some of the most fascinating sleuths in the mystery and thriller world really come from?

What was the real-life location that inspired Michael Connelly to make Harry Bosch a Vietnam vet tunnel rat? Why is Jack Reacher a drifter? How did a brief encounter in Botswana inspire Alexander McCall Smith to create Precious Ramotswe? In The Lineup, some of the top mystery writers in the world tell about the genesis of their most beloved characters -- or, in some cases, let their creations do the talking.

Over a thousand pages of haunted--and haunting--ghost tales: the most complete collection of uncanny, spooky, creepy tales ever published! Edited and with an introduction by Otto Penzler. Including stories by Joyce Carol Oates, Rudyanrd Kipling, Isaac Asimov, James MacCreigh, and many more! Featuring eerie vintage ghost illustrations.

The ghost story is perhaps the oldest of all the supernatural literary genres and has captured the imagination of almost every writer to put pen to the page. Here, Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler has followed his keen sense of the supernatural to collect the most chilling and uncanny tales in the canon.

These spectral stories span more than a hundred years, from modern-day horrors by Joyce Carol Oates, Chet Williamson and Andrew Klavan, to pulp yarns from August Derleth, Greye La Spina, and M. L. Humphreys, to the atmospheric Victorian tales of Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, and H. P. Lovecraft, not to mention modern works by the likes of Donald E. Westlake and Isaac Asimov that are already classics. Some of these stories have haunted the canon for a century, while others are making their first ghoulish appearance in book form. Whether you prefer possessive poltergeists, awful apparitions, or friendly phantoms, these stories are guaranteed to thrill you, tingle the spine, or tickle the funny bone, and keep you turning the pages with fearful delight.

Including such classics as The Monkey's Paw and The Open Window and eerie vintage illustrations, and also featuring haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore! AlsoFeaturing haunted mansions, midnight frights, lovers from beyond the grave, rapping, tapping, wailing shades, and ghosts, ghouls, and specters galore!

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream.

Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like Murder Is Bad Luck, Ten Carets of Lead, and Drop Dead Twice. Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America's finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America's underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this.

Featuring

- Deadly Diamonds
- Dancing Rats
- A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life
- A Parrot that Wouldn't Talk

Including

- Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published
- Lester Dent's Luck in print for the first time

In his introduction, guest editor James Patterson observes, I often hear people lamenting the state of Hollywood . . . If that's the case, I've got one thing to say: read these short stories. You can thank me later. Patterson has collected a batch of stories that have the sharp tension, drama, and visceral emotion of an Oscar-worthy Hollywood production. Spanning the extremes of human behavior, The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 features characters that must make desperate choices: an imaginative bank-robbing couple, a vengeful high school shooter, a lovesick heiress who will do anything for her man, and many others in these imaginative, rich, complex tales worthy of big-screen treatment.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 includes

Tomiko M. Breland, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Brendan DuBois,
Janette Turner Hospital, Dennis Lehane, Theresa E. Lehr, Joyce Carol Oates,

and others
JAMES PATTERSON, guest editor, has sold over 300 million books worldwide, including the Alex Cross, Michael Bennett, Women's Murder Club, Maximum Ride, and Middle School series. He supports getting kids reading through his children's book imprint, jimmy patterson, as well as through scholarships, grants, book donations, and his website, ReadKiddoRead.com.

OTTO PENZLER, series editor, is a renowned mystery editor, publisher, columnist, and the owner of New York's The Mysterious Bookshop, the oldest and largest bookstore solely dedicated to mystery fiction. He has edited more than fifty crime-fiction anthologies.

New York Times best-selling author of ten genre-bending novels Jonathan Lethem helms this collection of the year's best mystery short fiction.

For Jonathan Lethem, crime stories are deep species gossip. He writes in his introduction that they're fundamentally stories of power, of its exercise, both spontaneous and conspiratorial; stories of impulse and desire, and of the turning of tables. The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 has its full share of salacious intrigue, guilt, and retribution. The twists and bad decisions pile up when a thief picks the wrong target or a simple scavenger hunt takes a terrible turn. What happens when you befriend a death row inmate, or just how does writing Internet clickbait became a decidedly dangerous occupation? How can we not hang on their outcomes? asks Lethem. Are we innocent ourselves, or complicit? Read on to find out.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 includes Sharon Hunt, Harley Jane Kozak, Mark Mayer, Jennifer McMahon, Joyce Carol Oates, Brian Panowich, Tonya D. Price, Ron Rash, Robb T. White, and others.

#1 New York Times best-selling author of the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novels, Louise Penny brings her nerve and skill--as well as heart (Maureen Corrigan, Washington Post) to selecting the best short mystery and crime fiction of the year.

Writing short stories takes Skill. Discipline. Knowledge of the form while not being formulaic, contends Louise Penny in her introduction. In a short story there is nowhere to hide. Each must be original, fresh, inspired. Originality is just what's in store for readers of the twenty clever, creative selections in The Best American Mystery Stories 2018. There's no hiding from a Nigerian confidence game, a drug made of dinosaur bones, a bombing at an oil company, a reluctant gunfighter in the Old West, and the many other scams, dangers, and thrills lurking in its suspenseful pages.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2018 includes T. C. Boyle, James Lee Burke, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Charlaine Harris, Andrew Klavan, Martin Limón, Joyce Carol Oates, and others.

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.

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.

Includes discussion guide questions for use in book clubs.

The Best American Series(R)
First, Best, and Best-Selling

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2011 includes

Lawrence Block, Brendan DuBois, Loren D. Estleman,
Beth Ann Fennelly and Tom Franklin, Ed Gorman, Richard Lange, S. J. Rozan,
Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and others

This year's guest editor, Sue Grafton, has put together a wonderfully diverse collection of stories to surprise and satisfy all fans of the genre. In this volume, best-selling writers such as Mary Higgins Clark, Walter Mosley, Lawrence Block, Jay McInerney, and Donald E. Westlake stand alongside an impressive array of new talent. As Grafton writes in her introduction, Nowhere is iniquity, wrongdoing, and reparation more satisfying to behold than in the well-crafted yarns spun by the writers represented here. Already a bestseller in its first year, this year's collection of The Best American Mystery Stories promises to keep readers intrigued and coming back for more.

Fans of such notables as C.J. Box, Peter Straub, and Joyce Carol Oates chiefly known for their novels will be pleased to see how well they write at shorter length.--Publishers Weekly
Some people might tell you that crime short stories, unlike the more precious kind, are a kind of fictional ghetto, full of cardboard characters and clichéd situations. Not true. These stories are remarkably free of bullshit--al-though there's always a little, just to grease the wheels, writes guest editor John Sandford in his introduction. From an isolated Wyoming ranch to the Detroit boxing underworld, and from kidnapping and adultery in the Hollywood Hills to a serial killer loose in a nursing home, The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 hosts an entertaining abundance of crime, psychological suspense, and bad intentions.

The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 includes
C. J. BOX, GERRI BRIGHTWELL, JEFFERY DEAVER, BRENDAN DUBOIS,
TRINA COREY, CRAIG JOHNSON, JOYCE CAROL OATES, PETER STRAUB,
and others