Edgar Award-winning Publisher of The Mysterious Press and Proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop Otto Penzler
Otto Penzler is the president and CEO of Mysterious Press. He's also the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and is regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on crime, mystery and suspense fiction. Penzler founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, which he later sold to Warner Books (1989). He reacquired the imprint in 2010 and published literary crime fiction as an imprint at Grove/Atlantic. As of January 2021, The Mysterious Press is independently owned. Penzler also publishes both original works and classic crime fiction through Mysterious Press. In Fall 2018, Penzler established Penzler Publishers, which launched American Mystery Classics, a collection of newly-reissued mystery and detective fiction, many of which that had been unavailable for several decades. In September 2020, he launched Scarlet, an imprint specializing in psychological and domestic suspense. He was the publisher of The Armchair Detective, the Edgar-winning quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, for seventeen years. He also created the publishing firms of Otto Penzler Books and The Armchair Detective Library. Penzler is also a prolific editor, and his most recent anthologies include The Big Book of Espionage Stories, The Big Book of Reel Murders, The Big Book of Female Detectives, The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, and The Best American Noir of the Century with James Ellroy. From 1997 to 2020, he was the Series Editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), featuring guest editors Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Nelson DeMille, Joyce Carol Oates, Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen, George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais, Lisa Scottoline, Laura Lippman, James Patterson, Elizabeth George, John Sandford, Louise Penny, Jonathan Lethem, and C.J. Box. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, for Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection in 1977 and The Lineup in 2010. The Mystery Writers of America awarded him the prestigious Ellery Queen Award in 1994 and the Raven—the group's highest non-writing award—in 2003.
Of all the publishers/editors in book publishing, you might be one of the very few publishers/editors who owns their own genre-specific bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop! How did that come about and what inspired you to open The Mysterious Bookshop?
I’m not unique. Remember that the modern literature bookshop Shakespeare & Co. in Paris published Ulysses, the poetry (though now more diverse) bookshop City Lights in San Francisco was started by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which had its own imprint, and Harper Brothers, Putnam’s, Brentano’s, Doubleday, and other publishers also had bookshops. The Mysterious Bookshop was actually an accident. I started the Mysterious Press in 1975 and handled everything by myself, but when I published Ross Macdonald, Robert Bloch, and Isaac Asimov, I couldn’t keep up. I knew I needed more space than my Bronx apartment, wanted to move to Manhattan, and couldn’t afford the rents. It sounds crazy now, but a partner and I bought the building on West 56th Street in 1978 for $177,500 There was space available at the street level and a flight up. I thought it would be fun to open a bookstore. I had No idea how much work it would be!
Lee Child in conversation with Steve Cavanaugh at The Mysterious Bookshop
What was it like for independent bookstores having to cope with the aftermath of the recent COVID-19 pandemic?
Brutal, of course, as it was for most small businesses. Being forced to lock the doors for three months just about killed us, but I funneled money from publishing and my own writing to the store to keep it afloat. I kept one person on full salary to handle correspondence and mail orders and had to furlough the rest. The day we were allowed to open again, I hired everyone back at full salary. We just celebrated our 42nd anniversary and are fortunate to have many loyal customers who were very good to us then and still are.
How did you get your start in book publishing and what has it been like in also being a columnist at The New York Sun, through much of your and The Mysterious Press’s grown and transition?
The greatest mystery editor who ever lived, Joan Kahn, encouraged me to start my own publishing company when I complained that mysteries weren’t given the credit as serious literature that they deserved. I knew nothing and made it up as I went along, making every mistake that is possible to make—and some more, besides. I was a columnist for The New York Sun for five years, until the paper closed as a print publication.
Much like your bookstore, your publishing house, The Mysterious Press, specializes in publishing mystery/crime/thriller fiction. How has this sector of publishing changed in more recent years, perhaps from where it was five, ten or even twenty years ago?
Like all art, and like most things, it evolves and changes, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. It’s harder now for a mid-list author to build a career slowly, growing incrementally. The larger houses are dominated by sales and marketing people, rather than allowing an editor to stick with a good writer who hasn’t yet found their readership. It’s the big bestsellers that pay the overhead, so it’s easier to throw the weight of a house behind those books, rather than to try to nurture those who are likely to be only moderately successful because of the nature of the books they write. As for the books themselves, the biggest change in the past couple of decades has been the blurring of the lines between general fiction and mystery fiction. “Mainstream” novels have tended to incorporate many of the tropes of crime fiction, while the best mystery writers have become far closer to “literary” fiction—though that was always true, if not as common.
I often see you around the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, your original birthplace. It must be fun to be able to visit a place with a sense of identity. I am more curious to know, how has FBF changed over the years, especially most recently, given the restrictions of the pandemic?
I came to America when I was five, so identify as American, not German. The Frankfurt Book Fair could be held almost anywhere without giving one a sense of place. Frankfurt has many more Italian restaurants than German ones, for example. The five days that I attend are largely in the Buch Halle, where every language is spoken. I don’t go to touristy things. Aside from drinks and/or dinners with colleagues, it’s a work place, not a vacation. It changed during the pandemic by not existing, except virtually.
“As an author, editor, publisher, and bookseller, I can easily see all sides of the process.”
I understand that you served on the board of the Mystery Writers of America for over a decade. That must have been a rather rewarding experience. Is there anything interesting you came across along the way?
Yes, fourteen years on the board was interesting, occasionally rewarding, occasionally frustrating. I’ve made a good share of my income over the years by writing books and editing anthologies, so I am very sensitive to writers’ concerns. As an author, editor, publisher, and bookseller, I can easily see all sides of the process.
You worked with two-time Edgar Award-winner Andrew Klavan on When Christmas Comes, in which after a confession of murder, a sleuthing English teacher will need a Christmas miracle to prove a condemned man innocent. What was it like working with Klavan on this seasonal tale of tradition, family, and murder?
I’ve had the privilege of working with Andrew several times, publishing three of his books when my Otto Penzler Books imprint was at Harcourt, later Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is an incredibly talented writer who would have been a household name had he produced a book a year and restricted himself to a single sub-genre, but that’s not what he does. When Christmas Comes is very different from the usual publishing process, which tends to be reactionary. A manuscript appears on your desk, you read it, and decide whether or not to publish it. This book was my idea (not the plot, which I could not do with a century of effort): a Christmas novella. It is about half the length of the average mystery novel and will be published in a smaller format—stocking-stuffer size. I love the novella length, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Joyce Carol Oates’ Them and Black Water, and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s difficult for a writer to have sufficient depth in a shorter work but the great ones manage it—as did Klavan.
I understand that you have a legendary collection of rare book editions in your home. It must be a treasure trove! Are you reading anything good from that list of titles?
I built a pretty big house (actually a modest house with a giant, three-story library) to house my collection of first editions, which I’d argue was the best collection of its kind in the world. However, all 60,000 volumes are gone; they went to auctions, often setting world record prices, and the money (after taxes and paying off debts) is funding my four publishing imprints.
Do you have any advice you could share for hopeful writers eager to become published authors?
My only response, I’m afraid is a cliché: Read everything, write every day, rewrite every day, never think that something isn’t good enough. Aspire to greatness.
Can you finish this sentence? I love reading because...
…it is the most visceral, enduring, and rapturous window to all the worlds you would never otherwise see, and the opportunity to meet the most brilliant, captivating, and memorable people you would never otherwise know.