Golden Age Bibliomysteries

“A real treat for bibliophiles.” * Kirkus *

Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and founded the Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books. He has written and edited several books, including the Edgar Award-winning Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, and is the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories of the Year.

Anthony Boucher

Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) was an American author, editor, and critic, perhaps best known today as the namesake of the annual Bouchercon convention, an international meeting of mystery writers, fans, critics, and publishers. Born William Anthony Parker White, he wrote under various pseudonyms and published fiction in a number of genres outside of mystery, including fantasy and science fiction.

C. Daly King

C. Daly King (1895-1963) was an American psychologist and detective story writer. He was born in New York City and educated at Yale University. After fighting in World War I, he worked in textiles and in advertising before returning to school to study psychology, with a particular focus on sleep and consciousness. In the 1930s, King published nine books that quickly established him as a master of the Golden Age mystery, but ceased writing fiction with the advent of World War II.

Ellery Queen

Ellery Queen was a pen name created and shared by two cousins, Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971), as well as the name of their most famous detective. Born in Brooklyn, they spent forty-two years writing the greatest puzzle-mysteries of their time, gaining the duo a reputation as the foremost American authors of the Golden Age “fair play” mystery. Eventually famous on television and radio, Queen’s first appearance came in 1928 when the cousins won a mystery-writing contest with the book that would eventually be published as The Roman Hat Mystery. Besides co-writing the Queen novels, Dannay founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, one of the most influential crime publications of all time. Although Dannay outlived his cousin by nine years, he retired the fictional Queen upon Lee’s death.

Vincent Starrett

Vincent Starrett (1886-1974) was a Chicago journalist who became one of the world’s foremost experts on Sherlock Holmes. A books columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he also wrote biographies of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Ambrose Bierce, various books on books and book collecting, plus Sherlockian pastiches and numerous short stories and novels. A founding member of the Baker Street Irregulars, he is perhaps known best today for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, an imaginative biography of the great detective.

Cornell Woolrich

Cornell Woolrich (1903-68) was one of the most admired and influential of all 20th century American crime writers. His work inspired many films, including most famously Rear Window, The Leopard Man, Phantom Lady, The Bride Wore Black, Mississippi Mermaid and Union City. He led a strange and often very unhappy life, latterly as a recluse in a Manhattan hotel.

Lassiter Wren

Lassiter Wren (pseudonym of John T. Colter), with co-author Randle McKay, launched the concept of the “puzzle book”—in which the reader becomes the detective—into a Golden Age phenomenon with The Baffle Book in 1928. The Baffle Book became instantly popular and it was soon followed by The Second Baffle Book (1929) and The Third Baffle Book (1930). Little else is known about John T. Colter.

Randle McKay

Randle McKay (pseudonym of Richard Rowan), with co-author Lassiter Wren, launched the concept of the “puzzle book”—in which the reader becomes the detective—into a Golden Age phenomenon with The Baffle Book in 1928. The Baffle Book became instantly popular and it was soon followed by The Second Baffle Book (1929) and The Third Baffle Book (1930). Richard Rowan was educated at Brown and Columbia and served in the US Army Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. Apart from the Baffle books, he also published a number of nonfiction books about the history of espionage under his own name.

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