From the archives…I’ll be back with new content next week 📚🥞🦄🔍
“It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.” ― Arthur Conan Doyle
My dad read crime books, and so I did too. Having exhausted my stack of library books one night (at ok way too young an age), I can still recall sneaking down to his study and pulling off the shelf a seemingly innocuous book by Joseph Wambaugh titled The Onion Field. It is true crime, and its story sends chills down my spine to this day. Of course, I was hooked. That book was quickly followed by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, and every Agatha Christie whodunit in my dad’s collection (and later the library).
Sometime after graduating college and my (first) Stephen King phase, I stopped reading about crime. But I, of course, still read because I love to read. Rather, for years I was reading my way through the rest of the sections of a bookshop.
Then the pandemic hit, and my self-care toolkit became listening to Taylor Swift, cuddling my kitties, rosé wine, and crime fiction. A lot of crime fiction. Authors like Sharon Bolton and Michael Connelly have been my pandemic roommates. And I'm nowhere near alone. Scary stories have flourished during the pandemic.
Winter in the Northeast means dusk at 4:15 in the afternoon. By eight at night, it can feel like midnight. For those of us who've exhausted ourselves of television having binged the latest greatest series on Netflix, what next?
Just in time to help us get through these long, cold nights and short, dark days is Otto Penzler. This gentleman just happens to be the world’s foremost authority on crime, mystery, and suspense fiction. His store in Manhattan—The Mysterious Bookshop—is where I've been known to load up on Scandinavian noir (forget about sleeping; these are mostly edge-of-your-seat, up-all-night thrillers) and classics featuring our favorite cannibal, Hannibal Lecter or maybe just a few tidy little murders at that opulent mansion on the water’s edge.
Looking for mystery?
Otto Penzler is a fixture of the crime fiction literary community, and no crime author’s book tour would be complete without a visit to his shop. Over four plus decades, he and his staff have hosted the best-known authors in the business. People like Lee Child, Joyce Carol Oates, James Ellroy, and Megan Abbott.
The Mysterious Bookshop opened on Friday, the 13th of April, 1979 on 56th Street in Manhattan, right behind Carnegie Hall, and moved to its current home, Tribeca, in 2005. It is now the oldest and largest mystery-specific bookstore in the world.
Book lovers can browse shelf after shelf of crime, suspense, detective, and espionage books. More than 20,000 titles in all. There’s a big collection of Sherlock Holmes, bibliomysteries, old and rare books, and signed books. Added bonus: a dedicated, knowledgeable staff of readers ready to make recommendations. No, this is one store you won't leave empty-handed.
Interview
First, some background...
In addition to being the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop, Penzler is the creator of American Mystery Classics (dedicated to reissuing classic American mystery fiction) and the founder of The Mysterious Press (a literary crime imprint devoted to mystery and crime fiction). He has edited more than fifty mystery and crime anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of the 19th Century and The Best American Noir of the Century with James Ellroy.
Penzler has been recognized for his literary efforts with numerous awards, including two Edgars, and an Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement in the publishing world.
Until relatively, recently he owned the world’s greatest library of mystery fiction first editions. Check out this article The New York Times did on his home library. Incredible!
Around when did you find your way into the mystery section?
I was a University of Michigan English literature major. I graduated young. I was 20. I didn’t want to keep hurting my head by reading Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and the Russian novelists, but I wanted to keep reading because I’d read my whole life. So, I bought a copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes.
I thought this is great so let me see some more mysteries. I started reading Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr – the great Golden Agewriters who wrote puzzle books.
I liked the challenge of trying to figure out the puzzle. I was pathetic. I never figured one out. Then I read Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I suddenly realized this is literature. It’s not just puzzles. It’s not just this created world where the whole thing is about trying to find the clues. They are wonderful, wonderful writers. If you read Raymond Chandler today, it’s as if it was written yesterday. It’s so topical and contemporary even though they were written 70 or 80 years ago. That really made me become a great mystery fan through Chandler, Hammett and James M. Cain, and some other people too.
Raymond Chandler is an extraordinary writer. James Ellroy too. I just reread The Black Dahlia and that’s mind-blowing.
The Black Dahlia was the first bestseller I published. The Mysterious Press had been in business for quite a few years by that time, and I had edited three of Ellroy’s books before that. The Lloyd Hopkins Trilogy (Blood on the Moon, Because the Night, Suicide Hill). Then The Black Dahlia came in, and his agent wanted a much bigger advance. I said, You know those other books didn’t do very well, so I don’t know if I can pay that. He said, Read the book then let’s talk, and I was blown away by it. It was so fabulous, and it wound up selling so many copies. It was almost embarrassing. The hardcover was reprinted six times, and then the mass-market paperback we started with a first printing of more than a half million copies.
It’s not just a thriller. It’s a piece of literature.
And that’s true for many of the best crime novels. They are novels as well as telling a crime story or a mystery story or a suspense story. If it were written today, we would think of Crime and Punishment in the mystery category, because everything hinges on the murder.
Tell me what the title bookseller means to you.
Well, does it mean more to me than editor? Does it mean more to me than author? Does it mean more to me than publisher? I don’t know. I like being a bookseller. I liked it from the first day we opened the door more than 42 years ago.
The 13th of April 2022 will be our 43rd anniversary, so we’ve been doing this for a while. You know, if you read a wonderful book and you’re with a friend and you say, I just read this great book let me tell you about it. And if they then read the book and tell you how much they liked it, you feel great about that. I got to do it every day in my bookshop.
Somebody would pull a certain book off the shelf, and I would say, You know what put that back and let me give you a better book. Then people would come back and say boy you really know my taste. No, I know my taste, and it’s good taste. I know what people like and what they should like, and so I was always very proud of the fact that I would put a book in people’s hands, and they would come back almost without exception thanking me and telling me how much they loved the book and it’s great.
What you get to do with your friend every now and then I got to do every single day multiple times a day.
I don’t work in the bookshop as much as I used to. I spend most of my time now as a publisher. So, I don’t have that day-to-day face to face with my bookshop customers. Although, there are some, who when they come to the store—my office is in the basement—so they have to call me on the intercom and say oh come up Jay or Mary would like to see you. So, I go up. But on a regular basis I’m just not working in the store anymore. But, I love being a bookseller. I really do.
During the pandemic, social media has become a lifeline for many to the outside world. Your weekly Instagram chats about books, authors and collecting are a treasure trove. Even for those of us watching who cannot afford the books you talk about; these episodes are a window into a fascinating aspect of the store’s—and your—history. How did you decide to adapt this series into your business model?
I don’t really have a business model. It makes me sound like I’m really professional, and I’m really not. I just do things because I like to do them, or I think they might work or be interesting.
That, like so many other things, was the idea of one of the people on my staff. Charles Perry, who is the publisher of all four of my publishing imprints. He also works in the store and comes up with ideas. He said, Why don’t you do this? and I said, You know I’m not really crazy about talking in front of people. It always makes me nervous, but I like talking about books. That’s different. That’s not like getting up in front of a crowd, which I did when I was trying to earn a living as a freelance writer. That’s a hard way to earn a living if you’re talented, and when you’re like me and not talented, it’s brutal. So, I did a lot of lecturing, and I was a nervous wreck every single time. But this I felt very comfortable right away, because I was talking about books and talking about writers who in many cases I knew. Authors who were friends of mine or at least people I knew extremely well.
As a collector, I’ve been collecting for more than 50 years. I like collecting and understand what collectors like and what they want to know, so I enjoy talking about rare books even more than books by writer friends. It’s easy for me because I’ve been so immersed in it as a collector and bookseller.
Your passion comes through. You’ll talk about how a book is $5000 and the same book is $500, because of some seemingly small thing.
When we started that. We do it live on Wednesday mornings. I said Charles how many people watched. He said 35. I said I’m not sure it’s worth our trouble. I have to plan this, pull books, and think about what it is I’m going to say. And he said, no, but by the end of the second day we had 2,000 people watching.
I’m glad people like it, but I don’t know how much longer it will continue. I’m kind of running out of authors. There are authors who I would love to do, but it’s a bookshop. I don’t have a whole bunch of good Agatha Christie to talk about, because when I get them, they sell right away. Or the same with Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. I have a few more in store at least.
What do you love most about the bookshop?
What I loved most was interacting with customers. Getting to talk about books with people who knew something about books. Being given the chance to recommend books that I knew people would like. Even in the early years, a lot of people came in and said, I don’t really read mysteries. They look down their nose a little bit, but my aunt Mary loves them, so would you recommend something? I could do that, but I would always say I’m so sorry you don’t like mysteries. You don’t read Dickens or Dostoevsky or Somerset Maugham. Well, they said sure I do, but they aren’t mysteries. I said well, sure they are. They are just better than most. I miss that.
Now what I love most is dealing with rare books.
I have a wonderful staff who read so much more than I do, and they know the books better than I do—the modern books. The books of the last 20 years or so. Because I have so little time to read aside from manuscripts from my publishing companies and short stories for anthologies that I’ve been editing for years.
I used to fly a lot and read more, but I haven’t flown in two years. So I’m really behind on my reading, but the rare books I don’t have to do the reading I just know the books, and I catalogue them, and I talk to customers about them. I really do enjoy rare books.
What are some unexpected hidden gems one might find in the shop’s stacks?
Well, I think unexpected would be out of print books where they may not be aware these books are available. Also unexpected is if they ask for recommendations. Possibly me back in the day, but certainly Ryan, Tom or Mike. The three people who work on the floor on a regular basis and who read so much and who have very good taste. When you work in a store like this and you read, read, read, you start to understand the difference between a good book and a not so good book. So, if they ask for recommendations or are willing to listen to a recommendation and take a book by an author or a title they’ve never heard of before and then walk out with that and like it that would be an unexpected discovery, because we’ve discovered it for them.
I love that answer. I definitely left The Mysterious Bookshop with some treasures.
When I worked on the floor, which I did for around 20 years, people would say what do you recommend, and I always had to say tell me one book that you really like. Because I don’t want to give James Ellroy to somebody who loves Agatha Christe. It’s just a different readership. There are people who read across the board. Anything good they’ll read. A lot of people though are offended with Ellroy’s violence, language, sex, and all that stuff. A lot of people who like where cats solve the crime, they don’t want something really different. They want what they read. An Ellroy reader, if you give them Lilian Jackson Braun or some other very cozy writer, they’ll say what is this.
