Golden Age Bibliomysteries

Otto Penzler (Author)
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.

Frederick Irving Anderson (Contributor)
Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) has been largely forgotten by modern readers, having produced only three books of mystery and crime during his lifetime; many additional stories were published only in magazines, mainly The Saturday Evening Post, some being collected in only one recent book,

Lawrence G. Blochman (Contributor)
Lawrence G Blochman (1900-1975) was born, educated, and began his writing career in California, earning a certificate in forensic pathology. He was a reporter for San Diego newspapers before becoming a journalist in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Calcutta, and then moving to Paris, where he met and married Marguerite Mailliard, in 1926. During World War II he served in the US Office of War Information. He eventually moved to New York and was elected the fourth president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1948-1949.

Anthony Boucher (Contributor)
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.

James Gould Cozzens (Contributor)
James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) grew up on New York’s Staten Island, then attending the Kent School in Connecticut before going to Harvard, from which he dropped out after his first book, Confusion (1924), was published during his sophomore year. He quit to write his second novel, then spent a year in Cuba teaching the children of Americans working there. He moved to New Jersey where he spent most of the rest of his life, apart from service in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II.

Lillian De La Torre (Contributor)
Lillian De La Torre (1902-1993) began her literary career with well-researched narratives of famous murder cases of the past, such as Elizabeth Is Missing (1945) about the notorious Elizabeth Canning Case; Villainy Detected (1947), an anthology of eighteenth-century crime; The Heir of Douglas (1952), a study of one of the greatest scandals of eighteenth-century England; and The Truth about Belle Gunness (1955), unveiling an American serial killer for modern readers

Frank Gruber (Contributor)
Frank Gruber (1904-1969) at the peak of his career, produced three or four full-length novels a year, numerous short stories, and screenplays, including such near classics as The Mask of Dimitrios, Terror by Night and, with Steve Fisher, Johnny Angel. He also wrote two dozen western novels

C. Daly King (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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.

Carolyn Wells (Contributor)
Carolyn Wells (1869-1942) wrote and edited one hundred seventy books, of which eighty-two are mysteries. As famous as she was for her mystery novels, sixty-one of which featured the scholarly, book-loving Fleming Stone, she was equally noted in her time for such anthologies as Nonsense Anthology (1902), considered a classic of its kind, and her Parody Anthology (1904), which remained in print for more than a half-century. Wells also wrote the first instructional manual in the detective fiction genre, The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913).

Cornell Woolrich (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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 (Contributor)
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.