The greatest detectives of the Golden Age investigate the most puzzling crimes of the era

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.

An unparalleled treasury of crime, mystery, and murder from the genre’s founding century

With stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London, The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century is an essential anthology of American letters. It’s a unique blend of beloved writers who contributed to the genre and forgotten names that pioneered the form, such as Anna Katharine Green, the godmother of mystery fiction, and the African-American writer Charles W. Chesnutt. Of course, Penzler includes “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” recognized as the first detective story, and with thirty-three stories spanning the years 1824–1899, nowhere else can readers find such a surprising, comprehensive take on the evolution of the American mystery story.

Twenty great whodunnits from the first decade of this series, edited by the award-winning editor and founder of the Mysterious Press.

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.