American Mystery Classics. I spotted a few titles from this series on the shelves of my local library. It covers forgotten works from the Golden Age of detective fiction. Picking one up I tumbled headfirst down a rabbit hole that would have left Alice with a concussion. Who could imagine the political issues fermenting beneath the cover of that book? Culture wars, generational divides, genre battles, gender friction. Who knew crime fiction was such a war zone?
American Mystery Classics is curated by Otto Penzler, distributed through WW Norton. Goodreads list 57 titles. Otto Penzler is a controversial figure in the world of crime fiction. He has edited a ton of collections, like the annual Best American Mystery Stories (1997-2021) and the Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000) co-edited with Tony Hillerman. There are many more including the ‘Big Book of…’ series covering topics like espionage stories, Victorian, stories adapted for film, and female detectives. (The latter is ironic given the controversies Penzler has stirred up for years.). He’s received a bucketful of honors, like the Mystery Writers of America Ellery Queen Award in 1994 and the John Siegenthaler Legend Award at Killer Nashville in 2018. Between those dates and beyond a lot of stuff went down.
For example, after Sisters in Crime was started in 1986, Penzler commented, “It’s a negative, flawed concept. It’s an organization that espouses non-sexism but is sexist. They loathe the old boys network in publishing, but they’ve become one. It’s a divisive organization. Some of its members are strident and achingly boring on the subject of sexism.” (Chicago Tribune, 12/8/91)
It went downhill from there. (I couldn’t find original citations for all the quotes attributed to Penzler on the web, so there could be errors.) His most famous quote: “Men take writing more seriously as art. Men labor over a book to make it literature.” Referring to mysteries in the Agatha Christie style he said, “They may be fun, they may have their charm, but they are not serious literature and don’t deserve an Edgar.” And he qualified Malice Domestic as a conference devoted to lightweight books of negligible literary value.
Then there was the Linda Fairstein controversy. An ex-prosecutor, Fairstein headed the sex crimes office at the time of the prosecution of the Central Park Five, the five young men of color accused of the rape of jogger Patricia Meille. She was gravely injured but managed to survive. It took a decade for identification of the real perpetrator with DNA confirmation and exoneration of the five. Even after the men were released, Fairstein maintained their guilt.
In 2018 the MWA announced Fairstein would be the Grand Master at their upcoming annual meeting. Attica Locke was working on the Netflix series on the Central Park Five case. She begged that Fairstein be replaced, alleging she was responsible for the wrongful incarceration. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Steph Cha called it a scandal and criticized the MWA for being embarrassingly white. Penzler weighed in to defend Fairstein, calling Locke’s and Cha’s letters racially charged and utterly misinformed. He said Cha was patently unqualified for her position as crime fiction critic for the LA Review of Books
In a certain manner Cha won this battle with Penzler. In 2021 Steph Cha replaced him as editor of the annual collection The Best American Mystery and Suspense. Penzler started a competing anthology, The Best Mystery Stories of the Year. A demographic breakdown of the 2021 editions of the two series reveals that Penzler’s authors are all white while Cha’s includes eight white and eleven others of various ethnic and racial backgrounds. The average age of Penzler’s authors is 67 while Cha’s is 48.
So we might conclude that this turmoil has been symptomatic of an extended generational changing of the guard. Except that Penzler continues to sell, in fact his anthology outsells Cha’s. I counted up the titles by female authors in the series that originally drew my attention, American Mystery Classics, and found 17 by female authors out of 57 in total. That’s 30%. Draw your own conclusions. I have zero desire to wander into a DEI purity contest. Penzler is one editor among many whom readers can choose or leave on the shelf.
The problem is that curating collections that pretend to have critical authority, with titles like ‘the best of something’, encourages readers to think this represents some critical consensus. Then they unconsciously internalize the biases that informed the selection process. Unless they get educated about where those choices came from and what alternatives exist. Which is a long way of explaining how and why I fell into this rabbit hole and came out a touch more aware, if a bit dizzy. I’d love to hear what you think.
All these awards and "best of" anthologies are selected from a relatively small pool of stories when you consider how many get published each year in a slew of magazines both in print and online. The online landscape is often overlooked by whoever does the selection and it can't be any different. Nobody has the stamina to read everything, it's virtually impossible. So, name recognition plays a role, as does the reputation of the publication - stories in AHMM, EQMM get a boost. When the anthology is managed by a single individual, relationships come into the mix too, and obviously personal tastes. "Best of" should have a subtitle, something like: Of all the stories I read this year, these are the ones I think are the best.... a bit long, unfortunately.
Thank you. I was late in coming to this controversy, which I don't consider a controversy at all. Penzler has "white male syndrome," in my vp a fear of women. Even though he has contributed greatly to our profession, he needs to shut up as his opinions are so off the rails, especially about Sisters in Crime and Malice, that he's ruining his reputation.
You are such a terrific writer and I love your newsletter! Keep it up!