This year, Mysterious Press is celebrating 50 years of invaluable contributions to the mystery genre.
Mysterious Press was founded in 1975 to publish the best mystery books. One of the first genre-specific publishers to use specialty materials such as fine paper and full-color, artistic, dust jackets, Mysterious Press has always been known for the high quality of their books.
Since 2011, Mysterious Press has partnered with Open Road Integrated Media to create ebooks of classic mystery stories, bringing them into the 21st century without compromising on the editorial and artistic quality that has come to be expected from Mysterious Press books.
Otto Penzler, the founder of Mysterious Press and owner of The Mysterious Bookshop, one of the oldest mystery bookstores in America and home to the offices of Mysterious Press, is the driving force behind the imprint.
Nobody knows mystery like Penzler: He is a multiple Edgar Award winner and served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America for fourteen years.
This women’s history month, we asked Otto Penzler who his favorite women detectives are—and this is what he said!
Murder by an Aristocrat
Eberheart’s Sarah Keate is a nurse turned amateur sleuth. Quick-witted and spunky, she has solved cases across America.
In this book, Nurse Keate is called to care for a man from a wealthy family with a supposedly self-inflicted bullet wound.
When the man dies under suspicious circumstances, Nurse Keate must use her signature cleverness and attention to detail to determine which of the other aristocrats within the house could have committed the murder.
Miss Pinkerton
Another nurse with a knack for cracking cases, Hilda Adams began helping the police when she realized that people often confide in their nurses, and that those secrets could be used to solve mysteries.
The case here is the death of Juliet Mitchell’s nephew, which first appears like an obvious suicide.
But someone else is to blame. Hilda, under the name Miss Pinkerton, must dig through the family’s secrets to find the true killer, while lending her care to the aging Ms. Mitchell.
The Penguin Pool Murder
Stuart Palmer’s female sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, is no stranger to chaos: she’s a third-grade teacher.
In this first appearance of the amateur detective, she’s on a trip with her class to the New York Aquarium when she finds a body in the penguin pool! Withers, “one of the world’s shrewdest and most amusing detectives,” partners with the police to get to the bottom of the case and kickstarts her second career investigating crime (The New York Times).
Murder Out of Turn
Husband and wife writing team Frances and Richard Lockridge created husband and wife mystery-solving duo Mr. and Mrs. North. Smart and upbeat Mrs. North is often the one to really solve the cases.
When the Norths invite a group of their friends to a vacation outside of the bustle of 1940s New York, all is happy and peaceful. That is, until a young woman is discovered dead.
The Norths must help the police figure out who could have killed her, and it looks like it was someone from their party….
The Withdrawing Room
Sarah Kelling is a member of a well-known family with deep roots in Boston. Murder and mystery seem to follow her around, forcing her to solve the cases with the help of art fraud investigator Max Bittersohn.
Low on funds and recently widowed, Sarah decides to open up her Back Bay brownstone to boarders and welcomes in a colorful cast of characters.
But when lodgers start dying, including one close to her family, Sarah must find out who’s targeting her residents and stop them before it’s too late.
Double or Quits
Bertha Cool is a no-nonsense private investigator with the build of a linebacker and the mouth of a sailor. Her partner is Donald Lam, an awkward and anxious young man whose brain makes up for his wiry appearance.
Here, Cool and Lam are tasked with solving what seems to be a case of a secretary running off with her boss’ jewelry.
But as the detectives set out to locate the missing secretary, they find a more complicated mystery than they had thought… and a dead body.
The Cases of Susan Dare
Long before Murder, She Wrote, Mignon G. Eberhart wrote of crime writer and solver Susan Dare. A mystery author by trade, Susan Dare uses her head full of clues and motives to solve real-life cases in her life.
In each of the short stories in this collection, Eberhart manages to fit a complex mystery and remarkable detective work by Dare into a small number of pages.
Each story will have readers on the edge of their seats as Dare is called in to untangle a case.
Indemnity Only
Sarah Paretsky’s hard-boiled detective V.I. Warshawski is a reflection and product of her city: 1980s Chicago. Warshawski is fierce and independent, and not one to be reckoned with.
In this first appearance of the private eye, Warshawski meets with an anonymous client who is looking for his son’s missing girlfriend.
As Warshawski discovers that all of the information she’s been given is false, she finds herself on a deadly mission to capture a killer and save a woman’s life.
The Idol House of Astarte
Last but not certainly not least is Agatha Christie’s famous female sleuth, Miss Marple, the old spinster detective who solves the mysteries of the town of St. Mary Mead.
Miss Marple has become one of the most recognizable and renowned women of the mystery genre.
In this classic short story, Miss Marple sets out to solve the inexplicable murder of Sir Richard Haydon, who was killed years earlier while hosting a costume party at his own estate which he believes was formerly used as a site for worship of goddesses.
