Murder in the Library: The Best American Mystery Stories/The Best American Mystery & Suspense

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A perennial under the Thrilling Detective Christmas tree every year, The Best American Mystery Stories was an annual anthology of mystery stories published in United States magazines and anthologies that came out every autumn, edited by Otto Penzler (with Michele Slung riding shotgun) and a co-editor who changed every year. It established itself as arguably the premier annual collections of the best in crime and detective fiction, drawing its selections from periodicals, collections and anthologies, both print and digital.

But if you want to dig deeper, the history of “best” American mystery short story anthologies can be traced back to 1931, when the one-shot The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year, edited by Carolyn Wells, was published, which was followed by Best Detective Stories of the Year, which was edited by David C. Cooke’s and ran from 1947 to 1959. Other notable attempts to establish an annual series include The Year’s 25 Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, from the editors of Mystery Scene and The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories series, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, which ran from 2000-05, which overlapped with Penzler’s The Best American Mystery Stories series.

Penzler’s guest editors tended to be some of the biggest names in crime fiction; a veritable who’s who of bestsellers and critical darlings, and they’ve always been American, until 2018, when the series broke ranks and selected Canadian mystery writer Louise Penny.

The series was started in 1997 with The Best American Mystery Stories 1997 (edited by Penzler and guest editor Robert B. Parker), as part of Houghton Mifflin’s The Best American series, and follows the same procedure with other titles in the series for choosing stories: the series editor (Penzler) picks out about fifty potential stories and the guest editor chooses twenty or or so for publication. The runner-ups (and other noteworthy stories) are listed in the appendix.

The original series lasted twenty-four volumes, and then in 2020 it was announced that long-time editor Penzler was out, and that Steph Cha would be taking over as series editor, and that the series would be retitled The Best American Mystery and Suspense. They dropped the word “Stories” from the title, and promised a more diverse selection of authors.

In response, the presumably miffed Otto Penzler announced that the Mysterious Bookshop would be unleashing his own series of annual best-of’s, cleverly entitled The Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mysteries of the Year.

For all the promised wokefullness of the original series, and the chest pounding of the rival series editors, in many cases the same authors—if not the same stories—have appeared in both series.

I’m just glad we now have two annual collections to shove under the tree every year.

   

MURDER IN THE LIBRARY

List respectfully compiled by Kevin Burton Smith.

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