The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense »

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing firm Otto Penzler Books. He is a recipient of an Edgar Award for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection and the Ellery Queen Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his many contributions to the field. He is the editor of The Vampire Archives and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which was a New York Times bestseller.

The greatest Russian crime and mystery fiction—including Acunin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Nabokov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy.

Publishers Weekly

Penzler's anthology of Russian crime stories doesn't quite live up to the billing of its title, given the mediocrity of P. Nikitin's "The Strangler," a Sherlock Holmes pastiche that cribs from Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue." Fortunately, that tale is the sole dud among the 19 selections, many of which were penned by such 19th-century literary giants as Gogol, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, whose short but powerful "Sleepy" depicts an overworked servant girl driven by despair to commit murder. The most interesting story is Lev Sheinen's "The Hunting Knife," in which the author, a former prosecutor for Stalin during the purge trials of the 1930s, introduces an impossible crime element. The murder scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment may strike some as padding, while others will wonder why Penzler (Christmas at the Mysterious Bookshop) includes no examples of contemporary Russian noir. (Dec.)