Golden Age Christmas Mysteries
Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler selects Christmas-themed mysteries from the American authors active during the genre’s Golden Age, including stories by Mary Roberts Rinehart, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and more.
Christmas has served as a fertile background for mystery fiction for a very long time, perhaps because it has the appearance of a time of peace and love while being so deeply at odds with violence, crime, and even murder.
Many of the stories in this anthology have been written by some of the greatest Golden Age authors, undoubtedly inspired by the juxtaposition of the disparate elements of love and hate. There is a cliché about anthologies (and clichés become clichés because they are true) that compares them to a good…
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October 14, 2025Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, founded The Mysterious Press in 1975, now an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, and publishes classic crime fiction through MysteriousPress.com. Penzler has won two Edgar Awards, MWA’s Ellery Queen Award and the Raven. He has been given Lifetime Achievement awards by Noircon and The Strand Magazine. His new company, Penzler Publishers, launched its imprint American Mystery Classics in October 2018; it is devoted to reissuing classic American mysteries in hardcover and paperback.
The State versus Elinor Norton
Mary Roberts RinehartGolden Age Christmas Mysteries
Otto Penzler
The Scarlet Circle
Jonathan Stagge
Tragedy of X
Ellery Queen
Blood on the Cat
Nancy Rutledge
The D.A. Calls It Murder
Erle Stanley Gardner
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern
Phoebe Atwood Taylor
The Door
Mary Roberts Rinehart
The Fallen Sparrow
Dorothy B Hughes
The Three Coffins
John Dickson Carr
Christmas Crimes at The Mysterious Bookshop
Otto Penzler
