Crime-fiction kingpin dusts off history’s great ‘Rogues and Villains’
If Otto Penzler were an actual detective, his desk would surely be littered with expense receipts, manila photograph envelopes, overflowing ashtrays, coffee-cup rings and maybe a mugshot book he pilfered from the local PD.
Instead, the 75-year-old New Yorker is — and not just by his own admission — the world’s foremost authority on crime and detective fiction. In 1975, he founded his own publishing house, Mysterious Press, and won an Edgar Award as editor of The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection two years later. Two years after that he founded Mysterious Bookshop, a retail library of about 60,000 whodunits now located in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood.
“When it comes to legacy, Mr. Penzler’s only wish is to be remembered as the best in the murder business,” the New York Times noted last year.
You’ll get no argument from him.
“Once you write an encyclopedia, you’re the world’s leading expert on a subject,” Penzler laughs.
By his own arithmetic, Penzler has edited at least 60 mystery anthologies since that encyclopedia. His latest is “The Big Book of Rogues and Villains” (Vintage/Black Lizard), which — at nearly 75 stories and 900 pages — could well be the world’s bloodiest doorstop.
Published last fall, it’s another worthy entry in the series that began in style with 2007’s “The Big Book of Pulps” and has since grown to include books devoted to treachery, locked-room mysteries and ghost stories. Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper got one book apiece; other titles include “Bloodsuckers,” “Coffins” and “Fangs.”
“I don’t want to sound like a salesman here, but in truth they’re the biggest bargain in publishing,” Penzler says. “They’re 25 dollars, and they have the equivalent of five books in them.”
Penzler acknowledges the topic of rogues and villains, a murky area roughly bounded by larceny and murder, was a tougher sell to his editor than other books in the series. But as the saying goes, this time it’s personal.
“I just love the idea of these clever criminals,” he says. “And then some of them are not that clever; they’re just vicious, but they seem to fit into the same kind of book.
“A lot of the rogues are not at all villainous,” Penzler adds. “They may be thieves, but they’re not violent; they don’t really hurt people. They frequently steal from people who are not that terrific and maybe deserve to be stolen from.”
Which is not to say altruism ranks high on any of these characters’ list of qualities.
“Quite a few of them either take a little percentage for themselves or they take all of it for themselves,” Penzler chuckles. “But there is a Robin Hood mentality in a lot of these stories.”
Spanning the years 1824 — the date of Washington Irving’s “The Story of a Young Robber” — through 2015, “Rogues and Villains” includes other wellknown authors Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Bram Stoker, Sinclair Lewis and Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. Modern mystery fans will smile upon seeing the work of Max Allan Collins, Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block and “First Blood” author David Morrell.
Much of the value of “Rogues and Villains,” though, lies in the way Penzler — who estimates he reads between 400 and 500 stories for one of these anthologies — dusts off authors whose once bright achievements have inevitably faded into history.
Those might include William Irish, pen name of Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich, whom Penzler calls “arguably the greatest writer of suspense fiction of all time”; late-Victorian male-female collaborators L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace; or Edgar Wallace, creator of charming lady rogue “Four Square Jane.”
Similarly, the book reintroduces several characters who in their day numbered among the most popular in all of fiction, although some of them underwent radical transformations. The Cisco Kid, hero beloved by 1940s-’60s radio, TV, film and comic-strip audiences, actually began as a bona fide Texas outlaw created by O. Henry in 1907. Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, aka The Saint, was in many ways as suave and resourceful as 007 — which makes sense; the late Roger Moore played both characters, starting with Templar in the 1962-69 TV series.
On the other hand, Penzler notes that Maurice LeBlanc’s “Prince of Thieves” Arsène Lupin is a national hero in France whose books remain in print today. He’s also partial to A.J. Raffles, the quintessential gentleman burglar created by E.W. Hornung, who was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s brotherin-law.
Raffles, Penzler thinks, “certainly should be better known.”
Another of his personal favorites is American Frederick Irving Anderson’s Infallible Godahl, who first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1913. Anderson’s conceit was that Godahl was so brilliant he was never even suspected of any crimes; the police and the public only learned about them through a journalist intermediary.
“The police eventually were so incapable of catching whoever this mastermind criminal was that they paid him not to commit crimes,” says Penzler. “How cool is that?”
Plenty of villains are as fascinating as they are despicable. Penzler says the best of them can be boiled down to one word: “pulpy.”
“In order for a villain to have lasted in fiction, they have to have really big crimes in mind,” he explains. “World domination, taking over a government, stealing all the gold from Fort Knox. The James Bond villains are a great example of villains that have such massive egos and plans that they’re fascinating in their way.”
Although the character doesn’t appear in “Rogues and Villains,” Penzler points to Hannibal Lecter as a perfect example of contemporary villainy, saying he prefers the “offstage” Lecter of “Red Dragon” and “Silence of the Lambs” to his greater ubiquity in Harris’ later books.
“I think we’re horrified at the absolute worst acts that any human being could conceive of,” Penzler says. “We’re appalled and disgusted and fearful, but we still have to watch (Lecter) because he’s got something that makes him compelling.”
Reflecting over the eight eras and nearly 200 years covered in “Rogues and Villains,” Penzler says he thinks the nature of literary villainy hasn’t changed quite so much as the style used to describe it. That, he thinks, has gradually grown more graphic. Audiences may also be more likely to sympathize with the characters’ motives, he adds.
“They’re not killing people for the sport or because they’re psychopaths, they’re killing people for a reason,” says Penzler of characters such as Lawrence Block’s hit man, Keller. “So we accept them and kind of find ourselves in their corner.”
To wit, Penzler’s choice for the most fiendish tale in his entire book is George Fielding Eliot’s “The Copper Bowl,” in which a young girl is tortured and murdered in particularly nauseating fashion. The story was originally published in December 1928, the height of the pulp-fiction era.
“I talked to a guy who has written about the pulps endlessly,” Penzler recalls. “I was so shocked by this story that I (couldn’t) believe I read it, and that it was published because it was so horrifying. And he said, ‘In the pulp world, this is generally regarded as the most evil story ever published.’
“People in the 1920s and ’30s were not accustomed to that kind of overt violence,” he says. “We’re a little anesthetized to it today.”
‘I just love the idea of these clever criminals. And then some of them are not that clever; they’re just vicious, but they seem to fit into the same kind of book.’
Otto Penzler