by Josh Pachter
JOSEPH GOODRICH (1963– ) is a playwright and author. His adaptation of Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town received the 2016 Calgary Theater Critics’ Award for Best New Script. His adaptations of The Red Box and Might as Well Be Dead marked Nero Wolfe’s stage debut. Panic won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Play. He is the editor of People in a Magazine: The Selected Letters of S. N. Behrman and His Editors at “The New Yorker” and Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947–1950. His fiction has appeared in EQMM, AHMM, and two MWA anthologies. A former Calderwood Fellow at the McDowell Colony, he lives in NYC.
REBECCA K. JONES (1986– ) is a practicing attorney in Arizona, specializing in criminal law. Her first short story, “History on the Bedroom Wall,” was published in EQMM in 2009. She translated another Thomas Narcejac pastiche, “The Mystery of the Red Balloons,” for The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (Wildside Press, 2018).
MARVIN KAYE (1938– ) is the author of nineteen novels, the editor of Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and the editor and copublisher of Weird Tales, America’s oldest supernatural horror periodical. A native of Philadelphia, he is listed in Who’s Who in America and received the Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement Award.
JOHN LESCROART (1948– ) is the author of twenty-eight novels, eighteen of which have been New York Times bestsellers. Libraries Unlimited places him among “The 100 Most Popular Thriller and Suspense Authors.” With sales of over twelve million copies, his books have been translated into twenty-two languages, and his short stories appear in many anthologies.
FRANK LITTLER, like Patrick Butler, contributed a number of pieces to The Saturday Review in the late 1960s, primarily to Martin Levin’s “Phoenix Nest” feature, Goodman Ace’s similar “Top of My Head,” and Jerome Beatty Jr.’s also similar “Trade Winds.” A decade later, Thomas Middleton made several references to “a gentleman named Frank Littler” in his “Light Refractions” column, still in The Saturday Review, but it’s unclear whether or not that was the same Frank Littler.
ROBERT LOPRESTI (1962– ) lives in the Pacific Northwest. His most recent novel, Greenfellas, is the comic tale of a mobster who decides to save the environment by any means necessary. His seventy-plus short stories have appeared in EQMM, AHMM, The Strand, etc., and have been reprinted in Year’s Best Mystery Stories. In 2013, the Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine gave him the Black Orchid Novella Award for “The Red Envelope.”
MARION MAINWARING (1922–2015) was a scholar, writer, and translator. She held a PhD in English from Harvard, was fluent in French, Russian, and Greek, and lived much of her life in London and Paris. She wrote two murder mysteries—Murder at Midyears (set at a fictionalized Mount Holyoke College) in 1953 and Murder in Pastiche in 1955—and translated the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev for fun, in part to overcome writer’s block. Her talent for pastiche led to her most well-known project—also done for fun, as a break from her decades-long detective scholarship into the life of Edith Wharton—a seamless completion of Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers (1993).
THOMAS NARCEJAC (1908–1998) was the pseudonym of Pierre Ayroud, who wrote collaboratively with Pierre Boileau as Boileau-Narcejac. Their best-known work was D’entre les morts (1954), which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock as Vertigo in 1958. A collection of Narcejac’s pastiches of famous fictional detectives was published in France as Usurpation d’identité.
JOSH PACHTER (1951– ) is a writer, editor and translator. His short fiction has appeared in EQMM, AHMM, and many other periodicals, anthologies, and year’s-best collections; The Tree of Life (Wildside Press, 2015) collected all ten of his Mahboob Chaudri stories. He coedited The Misadventures of Ellery Queen (Wildside Press, 2018) and The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (Wildside Press, 2020) with Dale C. Andrews, edited The Man Who Read Mysteries: The Short Fiction of William Brittain (Crippen & Landru, 2018), and coedited Amsterdam Noir (Akashic Books, 2019) with Dutch writer René Appel. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife, Laurie, who was reading a Nero Wolfe novel in a coffee shop when they first met in 2007.
OTTO PENZLER (1942– ), 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 as ebooks 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. He founded two new publishing companies in 2018, Penzler Publishers, reissuing American Mystery Classics in hardcover and trade paperback, and Scarlet, which publishes original psychological suspense novels. He has edited more than 60 anthologies.
MACK REYNOLDS (1917–1983) was a science-fiction writer, credited with almost two hundred short stories (primarily in the 1950s and 1960s) and almost seventy novels (primarily in the 1960s and 1970s). Born Dallas McCord Reynolds, he wrote as Mack Reynolds and under numerous pen names, including Maxine Reynolds. His Mission to Horatius (1968) was the first original novel set in the Star Trek universe.
NORMA SCHIER (1930–1995) contributed ten unusual pastiches to EQMM between 1965 and 1970. In each case, her byline was an anagram of the name of a noted crime writer, and all the proper names in the stories were also anagrams. In 1979, the Mysterious Press collected all ten of these stories—plus five more—as The Anagram Detectives.
DAVE ZELTSERMAN (1959– ) is the award-winning author of twenty crime, horror, and thriller novels, and numerous short stories. His novels have been named by the Washington Post, NPR, WBUR, the American Library Association, and Booklist as best books of the year, and his crime novel Small Crimes was made into a Netflix original film starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. He also writes the Morris Brick crime thrillers under the pseudonym Jacob Stone.
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These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Nero Wolfe characters copyright © 2019 by
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Copyright © 2020 by Rex Stout Literary Properties
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
978-1-5040-5985-5
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