Otto Penzler

Otto Penzler is an editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Mystery Stories series ($13 each), and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York. Here he chooses his six favorite mysteries.

Breakheart Hill by Thomas H. Cook (Bantam, $7). “This is the darkest story I ever heard, and all my life I have labored not to tell it.” That’s the opening line of this poignantly evocative tale of young love. With its tragic undercurrent of violence, it may be the most poetically beautiful mystery ever written.

Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (Dell, $8). Lesser writers seem to believe that suspense is heightened by increasing the level of grisly violence and adding to the body count. There is plenty of all that here, but not gratuitously. This white-knuckle introduction to Hannibal Lecter could give Charles Manson nightmares.

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The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley (Vintage, $12). In a world that produced the great Raymond Chandler, this is the finest private-eye novel of all time. After three rereadings, I’m still not sure I get the plot, but the language is so dazzling it could blind a Brazilian pimp.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (Bantam Classics, $6). Full of Dickensian names (the heroes are Laura Fairlie, her half-sister, Marian, and Walter Hartright; the villains are Count Foscoe and Percival Glyde), this gorgeous 1860 romance is one of the first and most memorable novels of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge.

Chinaman’s Chance by Ross Thomas (out of print). The first adventure of Quincy Durant and Artie Wu, the fat Malibu con man who was a pretender to the emperor’s throne, is as perfectly constructed and hilarious a caper as the best of Donald E. Westlake—and there’s no higher praise than that.

A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (Center Point, $26). Impossible as it may seem upon reading this utterly brilliant tour de force, the author was only 24 when it was published. Forget the bad movies made from it-the twists and shocks are as intense in Levin’s mystery as they are in his horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby.