Otto Penzler

When I was in grade school there were basically two lines of mysteries you could read. One was the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew and the other was Encyclopedia Brown. The chief advantage of one over the other was that while HBND were novel length stories, Encyclopedia Brown tended to have a collection of shorter mysteries which had all the clues laid out in front of you. You’d read them and then turn to the back of the book where the solutions were explained, and some little-known fact given that helped explain how young Leroy “Encyclopedia” Brown had worked it out. Almost all of them were written by Donald J. Sobol starting in 1963. Several years later, however, I discovered that this was not where Sobol had started. Instead, in 1959, he began by writing a syndicated series called Two-Minute Mysteries which starred someone called Dr. Haledjian. They took a couple minutes to read and followed much the same pattern as the Encyclopedia series. In fact, many of the plots and key clues were reused for Encyclopedia. All of which is to say that Kwik Krimes is exactly the same sort of thing except written for adults by a variety of different authors. And it was fun to read.… (more)

There’s a certain satisfaction to a good Locked Room mystery. From the original example of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 which ushered in the modern era of the detective story to the examples contained in this book which play with the basic concepts of a room which it would either be impossible to escape or impossible for the murderer to have entered -- even up to playing with the concept of “room” itself – working it out ahead of the detective has almost always been the point. Therefore, it was a delight to read through these and see the artform well executed and still be able to beat them to the punch at least a few times.… (more)

The collection begins with W.B. Seabrook’s “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields”, the first account of zombies ever written and purported to be “entirely true”! And the fun doesn't stop there! Three of my all-time favorite authors are in this collection - Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale, and Edgar Allan Poe! Other authors within that I've enjoyed reading in the past include H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Robert Matheson, and Michael Marshall Smith. Truly, an all-star line-up!
The only one in here that I thought was a stinker was also the longest - "Z is for Zombie" by Theodore Roscoe. If you grow tired after 600 pages or so, I suggest skipping this last entry!

But BEWARE! “Eat Me” by Robert McCammon is nasty! Like it churned my stomach nasty! Eww…

Some zombie factoids I learned in these pages - they can come from the West Indies. Haiti. Africa. Lots of the time they are simply used as cheap labor! No salt rule (don't feed zombies anything with salt!). No meat rule.

A definition of a zombie appears in “Pigeons From Hell” by Robert E. Howard - “It’s a monster, something more and less than a human being, created by the magic that spawns in black swamps and jungles - well we’ll see.”

“When you sup with the devil, be sure you have a long spoon.”

“Greed inspires horrible things my dear…”… (more)