In 2018, for instance, after the Mystery Writers of America withdrew its nomination of Linda Fairstein for a lifetime achievement award (due to her involvement, as an assistant district attorney, in Manhattan’s notorious 1989 Central Park Five rape prosecutions), Penzler penned a poisonous response to the MWA’s decision. In it, he denounced the organization’s board members as “cowardly” and damned the crime writers (among them Steph Cha and Attica Locke) who’d complained of Fairstein’s part in that legal case as a “small coterie of frightened sheep caving to political correctness.”
Only months later, news that Penzler and Pegasus Books were planning to launch Scarlet, “a joint publishing venture specializing in psychological suspense aimed at female readers,” drew additional disapproval. As short-story writer and blogger David Nemeth opined in Do Some Damage, “what a dumb idea it is to have a man to team up with a publisher with the intent of ‘specializing in psychological suspense aimed at female readers’ in the throes of #MeToo and female empowerment. Does Pegasus Books know how to read a room?” Further criticism flowed Penzler’s way, recalls writer Nick Kolakowski, following word of Scarlet’s decision “to have male authors write or co-write its initial slate of books with ‘complex women,’ and then fade those authors behind either a woman’s pseudonym or a woman co-author.” (The first Scarlet title due for release, in September, will be An Inconvenient Woman, by Stéphanie Buelens.)
And then just two months ago, it was announced that Penzler had been replaced as series editor of the annual anthology Best American Mystery Stories, which he founded back in 1997. It seems Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (which publishes BAMS under its Mariner Books imprint) had taken on a new adult trade publisher, Deb Brody. She, in turn, had decided to let Penzler go and to rebrand his series—beginning in 2021—as The Best American Mystery and Suspense. These changes didn’t sit at all well with Penzler, who responded in a cantankerous Facebook post (which has since been deleted):
According to an announcement from the editor-in-chief of HMH on Monday, the series "is going in an exciting new direction in response to the changing market and evolving readership and with an increased focus on traditionally marginalized voices." This means that stories will no longer be selected for excellence, the major criterion evidently now being the race, ethnicity, or sexual preference of the author. Forgive my bitterness. First off, I published lots of black writers and probably more than I knew since I never required a photo ID. I also published some writers who I know are gay but, again, doubtless others whose sexual preferences were unknown to me--as they should be. No one was marginalized when my first reader Michele Slung, and I, and the guest editors, sought the best stories. I'm now glad that I was not asked to stay on as I never would have agreed to edit a book on these terms.Intriguingly, his post concluded, “It’s not over. I’ll make an announcement soon.” Only now do we know that remark’s import.
Yesterday brought this notice:
Given Penzler’s penchant for rubbing many people the wrong way, it wasn’t surprising to see this latest news met with doubts, but also with some ringside curiosity. “This has the potential to get … interesting,” Jim Thomsen, a Washington manuscript editor and member of the Mystery Writers of America—Northwest Chapter, observed on Facebook. “Will the author rosters for [Best American Mystery and Suspense and the rival Mysterious Bookshop anthology] break down along tribal lines? What if the competing anthologies want the same story? How old and white and male—Penzler’s core constituency—will the new anthology be? What will the selection criteria and process he for each? Which will sell better, if you had to guess?”
We have another year to wait before such questions can be answered. Meanwhile, the 2020 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories, guest-edited by C.J. Box, and featuring Otto Penzler in his final turn as series editor, will be released on Election Day, November 3.
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