Quotes from Otto Penzler

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

I don't believe in ghosts and have never seen one. I wish I could see one, and I would like to have seen one because then I could believe in God. If I can see it, feel it and taste it, then I believe in it.

I have always been a pretty big fan of ghost stories.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.

All cultures have had a belief in ghosts and a fear of ghosts. People have always told stories, and everybody likes being frightened, especially when you feel safe. Personally, I find them scarier than vampires or zombies.

One of the hopes we have when we hear or read an interview with a mystery writer is to get inside the writer's head, to learn something we didn't know before.

To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery.

A pulp story without a detective and, obviously, somebody for him to do battle with is unthinkable, and I can't remember reading a pulp story that didn't have a dame - either a good girl or a bad girl.

Today's ghost stories tend to be much more physically or psychologically violent. The Victorians were much more leisurely about what might or could happen, building suspense layer by layer rather than punching you in the face.

Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.

She (Patricia Higsmith) was a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being…I could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly…. But her books? Brilliant.

I went over and rolled the woman over on her back. She couldn't have been much over twenty-two or three; little, gray-eyed blonde. There was a knife in her side, under the arm. There was a .38 automatic near her outstretched hand. She was very dead.

He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you. She

The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrensy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eyes, it flew upon the body of the girl

I am not given to either believing or disbelieving things 'on principle,' as I have found many idiots prone to be, and what is more, some of them not ashamed to boast of the insane fact.

combat boots and helmets. The breeze rose and he walked crabwise, trying to give

Communism is a hatred of the poor for the rich—not simply an envy.

These comments have been offered by those who abuse the privilege of being stupid, but I thank them for their interest.

a town that smelled of chicken guts, hog manure, and rampant incest, which seemed to be the three main industries.

Abington, Glass of '64. Jenny was a year behind me and Wayne.

You think people open their eyes just because you tell them to look? There's no happily-ever-after on this. You're dreaming.

At Cato's Irene Mayo waited in the booth McFee usually occupied. She wore a green felt beret, a string of pearls and a knitted green silk suit with white cuffs.