Otto Penzler owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and founded the Mysterious Press and Otto Penzler Books. He has written and edited several books, including the Edgar Award-winning Encyclopaedia of Mystery and Detection, and is the series editor of the annual Best American Mystery Stories of the Year.

Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) has been largely forgotten by modern readers, having produced only three books of mystery and crime during his lifetime; many additional stories were published only in magazines, mainly The Saturday Evening Post, some being collected in only one recent book,

Lawrence G Blochman (1900-1975) was born, educated, and began his writing career in California, earning a certificate in forensic pathology. He was a reporter for San Diego newspapers before becoming a journalist in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Calcutta, and then moving to Paris, where he met and married Marguerite Mailliard, in 1926. During World War II he served in the US Office of War Information. He eventually moved to New York and was elected the fourth president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1948-1949.

Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) was an American author, editor, and critic, perhaps best known today as the namesake of the annual Bouchercon convention, an international meeting of mystery writers, fans, critics, and publishers. Born William Anthony Parker White, he wrote under various pseudonyms and published fiction in a number of genres outside of mystery, including fantasy and science fiction.

James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978) grew up on New York s Staten Island, then attending the Kent School in Connecticut before going to Harvard, from which he dropped out after his first book, Confusion (1924), was published during his sophomore year. He quit to write his second novel, then spent a year in Cuba teaching the children of Americans working there. He moved to New Jersey where he spent most of the rest of his life, apart from service in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II.