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.

Charlotte Armstrong (1905 1969) was an Edgar Award-winning American author of mystery short stories and novels. Born and raised in the mining region of Michigan s Upper Peninsula, she moved to New York and received a B.A. degree from Barnard in 1925. She had two plays produced on Broadway but neither was successful, so she turned to writing mystery fiction, beginning with Lay On, MacDuff (1942), the first of three detective novels featuring Professor MacDougal Duff. Several of her novels were adapted for film, including The Unsuspected, The Chocolate Cobweb, and Mischief.

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.

Mignon G. Eberhart (1899 1996) wrote dozens of mystery novels over nearly sixty years. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she published her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, in 1929 and by the end of the 1930s she was one of the most popular mystery writers on the planet. Eight of her books-including Murder by an Aristocrat-were adapted for film; later in her career, she was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement.

Erle Stanley Gardner (1889 1970) was a prolific American author best known for his works centred on the lawyer-detective Perry Mason. At the time of his death in March of 1970, in Ventura, California, Gardner was the most widely read of all American writers and the most widel