The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films
Edited by Otto Penzler
Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original, 2019 

The latest sumptuous production by the legendary editor Otto Penzler, The Big Book of Reel Murders: Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films, features 61 short stories arranged in the classic style of the Black Lizard volumes: a thousand-page doorstopper of a book with contents arranged in double columns, and it has a theme: these are stories that formed the “source material” for a wide variety of movies and serials, from the forgettable to the classic. 

Readers already familiar with Penzler’s style will know what to expect here: this huge book is a bonanza of finds, from the well-known to the gloriously idiosyncratic. For instance, Penzler seems to be a Cornell Woolrich fan: he gets a whopping eight stories in the anthology, whereas Arthur Conan Doyle has only two. Fluent old hacks like Stuart Palmer get re-introduced to readers who may like what they see, or may at least smile indulgently at works like the 1934 story “The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls,” a Hildegarde Withers story by the man who’s quoted by his widow in the inimitable line: “I’ll write anything for money except poison pen letters and ransom notes.” 

Penzler’s charming enthusiasm, as usual, sometimes gets the better of him. He includes here “Brother Orchid,” a 1938 story by Richard Connell (the author of “The Most Dangerous Game,” which is of course also included in this volume), commenting that it’s “typical of Connell’s stories in that it has a quiet charm and humor that doesn’t throw a pie in the face.” But when former gangster Little John Sarto finishes his ten-year stretch in Alcatraz and crows to the warden as he’s leaving, readers will have to squint a bit to find any quiet charm:

“When I pet out I want to go with fireworks, flowers, and bands; but you’ll have a beard to your knees before they get out the last extra on Little John Sarto. I got a lot of livin’ to do first: I got to wash out the taste of slum with a lakeful of champagne, and it’ll take half the blondes in the Loop to make me forget them nights in solitary. But most of all I to to be myself again, not just a number. For every order I took here on the rock, I’m goin’ to give two. I’m goin’ to see guys shiver and jump when I speak. I’ve played mouse long enough. Watch me be a lion again.” 

A huge banquet like this rightly ought to be the place where the boring old truism “the book is always better than the movie” goes to die. Time and again, Penzler serves up a turgid, silly, or outright dumb story that went on to form the basis for a brilliant movie. Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution” is a ridiculous cartoon-sketch of Billy Wilder’s great 1957 movie, for instance, and readers will hardly recognize Bad Day at Black Rock in Howard Breslin’s tinny original, “Bad Time at Honda,” and what need be said about Robert Bloch’s “The Real Bad Friend” in comparison with Hitchcock’s immortal Psycho? 

Fortunately, even when the comparisons are embarrassing, they’re fascinating. Penzler has once again created a great big volume perfect for beguiling a long, lazy afternoon, or a whole series of them. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.