Mysteries that don’t end neatly

SOME curmudgeons complain that they miss good old-fashioned fiction -- orderly stories that begin at the beginning, proceed through the middle and end with all strands knotted in a tidy bow. The implication, of course, is that standards have declined because of our decadent postmodern preoccupation with style over substance. “Uncertain Endings,” the latest anthology from the prolific Otto Penzler, disproves this theory. Either standards fell long ago or untidy stories have always been popular.

Penzler, founder and proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, knows that anthologies are like a party: You meet people you already know, people whose reputation you know and people who are completely new to you. The experienced host chooses invitees who will get along well, and he provides enough preamble to launch a conversation. For “Uncertain Endings,” Penzler gives a brief overview in the foyer and introduces each author and story, including Mark Twain’s “A Medieval Romance,” O. Henry’s “Thimble, Thimble” and tales by Roald Dahl and Aldous Huxley.

Robert Parker, the creator of Spenser, once remarked that “Otto Penzler knows more about crime fiction than most people know about anything.” Indeed he has taken the place formerly held by such mystery genre critics and anthologists as Howard Haycraft and Frederic Dannay. (Dannay was the magazine- and anthology-editing half of the pseudonymous duo known as Ellery Queen.) Anthologies seem to play a more important role in genre fiction than in mainstream writing. A handful of them are landmarks in -- or perhaps pocket guides to -- the field, including Dorothy L. Sayers’ “Omnibus of Crime” series from the 1920s and various Ellery Queen anthologies, especially “101 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1941,” the first comprehensive tour of the genre’s youth.

Penzler has a truly encyclopedic knowledge of these scholars and practitioners, as he demonstrated with the indispensable “Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection.” He’s edited more than 30 anthologies, including the annual “Best American Mystery Stories” series. His shop is one of the earliest and surely the most famous bookstores devoted to crime and detective fiction. He’s won all the major awards in the field -- an Edgar or two, a Raven and an Ellery Queen award for lifetime contributions.

Some readers may consider his new book’s subtitle, “The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mystery Stories,” somewhat misleading. These are not unsolved true-crime tales; they are complete fictions intentionally left unresolved. “These are riddle stories,” Penzler writes, “dilemmas, paradoxes, brain-teasers, all guaranteed to flummox the most astute mind.” They deliberately flout the supposed rules of storytelling and leave the reader hanging at the end. Penzler recommends, and this reviewer echoes, that you read the stories in order rather than skipping around, to enjoy some unexpected narrative developments. For example, there is Ray Bradbury’s suspenseful tale “The Whole Town’s Sleeping.” After it appeared in McCall’s in 1950, Alfred Hitchcock included it in one of his anthologies. Bradbury fans will remember it as the chapter in “Dandelion Wine” about Lavinia’s flight through the ravine, fearing the serial killer called the Lonely One. In “Dandelion Wine,” a follow-up scene resolves the question left hanging at the end of the original story. But later in Penzler’s anthology, you will find a sequel that Dannay asked Bradbury to write for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1954. Don’t expect a neat resolution even in the sequel. The same sort of process occurs with Frank R. Stockton’s classic 1882 puzzler, “The Lady or the Tiger?” Four years later Stockton published a sequel, “The Discourager of Hesitancy.”

Equally interesting (and unpredictable) are authors’ responses to forays into this open-ended kind of story. In 1948, American screenwriter and fiction author Jack Moffitt, who had already responded to Guy de Maupassant’s tale “The Necklace,” wrote his own remarkable answer to Stockton, titled “The Lady and the Tiger.” Penzler presents these stories in chronological order, with just enough historical background to enrich this anthology and lend it more scholarly value than most such collections can claim.

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Michael Sims is the author of “Adam’s Navel” and “The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel.”