Nancy Rutledge was born in Chicago and educated at Rockford College and Northwestern. Between 1944 and 1960, she authored ten works of crime fiction under her own name, two of them published only in England. She also had one mystery novel published as by Leigh Bryson, a Handi-Book paperback original in 1947. In the 1950s and '60s, she had eight mystery novels serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and one that appeared complete in an issue of Redbook.

Otto Penzler, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975); Mysterious Press.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City's Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from Noircon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 80 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.