The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age--the '20s, '30s & '40s » (Reprint)

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing firm Otto Penzler Books. He is a recipient of an Edgar Award for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection and the Ellery Queen Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his many contributions to the field. He is the editor of The Vampire Archives and The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which was a New York Times bestseller.

The biggest, the boldest, the most comprehensive collection of Pulp writing ever assembled.

Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train—a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.

Including:

• Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.

• Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel,

one of the masters of the form.

• A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.

• Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many

many more of whom you’ve probably never heard.

• Three deadly sections–The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames–with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben,

Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman

Featuring:

• Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.

• A kid so smart–he’ll die of it.

• A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning–the hard way–never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.

• The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Pulp, points out Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City and a prolific editor of American crime fiction, is a term "frequently misused to indicate hack work of inferior literary quality." But it was originally derived from "pulpwood," an indicator of the cheapness of the paper used to print popular magazines in the early part of the 20th century, not the prose contained therein. The fast-paced narratives and rat-a-tat prose forged by the masters of the golden age of pulp fiction -- the '20s, '30s, and '40s -- have made their work American literary classics, exerting influence on everyone from their contemporaries (including Ernest Hemingway, who, Penzler argues, borrowed much of his style from Dashiell Hammett) to our own (including Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and Quentin Tarantino). Not that anyone needs a high literary pretext to enjoy the massive new collection of vintage crime fiction assembled by Penzler, which, at nearly 1,500 pages, is thick enough to stun the most dastardly criminal. With more than 50 stories, including two full novels (by Frederick Nebel and Carroll John Daly) and an never-before-published story from Hammett, this volume collects and preserves the titans of the genre side by side with their all-too-mortal fellow practitioners. The indisputably great Raymond Chandler is here, as is Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason; Cornell Woolrich (who writes in "The Dilemma of the Dead Lady," about the novel technique of strangling a woman to death with a lasso of pearls); and James M. Cain, whose "Pastorale," featuring a frozen head and the burdensome nature of guilt, was first published in a very un-pulpy intellectual journal. Then there are writers whose lives were as shadowy as those of their characters. "The Jane from Hell's Kitchen" is a wildly inventive tale, involving a hanging-by-parachute, an electrocution-by-doorbell, and a gun moll named Dizzy Malone, whose room is painted entirely in shades of purple. Of the author, Perry Paul, Penzler could only discover that he was a former crime reporter. Speaking for many other forgotten authors he writes: "They vanished as quickly as they appeared, and they are largely unremembered today." Thankfully, some of them are remembered here. --Amy Benfer

PART ONE THE CRIMEFIGHTERS

Harlan Coben: Introduction
Paul Cain: One, Two, Three
Dashiell Hammett: The Creeping Siamese
Erle Stanley Gardner: Honest Money
Horace McCoy: Frost Rides Alone
Thomas Walsh: Double Check
Charles G. Booth: Stag Party
Leslie T. White: The City of Hell!
Raymond Chandler: Red Wind
Frederick Nebel: Wise Guy
George Harmon Coxe: Murder Picture
Norbert Davis: The Price of a Dime
William Rollins, Jr.: Chicago Confetti
Cornell Woolrich: Two Murders, One Crime
Carroll John Daly: The Third Murderer

PART TWO THE VILLAINS

Harlan Ellison: Introduction
Erle Stanley Gardner: The Cat-Woman
Cornell Woolrich: The Dilemma of the Dead Lady
Richard Sale: The House of Kaa
Leslie Charteris: The Invisible Millionaire
Steve Fisher: You’ll Always Remember Me
Dashiell Hammett: Faith
James M. Cain: Pastorale
Frank Gruber: The Sad Serbian
Raymond Chandler: Finger Man
Erle Stanley Gardner:The Monkey Murder
Raoul Whitfield: About Kid Deth
Frederick C. Davis: The Sinister Sphere
Paul Cain: Pigeon Blood
C. S. Montanye: The Perfect Crime
Norbert Davis: You’ll Die Laughing
Frederick Nebel: The Crimes of Richmond City i) Raw Law
ii) Dog Eat Dog
iii) The Law Laughs Last
iv) Law Without Law
v) Graft

PART THREE THE DAMES

Laura Lippman: Introduction
Cornell Woolrich: Angel Face
Leslie T. White: Chosen to Die
Eric Taylor: A Pinch of Snuff
Raymond Chandler: Killer in the Rain
Adolphe Barreaux: Sally the Sleuth
C. S. Montanye: A Shock for the Countess
C. B. Yorke: Snowbound
Randolph Barr: The Girl Who Knew Too Much
D. B. McCandless: The Corpse in the Crystal
D. B. McCandless: He Got What He Asked For
P. T. Luman: Gangster’s Brand
Robert Reeves: Dance Macabre
Dashiell Hammett: The Girl with the Silver Eyes
Perry Paul: The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen
Whitman Chambers: The Duchess Pulls a Fast One
Roger Torrey: Mansion of Death
Roger Torrey: Concealed Weapon
Carlos Martinez: The Devil’s Bookkeeper
Lars Anderson: Black Legion
Richard Sale: Three Wise Men of Babylon
Eugene Thomas: The Adventure of the Voodoo Moon
T. T. Flynn: Brother Murder
Stewart Sterling: Kindly Omit Flowers

Contributors Notes Permissions Acknowledgments