Shelf space here at BBB&B headquarters is sparse. With this column, I get a chance to clear off a major portion of it with only three books. To say these tomes are a bit big is an understatement. Two of them are pulp collections with no crossover with the fantastic THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS. The other is a collection of Westerns that could easily stop a bullet with its size. I’ve still got other books of huge girth, but my P.G. Wodehouse collection and Woody Allen omnibus are not appropriate for this column.

AMERICAN PULP edited by Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg — Plain and simple this 1997 collection has a who’s who of BOOKGASM favorites. To list everything in this book would just about take forever, and I figure most people will be familiar with most of the names already. If you’re not, then start buying their works.

But here are some truly great highlights. David Goodis’ “The Plunge” is a terrific short story from one of the true masters of noir, while Lawrence Block’s “Package Deal” is a short little tale of a hitman just doing his job of cleaning up a town for the higher-ups.

In “Down in the Valley,” James Reasoner tells a story of a Mexican crossing the border, looking for a new life and a promise of work. (This reminds me I really need to pick up TEXAS WIND at some point.) “Bothered” by Gil Brewer is about a truly bad seed in a quiet neighborhood. “We Were Picked as the Odd Ones” is Wade Miller’s tale of a serial killer with a thing for ice picks.

I’m not even scraping the surface. This is a great introduction to all these writers, which include Richard Matheson, Mickey Spillane, John D. MacDonald, Vin Packer, Donald Westlake, Evan Hunter and Marcia Muller. Each story has a brief paragraph about the authors, with the editors picking only the cream of the crop. AMERICAN PULP is a great find well worth grabbing. It leans toward the more recent of pulp’ if you’re looking for older works, there are plenty of those collections already out there.

PULP FICTION edited by Maxim Jakubowski — Like the BLACK LIZARD book, this 1996 anthology is packed to the gills and could have been even longer, according to Jakubowski’s introduction, in which he lists authors who had to be cut. But what’s here more than makes up for those missing few.

Going with a more traditional route of putting the older authors up front and moving right along, the collection starts off with Dashiell Hammett’s “Too Many Have Lived,” where Sam Spade is hired to find a missing man. We also have the Paul Cain story “Black,” which I’ve read before … and again, I just don’t get it. But fear not, because we also have James M. Cain and Gil Brewer — that’s a great one-two punch, with the latter being a tale of revenge from the mob.

Also included are Jim Thompson and a nice bit of humor from Mickey Spillane in “The Girl Behind the Hedge.” But what came off as a real nice surprise was Lawrence Block’s “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” a super-early Matthew Scudder story that tells of Matt receiving a check from the unlikeliest of sources and what he does to earn that money.

That’s only one of the surprises inside, including Charles Willeford, a Lew Archer tale from Ross Macdonald, and Robert Bloch providing some fun with a vampire story with a funny ending. It closes out with a Hollywood tale by some person named Donald Westlake. (I hear he has a few books worth checking out.) This is a monster of a book, especially in hardcover which is the version I own, but be on the lookout under its original title of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF PULP FICTION.

THE BIG BOOK OF WESTERN ACTION STORIES edited by Jon Tuska — Closing out this column of massive short-story collections is a 1995 trip to the Old West, where I was familiar with only two authors: Ed Gorman and Max Brand. What truly is great about this one is the exposure to writers I’ve never heard of before; sadly, my Western reading is very limited to certain authors or series.

Alan LeMay is a name that seemed familiar to me for some odd reason, and in Tuska’s notes, it’s made clear why: He wrote the screenplay to THE SEARCHERS, one of the greatest Westerns ever filmed. His “Lost Dutchman O’Reilly’s Luck” is about the search for a supposed gold claim. For its short length, it tries to pack it all in, with a nice result.

A real standout for me was “Gun Fog” by William Colt MacDonald (coolest author name ever), with a down-on-his-luck ranch hand who gets taken in a game of cards and is forced into work for a ranch where not everything is legit. It’s a great story that has such a great reveal at the end, you’ll want to find more from MacDonald. This is one of the four stories in this collection that are considered novels. “The Strange Ride of Perry Woodstock” is another, this one by Max Brand. In his typical style, he doesn’t give the reader what’s expected in this story of a dying man and his secret message to pass along.

For me, the reason I picked up this book in the first place was fellow BOOKGASM contributor Ed Gorman, whose “The Victim” concerns two gunfighters: Jim Hornaday, who is haunted of killing a little girl by accident, and her cousin Andy Donnelley, who takes up shooting after her death. It fast-forwards to years later as Andy relates how he became more of a legend than he really is. Gorman does a great job of leading the reader along in this story of one gunman who wants to just be killed for his actions, while the other just wants nothing to do with gunfights anymore. It’s a terrific tale from a writer who needs to write more Westerns.

There are plenty of other stories in this anthology that will delight the little cowboys in all of us. They’re not revisionists takes; they mainly fall into the code of the Old West, where good guys wore white, and there is nothing wrong with that at all. So saddle up, buckaroos, and grab a copy.

Next time: With a little help from my friends. —Bruce Grossman

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF ED GORMAN AND MARTIN H. GREENBURG:
• A PRISONER OF MEMORY AND 24 OF THE YEAR’S FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
• THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING DETECTIVE AND 19 OF THE YEAR’S FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES edited by by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
• THE WIDOW OF SLANE AND SIX MORE OF THE BEST CRIME AND MYSTERY NOVELLAS OF THE YEAR edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
• WOLF WOMAN BAY AND NINE MORE OF THE FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY NOVELLAS OF THE YEAR edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF MARTIN H. GREENBERG:
• THE BEST HORROR STORIES OF ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE edited by Frank D. McSherry, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh
• NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET: FREDDY KRUGER’S SEVEN SWEETEST DREAMS edited by Martin H. Greenberg