Ever since the 1940s, there have been discussions about which collection of stories best gives a real idea of what pulp magazines were like in breadth and scope. THE HARD-BOILED OMNIBUS edited by Joseph “Cap” Shaw has always been the most prestigious because Shaw was for years the editor of Black Mask, the magazine both Hammett and Chandler called home.
There since have been many others; I’ve even co-edited a few pulp collections myself. Each book has its own merits – particuarly Ron Goulart’s THE HARDBOILED DICKS– but nothing, nothing even approximates the just-released THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS, edited by Otto Penzler.
More than 1,000 densely packed pages. Reprint of pulp illustrations. Fascinating biographies of each writer. Commentary by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison and Laura Lippman. The huge sections: “The Crimefighters,” “The Villains,” “The Dames.” And again, more than 1,000 densely packed pages.
Yes, Dashiell Hammett is here and with an original story. Raymond Chandler is here, too. So is James M. Cain. So is Horace McCoy. And so are some of lesser names still familiar to readers of the pulps: Carroll John Daly, Frederick Nebel, George Harmon Coxe and Frank Gruber, among others. My favorite of the lesser-knowns, Norbert Davis, has two stories; Chandler, Hammett and Woolrich have three each. All well and good. Great, great stuff.
But what makes this collection notable for me is the inclusion of many writers I’ve never heard of before and the diversity of story material they chose. Most hardboiled anthologies leave the impression that the magazines were filled with straightforward private-eye and police-procedural tales. Not so. And this anthology proves it.
The material ranges from the waterfront to the newspaper office to outré chambers that may be under supernatural assault. In other words, if you went to a newsstand in 1935, you could buy seven or eight crime-fiction magazines and get everything from The Saint (included here) to those in touch with the dead.
This is the one and only, no doubt about it. A true masterpiece. And more than 1,000 pages for only $25 in an extremely handsome package. With the holidays sneaking up on us, I don’t have to tell you it’d make a perfet gift. It’s the only such book that gives the reader a real sense of what pulp fiction was really like, because it includes so many different types of stories. Not just Chandler and Hammett, but a cross-section of worthy lesser-knowns who wrote just about every kind of suspense story a feller could think up. –Ed Gorman
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• MURDER AT THE FOUL LINE edited by Otto Penzler
• MURDER IN THE ROUGH edited by Otto Penzler
• PULP FICTION: THE CRIMEFIGHTERS edited by Otto Penzler
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