The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age—The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s, edited by Otto Penzler

You would think when you have a book the size of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by one of the two or three leading authorities in his field, that it would tax the abilities of even the most florid cover blurb writers to come up with statements that exaggerate the book’s purpose or accomplishments, much less misstate them. But somewhere, somehow, Vintage managed to find someone for whom no challenge was too great, and there are remarks on the cover of this book that should be taken with a grain or two of salt. Just suffice it to say that you will not find every “major pulp writer” of the time who appeared in Black Mask and similar pulps (omitted are such lightweights as Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Louis L’Amour, Anthony Boucher, Day Keene, Brett Halliday, and Talmadge Powell, just to name a few), and the book is by no means the “most comprehensive collection of pulp writing ever assembled,” though if they’d called it the most comprehensive collection of pulp detective stories, they would have been onto something.

Okay. You would like to know if you need or want to read this book and reviewing it is going to be a reasonably stretched out process, so let’s get down to brass tacks here. Otto Penzler has in this 1150+ page book reprinted 57 stories primarily from the pulp magazines Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly, but also including a smattering of stories from other magazines such as Gun Molls, Detective Story, Spicy Detective, and Gangster Stories. Penzler has arranged them in three sections, “The Crimefighters,” with an introduction by Harlan Coben; “The Villains,” with an introduction by Harlan Ellison; and “The Dames,” introduced by Laura Lippman. The stories include some of the finest hard-boiled writing you’ll ever read, as well as a fair representation of detective story types from the pulps as a whole. The stories are unhampered by that modern form of censorship known as “political correctness.” They are fast-paced, violent, insensitive, and filled with enough cigarette smoke and booze to give you withdrawal symptoms by the time you reach the book’s end. But there is, in a handful of these stories (Hammett, Chandler, Paul Cain, Woolrich), examples of some of the finest writing in the history of American literature. And in some of these stories (Hammett, Chandler, Woolrich, Nebel) there is a strong understanding of human nature. But by and large what you have here is some of the finest storytellers of the 20th Century, operating at their most entertaining. If that sounds like what you want, I see no reason for you not to stop reading right here and go out and buy a copy.

Okay, now that they’re gone, let me sell this to the rest of you.

The book starts off with Paul Cain’s “One, Two, Three” from the May, 1933 Black Mask. Cain was the penname of George Carroll Sims who also wrote for the movies under the name Peter Ruric. “One, Two, Three” is a lean, tightly constructed private eye story, one of less than twenty known to have been published by him in the detective pulps. Five of his stories from Black Mask formed his only novel, Fast One (1933) which Raymond Chandler called “Some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.” His movie scripts included the Karloff-Lugosi Black Cat and Affairs of a Gentleman (both 1934) and Mademoiselle Fifi (1942). As Penzler points out, the small number of his published stories makes one reluctant to put him quite in the league with Hammett and Chandler, but they sure make a good argument. I don’t think he’s too far behind them.

There is a second Cain story, “Pigeon Blood,” in the Villains section about the hunt for some missing rubies that is even better.

Dashiell Hammett, a former operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, sold his first stories to Black Mask under the name Peter Collinson, his first story for the pulp appearing in the same December, 1922 issue that featured “Three Gun Terry,” by Carroll John Daly, generally cited as the first hard-boiled detective story. Hammett’s initial Continental Op story appeared in the October 1, 1923 issue of Black Mask. Joe Shaw, the editor of Black Mask held Hammett’s work up as the standard for what he wanted the Black Mask story to be.

The second story in the book is Hammett’s “The Creeping Siamese,” from a 1926 Black Mask issue, part of his Continental Op—or Continental Detective series as it’s referred to in the magazine. Hammett usually based these stories on his experiences as a Pinkerton, and the short, fat Op was supposedly based on one of the men Hammett worked with. Hammett claimed all of his characters were based on people he knew, most of them from his Pinkerton days. Shaw’s faith in Hammett’s work was rewarded in the late twenties with a series of serialized novels all outstanding, including The Dain Curse, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, and The Maltese Falcon, arguably the finest single novel-length story ever published in a pulp magazine, and certainly the best detective novel.

The Continental Op stories are generally realistic and tightly written. If they had a weakness, it was a tendency in one or two of them to lay on the violence a big thickly, and in the four stories that made up The Dain Curse, melodrama and experimentation with the conventional structure of the detective story play a part. “The Creeping Siamese,” however, leaves the impression of being solidly based on things that really happened—as does “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (Black Mask, June 24) in section three, Dames. This story, by the way, is a sequel to the earlier Op story, “The House in Turk Street.” It features one of the most conniving dames in fiction.

In the villains section, however, Penzler turns up a winner by Hammett that’s never seen print before, “Faith.” A character study of itinerant workers in the depression, I think a lot more of it than Penzler seems to.

Erle Stanley Gardner is remembered today for his Perry Mason novels, which he began publishing in 1933, but before that, he was a prolific pulp writer, selling 1,200,000 words a year to a wide variety of pulps, where he seems to have had dozens of series going. Week in, week out, he turned out a novelette every three days, writing westerns, a few fantastic stories, but mostly detective yarns. He did this in the evening because during the day, he was one of Sacramento, California’s busiest attorneys.

Three of his best pre-Mason series characters, including his two most important, are represented here. Crimefighters gives us “Honest Money” (Black Mask, November, 1932), the first story to feature Ken Corning, a two-fisted lawyer similar to the Mason of the very early novels. In the Villains section, we have two stories representing his two best series, “The Cat-Woman” (Black Mask, Feb. 27), featuring Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook; and “The Monkey Murder” (Detective Story, January, 1939), featuring Lester Leith. Both are tightly plotted, fast paced, and entertaining. Ed Jenkins is a man framed for a crime and forced to live as a criminal; fortunately he’s quite good at it. Lester Leith is a clever thief whose butler, Shuttle, is an undercover policeman planted to catch him. In each adventure, Shuttle calls Leith’s attention to an unsolved crime—which Leith solves from reading only the newspaper accounts. Keeping the solution to himself, Leith begins sending Shuttle out on strange errands, usually to acquire something seemingly useless, until Shuttle’s supervisors “guess” what Leith is up to and set a trap for him. The trap fails, and the police never figure out that Leith knows that Shuttle is a plant. These stories are funny, clever, and highly entertaining.

“Frost Rides Alone” by Horace McCoy (Black Mask, September 29) is one of a series about Captain Jerry Frost, a modern-day Texas Ranger who led a squadron of border patrolling aviators. The author of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? could overwrite with the best of them, but this is a fairly good story.

“Double Check” by Thomas Walsh (Black Mask, July 33) concerns two cops working on a big robbery-murder case. Charles G. Booth, author of “Stag Party” (Black Mask, Nov. 1933), won an Academy Award for the story for the movie The House on 92nd Street. “Stag Party” features a private detective named McFee and was the first of a series of three. It’s a well-plotted little entertainment with convincing background and good detail.

Leslie T. White was another of Black Mask’s contributors with a law enforcement background (he worked for the sheriff’s office and police force before becoming an investigator for the Los Angeles District Attorney). “The City of Hell!” (in the Oct. 35 issue) is an interesting story about cops so fed up with corruption in their town that they take the law into their own hands. You can guess where White’s sympathies lie. His story in the Dames section, “Chosen to Die” (Detective Fiction Weekly, Dec. 1, 34) has a plot about a private eye that would seem a lot more familiar except for the characters who star in the story. Private Eye Duke Martindale’s wife, Phyllis, is a lawyer who takes cases only when her husband gets into trouble. She works a lot.

There are three stories in the book by Raymond Chandler: “Red Wind” (Dime Detective, January 38) in the Crimefighters section; “Finger Man,” (Black Mask, Oct. 34) which sports two very lovely Arthur Rodman Bowker drawings in the Villains section; and “Killer in the Rain” (Black Mask, January 35) in Dames. Although the name Phillip Marlowe was never used in a pulp magazine (where Chandler used various detectives like Mallory, Carmody, or Johnny Dalmas), when they were finally collected in book form in the 1950s, most of the detectives became Marlowe, and they’re Marlowe for their appearances here. These stories are probably familiar to everyone, but I reread them anyway; they’re Chandler and I can’t help myself. Ross McDonald described Chandler as writing “like a slumming angel,” and it’s true. An angel that moved precisely, delicately, and confidently across the head of one of the damnedest pins ever.

For ten years, ending in 1936, Frederick Nebel was one of the top contributors to Black Mask. Then he began selling to the higher paying slick magazines such as Colliers and Saturday Evening Post, and concentrated on contemporary love stories. It paid better.

He was a prolific writer who also wrote Canadian Northwest and aviation stories. In the ten years he wrote for Black Mask, he sold them 70 stories. His three series heroes included Donny “Tough Dick” Donahue, the toughest (and best) of the truly tough detectives; Jack Cardigan, an almost as tough character who usually appeared in Dime Detective; and the team of Police Captain Steve MacBride and a reporter named Kennedy.

There are no fewer that six Nebel stories in this collection, and they all feature MacBride and Kennedy. The solo story in the Crimefighters section is “Wise Guy” from the April 1930 Black Mask. It concerns an alderman who comes to MacBride when gangsters try pressuring him by threatening his family.

The five novelettes in the Villains section were published in Black Mask as a series under the collective title “The Crimes of Richmond City.” The first one, “Raw Law,” was in the September 28 issue. The last one, “Graft,” was in the May 29 issue. The first three were published in consecutive issues, then December, January, February, and March were skipped, the next to last one appearing in April 29. Nebel is notable for the casual way he uses violence in his stories. His characters are tough because it’s necessary for their survival; seldom, if ever, are they tough just for show. No one ever made toughness seem more natural.

In the early pulps it was common practice to run series of short stories under a group title, separately from serials. Sometimes they were simply parts of novels, as in Hammett’s The Dain Curse and other times just thematically related as in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Jungle Tales of Tarzan. “The Crimes of Richmond City” are thematically related with few characters other than MacBride, Kennedy, and the cops carrying over between stories. The theme is corruption, the central theme of the hard-boiled story, at least in Black Mask under Joe Shaw, and in the works of major hard-boiled writers such as Hammett, Chandler, and Nebel. In fact, that’s the theme of “Wise Guy,” and it could as easily have been inserted into “The Crimes of Richmond City” as not.

By the way, in that first “Crimes of Richmond City” story, “Raw Law,” a young cop named Jack Cardigan quits the force so he’ll have a free hand to fight the gangsters who killed his partner. He disappears from the series at the end of “Raw Law” but some time later shows up in Dime Detective with his own series, now working for the Cosmos Detective Agency.

George Harmon Coxe’s Flash Casey is a news photographer. The series started in Black Mask in 1934 and the example here, “Murder Picture,” was in the January 35 issue. Casey was a fixture on network radio in the 1940s, and quite famous for a time. Damn good stories, too.

Norbert Davis shows up with “The Price of a Dime” (Black Mask, Apr. 34) and “You’ll Die Laughing” in the Villains section. Davis combined humor and action in a style sometimes called “screwboiled” and was a pretty good writer while it lasted; a series of bad breaks led him to suicide at age 40. “The Price of a Dime” concerns a private eye whose assistant is a coward, and “You’ll Die Laughing” is about a man who works for a collection agency run by a man who lacks Ebenezer Scrooge’s more endearing characteristics.

Maybe William Rollins, Jr., thought he was slumming when he wrote “Chicago Confetti” (Black Mask, March 32). It’s written in a snide tone that makes everything in it, especially the narrator, seem phony. Rollins was, in his time, an acclaimed novelist, but there’s nothing here to make me want to read anything else by him.

“Two Murders, One Crime” (Black Mask, July 42) by Cornell Woolrich, starts with a man going out late at night to buy a newspaper. This being a Woolrich story, that act on his part is a mistake and ends with him being executed for a murder he didn’t commit. Over in the Villains section, Woolrich shows up with “The Dilemma of the Dead Lady” (Detective Fiction Weekly, July 4, 1936), in which a crook getting ready to leave Paris is forced to kill a man. In order to conceal the murder long enough to get out of France, he hides the corpse in his steamer trunk planning to dispose of the body at sea. But it turns out his cabin mate aboard the ship claims to be a cop, and is obviously very suspicious. Woolrich is the master of suspense as well as mystery fiction’s most paradoxical writer. Capable of writing careful, compelling prose, he frequently seems to write as if he’s just putting down any fool thing he thinks of. Able to plot carefully and even cleverly, he is the one great mystery writer whose plots are most likely to hinge on outrageous coincidence and even more outrageous premises. And get away with it. He is the author of “Rear Window,” “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” and “The Bride Wore Black.”

Woolrich opens the Dames section with as lovely a crime novelette as you will ever read, “Angel Face” (Black Mask, Oct, 37). It’s about a stripper who tries to save her kid brother from being electrocuted for a crime he didn’t commit. The first person narration is from her point of view. She’s a great character, and the story has all the suspense and breathless intensity you’d expect from Woolrich. Okay, the plot isn’t exactly airtight, but who cares?

Carroll John Daly is credited with writing the first hard-boiled story, and if you say first hard-boiled detective story, you’re right. (There were some pretty hard-boiled westerns as early as 1905 with Clarence E. Mulford’s Hop-along Cassidy series, “Bar-20 Days” in Outlands.) His story, “Three Gun Terry,” in the May 15, 1923 Black Mask started it all. Almost at once, he was surpassed by Dashiell Hammett whose first Continental Op story appeared five months later.

Daly had a style that was becoming dated even then, repetitive, overwrought, and uncertain. His characters were tough in an artificial sense that took little into account of true human nature. Over the years, he was incapable of adjusting to the times, and that finally killed his writing career. His leading series character, Race Williams, has been acknowledged by Mickey Spillane as an influence.

Yet there is often something compelling about his storytelling, and occasionally, he shows a nice sense of place. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps reprints one of his novels, The Third Murderer, serialized in Black Mask (June-August, 1931). At around 75,000 words, it’s way too long, not to mention juvenile, to be showcased with Hammett and Nebel and Chandler and Gardner, who produced works that still seem mature 75 years after their first publication. One of his novelettes would have been plenty.

Richard Sale was a pretty good writer most of the time. But here we get “House of Kaa,” one of his Cobra stories from Ten Detective Aces (Feb. 34). It’s not too believable to begin with and perfunctorily written.

Happily, in the Dames section, we find one of his stories of reporters “Daffy” Dill and Dinah Mason, of the Chronicle. The series ran for years in Detective Fiction Weekly, and “Three Wise Men of Babylon” was in the April 1, 39 issue. A nice series of screwboiled comedies with clever plotting, though seldom more clever than was absolutely necessary, this one is certainly a lot of fun.

“House of Kaa” is immediately followed by “The Invisible Millionaire” one of Leslie Charteris’s always welcome Saint stories (Black Mask, June 38). This is pretty routine by Saint standards and could use a little trimming, but is fun nevertheless.

“You’ll Remember Me” by Steve Fisher (Black Mask, 38) is an interesting portrait of a juvenile delinquent in a military school. Fisher was a top pulp writer who graduated to films and TV. This story could be better, but it has a really scary ending.

There are two stories in the book that did not come from pulps. One is Hammett’s “Faith,” already discussed. The other is “Pastorale,” by James M. Cain which appeared in the March 1938 issue of The American Mercury, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s intellectual journal. This is worth mentioning only because Mencken and Nathan were the founders of Black Mask (which they sold in 1920). Cain is, after Woolrich, the leading American suspense writer, and this story is suitably chilling.

Frank Gruber, a highly prolific writer of westerns and detective stories for the pulps, and later for movies and TV, made it a point to give his characters unusual occupations for the situations they were in. His hero in “The Sad Serbian” (Black Mask March 39) is a skip-tracer who discovers a murder. The story is fast-paced and entertaining.

Raoul Whitfield was one of the Black Mask stars, but his career was cut short in 1935 when he became ill. Ten years later, he died. He wrote both as Whitfield, under which name he produced several series, and Ramon DeColta, under which he wrote his famous Joe Garr stories. “About Kid Deth” (Black Mask, Feb. 31) is a superb non-series story about a smalltime crook trying to clear himself of murder. Whitfield’s another writer who might have enjoyed a stellar career if his career had been allowed to run its natural course.

Frederick Davis certainly had a career that ran its natural course, resulting in more than 1000 stories. Under the name Curtis Steele he wrote the lead novels in the Operator 5 pulp that ran from 1934 to 1939. “The Sinister Sphere” (Ten Detective Aces, June 33) is the first of a highly popular series (totaling 39 stories) about a character named the Moon Man. By day a cop, Stephen Thatcher robbed bad guys at night, protecting his identity with a globe of one-way glass that resembled the moon.

C.S. Montanye also wrote for one of the hero pulps; he was one of several writers who used the house name Robert Wallace to write novels of the Phantom Detective. But during the twenties, you can find him in a surprising variety of pulps with short stories that are often about crooks. “The Perfect Crime” (Black Mask, July 20) features a man named Rider Lott, self-proclaimed inventor of the perfect crime. Over in Dames, Montanye gives us “A Shock for the Countess” (Black Mask, March 23) about a theft of a pearl necklace that has a familiar, if sly, ending. Montanye’s stuff from this period is old-fashioned, but lighthearted with a clear, not-too-dated style, and a lot of old-fashioned charm.

In his foreword, Penzler makes the mistake of saying there were no female series characters in Black Mask. Considering that Black Mask published 340 issues, you just can’t make statements like that and back them up. Sure enough, I found one. In the December 1928 issue there’s a story by Katherine Brocklebank called “Bracelets” that introduces Tex of the Border Service, a sure enough hard-boiled yarn about a police woman working undercover in Tia Juana. The next issue features another Tex story called “White Talons.” She’s not in the issue after that and whether or not any other stories about her appeared in the magazine, I can’t say. She would have been a nice addition to the Dames section.

Eric Taylor’s “A Pinch of Snuff,” which opens up the Dames section, is as old-fashioned as Montanye’s stuff, but doesn’t hold up as well. Rather, it’s like a silent melodrama, enjoyable for what it is—though I suspect you need to be in the right mood for it. Again it boasts some wonderful Bowker drawings.

There are two comic strips featuring “Sally the Sleuth” from Spicy Detective, an early one (February, 37) by Adolphe Barreaux, and a later one probably from the late years of World War II, when Barreaux had turned the actual drawing over to assistants. Sally the Sleuth’s detective technique consisted of being kidnapped by gloating madmen who would tear her clothes off and explain their crimes to her, usually while she was tied up and a rescuer was climbing in the back window. But sometimes the rescuers were slow in coming, and when that happened, she was just as likely to trip the badguy so that he fell into his own death trap.

Penzler seems particularly down on the Spicy pulps. This was a line of magazines usually sold under the counter because of the racy aspects of the covers and illustrations, and certain passages of the stories. He seems to think that only the least successful pulp writers wrote for them and then only taking their rejects and adding sex scenes to slant them to the magazines. While it is true this often happened, and lord knows there are some bad stories in some of the Spicy titles, that was not always the case. Among the competent, even outstanding writers who wrote frequently for the line were Robert Leslie Bellem, Robert Turner, Roger Torrey, and E. Hoffmann Price, all of whom allowed stories to appear in the Spicy pulps under their own names. Also in the Spicy stable: Robert E. Howard, Howard Wandrie, Bruno Fisher, W.T. Ballard, and Hugh Cave (as “Justin Case”). Price once told me that he got pretty good pay from them, and furthermore, he got it fast. He could take a 10,000-word novelette to them in the morning and then go back in the afternoon and pick up a check for $200. The greatest failure of this anthology is that it doesn’t carry any representative of the best work in Spicy Detective, such as one of Cave’s “Eel” stories, or one of the Tim Sloan stories. Sloan was tall, skinny, sloppy, and drank a bit too much. His secretary, Emma Hohenberger, was short and dumpy with mousy hair, not the usual Spicy Detective’s secretary. They were still a great team. Sometimes the stories were published under the penname Dale Boyd and other times as by Wallace Kayton. Who the actual author was, I don’t know. But they were funny and well done detective yarns.

The leader of the Spicy Detective lineup was Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, who also had his own magazine in the 40s. The Turner yarns were written by Robert Leslie Bellem, with passable detective plots and a bright, inventive, slangy style. They’ve become quite popular among anthologists lately, but it seems to me that Penzler could have found one that hadn’t appeared before if he’d wanted to. Instead, you get from Spicy Detective: “The Girl Who Knew Too Much” by Randolph Barr (April 41). You can read it if you want to; it’s not too bad. It does feature an unsigned illustration that I suspect is by Rex Maxon, who drew the Tarzan comic strip for a time. The Spicy line shared a financial interest with the company that eventually became DC Comics, and they also shared the same address for many years.

“Snowbound” (Gangster Stories, Oct. 31) by C.B. Yorke is a readable crime novelette about a woman crook named Queen Sue, battling a dope dealer named Suds Garland. Imagine, if you will, any Warner Brothers gangster movie with Mary Astor replacing Jimmy Cagney and no moralizing at the end. The Yorke name appeared occasionally throughout the thirties, and I suspect it was someone’s pen name.

D.B. McCandless has two stories from Detective Fiction Weekly, both featuring “The Female She-Devil,” Sarah Watson. Middle-aged, plump, and spinsterish, she talked tough and could scare people. Almost nothing could scare her. The stories are “The Corpse in the Crystal” and “”He Got What He Asked For” from early 1937 issues.

“Gangster’s Brand” (Gun Molls, August 1931) by P.T. Luman is fast paced and adequate. “Luman” is probably a house name, and since this story is listed on the cover, the story may well have been written around the title. That was a common practice in the pulps because covers were often set up before the rest of the magazine.

“Dance Macabre” by Richard Reeves (Black Mask, April 41) boasts a couple of illustrations by Pete Kuhlhoff who did wonderful work for several pulps, among them Short Stories, and who was a columnist on guns for Argosy after it became a men’s magazine in the mid-40s. Reeves died in action during the Second World War.

“The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen” (Gun Molls, Oct. 30), is by Perry Paul who had two series in the magazine. The only information available about him is that he’s supposed to be a former crime reporter, but since nothing else could be discovered about him, that may be fictitious. He also wrote for a couple of the air war pulps.

Whitman Chambers, on the other hand, the author of “The Duchess Pulls a Fast One” (Detective Fiction Weekly, Sept. 19, 36), published twenty or more crime and mystery novels. He also wrote screenplays for movies like Manhandled (1949) and The Come-On (1953). The Duchess is a reporter, and the stories are narrated by one of two rival reporters who don’t think much of her abilities. Somehow she not only manages to solve the case before them but prevents them from filing the story before she does as well.

Roger Torrey had an interestingly light touch with the hard-boiled story, and he’s represented here twice. In “Mansion of Death” (Detective Fiction Weekly, May 25, 40) his private eye is hired by a little old lady who proceeds not only to tell him what to do, but ends up solving the case for him. “Concealed Weapon” (Black Mask, Dec. 38) is an almost routine story, but so good-natured it comes across as more.

The next two stories are from minor magazines by writers whose names might not be any more real than their stories seem. “The Devil’s Bookkeeper” by Carlos Martinez (Gun Molls, August 31) features a hunt for an underworld bookkeeper named Clerical Clara. Lars Andersons’s “Black Legion” (Saucy Romantic Adventures, Oct. 36), is one of the Domino Lady stories that ran mostly in SRA, though one story ran in the same publisher’s Mystery Adventure Magazine. The Domino Lady is Ellen Patrick, twenty-two years old, blonde, built like a brick convenience. Whenever she’s at some upscale social event and something goes wrong, she ducks into a closet, changes into a low-cut gown made of material so thin she can easily carry it in her purse, puts on a teeny little mask, and no one catches on to who she is. In that dress, they probably never notice the mask.

For a while, Detective Fiction Weekly ran a series of supposed true crime features centering on a female spy named Vivian Legrand, often described as “The Lady from Hell.” After a time, they ran her adventures as fiction. “The Adventure of the Voodoo Moon,” by Eugene Thomas (Feb. 1, 1936) is set in Haiti.

To make a living in the pulps you needed to be prolific. You also needed to write more than one type of story. T.T. Flynn, now remembered for his westerns, also wrote railroad stories, sports stories (I recall enjoying some of his baseball stuff very much)—and, of course, detective fiction. His story here is “Brother Murder,” from the Dec. 2, 39 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. It features the team of Mike Harris and Trixie Meehan of the Blaine International Agency. Actually, they’re more like rivals, not an uncommon gimmick in a series like this. It starts with them investigating the supposed suicide of a Hollywood script girl, and that leads to one of those strange Hollywood cults. But it’s fun.

Prentiss Winchell is best known for his stories written as Stewart Sterling, though he did have other pennames. He needed them. His bibliography includes about 400 known stories and 500 or so radio plays which he produced as well as wrote. “Kindly Omit Flowers” (from Black Mask, March 42) is part of a series he did called “Special Squad,” each focusing on a different aspect of police work. The heroine is Helen Dixon, an ordinary looking woman who happens to be a police officer working for the homicide squad.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps is certainly the best overall look at the phenomenon of the pulp detective magazines we’ve yet had. You can read it and get the feel of the pulps and find many, if not most, of the best writers represented. It covers a wide range of characters and themes and probably could have been organized a bit better. But that doesn’t matter. We’re all looking for the sequel, aren’t we?

Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard (November 2007)
Price: $16.50
Paperback: 1168 pages
ISBN: 0307280489