Edited by Otto Penzler
Vintage Book
Available Now
A lot of pulp went into Black Lizard Big Book of Pulp The mammoth project is a 1150-page compendium of crime fiction from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, faithfully packaged with cheap paper and scratchy line drawings. It’s comprehensive and well-assembled; Otto Penzler, editor of ten editions of The Best American Mystery Stories, has paired acknowledged greats with lesser-knowns and written precise, revealing introductions to each tale.
However, the length and range of the Big Book makes an evaluation of it an evaluation of the American hardboiled detective story, and here you run into dangerous territory. There are a lot of fetishizers out there who claim that the genre is good despite, or because of, the fact that it isn’t. Author Harlan Ellison, in his introduction to the section dedicated to”The Villains,” admits that “the fictions may creak a bit in the joints” but holds that we are meant to enjoy them because of the wordy prose and “expressions [that] may seem giggle-worthy.”
Really? Besides clichés and unrealistic dialogue, many of these stories have interchangeable characters and some lack even a decent sense of place or order of events. Plus they all seem to begin with the description of a face, and then a person dying. It’s understandable that they were produced for money, in a specific format, on a tight schedule, but as such they should play like a set of punk songs and not a haze.
There is one treat: Cornell Woolrich, master of noir, whose three tales are especially welcome since his books are so hard to find.
Since the pulp magazines died mid-century and were replaced by paperback books, crime fiction has become so much more than dames, dicks and crooks. It has turned into tales of high-stakes politics and psychics and globe-trotting adventurers. Meanwhile, independent publisher Hard Case Crime and Akashic Books are putting out more-developed detective stories by contemporary authors. That’s not to say that The Big Book of Pulps isn’t worth it, especially at a very reasonable $25. It’s just to say that this genre hasn’t died — it’s gotten better.
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