NEW Black Lizard Pulp Book

[Mark]

(I got my copy yesterday--an oversized, massive paperback that
will keep your garage door open! A "doorstop" that looks like great fun after looking at the Table of Contents.)



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

rest at
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/...id=1047223

[Mark]

Stories that will beat you to a bloody pulp
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By Neely Tucker, Washington Post
December 27, 2007
The book thudded on my desk like a bum fighter hitting the canvas.

"The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps." That's what it said on the cover, right above the picture of the dame.

I drained a shot of rye and got to thinking about those thrilling days between the world wars, when the hard-boiled American private eye was created. Men who beat the typewriter like a percussion instrument hacked out an entire genre of literature.

It was the golden age of pulp magazines, when 500 or more action and adventure fiction magazines flooded newsstands. They were weeklies or monthlies whose literary merit was so low they were printed on flimsy paper made from pulpwood.

The pulps covered everything from romance to westerns, but in long-defunct magazines such as Black Mask, Dime Detective or below-the-counter sleazoids like Spicy Detective, the hard-boiled American crime story and the entire noir movement were born. Their primarily blue-collar male readers understood certain truths: that bad things should happen to bad people, beautiful women are a problem, sex is dirty, violent crime can be funny and whiskey is our friend.

rest at

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-...s-calendar