"I know there are more, but who would they be?"
One I might add would be Thomas Walsh. Active in *BM* during
roughly the
same period as Hammett, Chandler, etc., he was still
regularly publishing in
the late '70s and early '80s. A former police reporter, he
wrote early (and
excellent) examples of the police procedural before that
particular genre
term had even been coined. Like a lot of pulp writers, he
eventually
graduated to higher paying pulps, but unlike most pulp
writers who made that
jump, he didn't change his style much. Still writing
hard-edged stories
about tough but tender Irish cops in New York (and his ear
for the cadences
of Irish-American speech was pitch-perfect), his major
concession to the
slick market was adding romantic elements he was more likely
to leave out of
his pulp work. He won the First Novel Edgar in for *Nightmare
in
Manhattan*, one of my favorite cop novels, about a railroad
detective on a
kidnapping case in Grand Central Station (it was filmed as
*Union Station*
with the locale changed from NYC to Chicago). He won a second
Edgar for
short story in the late '70s for "Chance After Chance" which
appeared in
*EQMM*. Joseph T. Shaw, his *Black Mask* editor, included
Walsh's *BM*
story "Best Man" in the anthology *The Hard-Boiled Omnibus*.
- Jim Doherty
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