Marilyn Stasio does a weekly column in the NYTimes in which
she usually does four minireviews of mystery volumes.
Sunday's has only three reviews, but this is the one I think
will be most interesting to Rara.
Looks like it's worth getting.
MARILYN STASIO'S MINI REVIEW:
Anthologies normally sit on the night table, handy for
nibbling. But THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS (Vintage,
paper, $25), which runs to 1,150 pages and screams at you
with its lurid typography and cheesy cover art, looks as if
it would bite back. Should you take that chance, there's
guilty fun to be had in the snarling prose and vintage
illustrations of what the editor, Otto Penzler, promises are
"the best crime stories" from the "golden age" of the '20s,
'30s and '40s. Most were culled from Dime Detective,
Detective Fiction Weekly and (pause for genuflection) Black
Mask, the cream of the 500 or so cheaply produced magazines
that proliferated on newsstands before World War II. While
you don't go trawling for Faulkner among the journeymen
authors in Depressionera America who wrote their fingers raw
for a penny a word, names like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell
Hammett, Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain are well
represented here. And someone you think you know can always
spring a surprise, as Erle Stanley Gardner does with his
suave but forgotten sleuth, Ed Jenkins, the "phantom crook"
in "The Cat-Woman."
Still, I suggest putting off the big guns for the joy of
discovering a lesser-known worthy like Steve Fisher - whose
teenage sociopath in "You'll Always Remember Me" is indeed
memorable - or for the jolt of stumbling across one of those
"weird menace" novelties about avenger heroes who traipse
around in silly costumes. (Penzler's editorial notes are
especially helpful in putting these pulp phenomena in
perspective.) That said, I admit to having made a beeline for
"Faith," an unpublished story by Dashiell Hammett, whose
shrugged-off prose looks even tougher in the double-wide
column format. But even among the literati, a tasteful style
isn't really the point of hardboiled pulp writing. As
indicated by the anthology's three sections - "The
Crimefighters," "The Villains" and "The Dames" -
these adventures satisfy because they encode every kind
of male fantasy into their formulaic narratives about cynical
private operatives plugging bad guys in defense of women
who'll betray them in the end. So it's not exactly P.C., but
as one smart dame puts it when a kidnapper offers to educate
her in crime: "Jake with me, Ed."
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