The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

By Otto Penzler and Keith Alan Deutsch

Book Overview

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream. Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like "Murder Is Bad Luck," "Ten Carets of Lead," and "Drop Dead Twice." Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America's finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America's underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this. Featuring * Deadly Diamonds * Dancing Rats * A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life * A Parrot that Wouldn't Talk Including * Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published * Lester Dent's Luck in print for the first time

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307455432
• ISBN13: 9780307455437
• Release Date: September 2010
• Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
• Length: 1136 Pages
• Weight: 2.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Some of the best pulp fiction written

The Black Mask anthology gathered takes you down rain slick streets, rotting buildings, dives, big cities and small towns with dark and dirty secrets. It has greedy gold-digging women, desperate men, kids with hearts of gold, and would-be heroes with their own code of ethics and honor. All while gun smoke hangs in the air like cheap perfume, every back alley is a dead end, and reality is a bullet in a chamber, a shot of whisky in a glass or a punch to the stomach. It features Hammett's original Sam Spade and many others. All in a collection the size of a phone book. If you love classic detective fiction, you'll love this collection of Black Mask from Black Lizard.