Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train—a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
Including:
• Three stories by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett.
• Complete novels from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and Fredrick Nebel,
one of the masters of the form.
• A never before published Dashiell Hammett story.
• Every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many
many more of whom you’ve probably never heard.
• Three deadly sections–The Crimefighters, The Villains, and Dames–with three unstoppable introductions by Harlan Coben,
Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman
Featuring:
• Plenty of reasons for murder, all of them good.
• A kid so smart–he’ll die of it.
• A soft-hearted loan shark’s legman learning–the hard way–never to buy a strange blonde a hamburger.
• The uncanny “Moon Man” and his mad-money victims.
