Otto Penzler [Editor]

New pulp-fiction collection covers the waterfront

The story starts like this: While thumbing through some stacks of paperbacks in a Paris bookstall, Yank writer Barry Gifford came across quite a few titles by fellow American Jim Thompson—in French. Seems publisher Gallimard’s Serie Noire had been producing the pulpmaster’s books all along, while here at home his work had long since gone out of print.

Back in the States and determined to rectify the situation, Gifford got with Don Ellis, head of West Coast publisher Creative Arts, and formed an imprint called Black Lizard. The rest, as they say, is literary history.

Before its acquisition by Random House, Black Lizard would publish some 80 works of the most hard-boiled ?ction ever written. The house, it could be argued, single-handedly revived interest not only in the works of Jim Thompson, but in scribes such as David Goodis and James M. Cain, two once incredibly well-known writers whose works had also, for the most part, fallen out of print.

Well, ante up crime ?ction fans, and buckle down for another chapter in the story. Black Lizard’s back with a whole new twist—The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. And get this—it’s big enough to start a third resurgence in hard-boiled history. Actually, this baby might be as big as history itself. At 1,100-plus pages, it’s almost as voluminous, and just as bloody.

You know about the pulps. Named for the paper on which the tales were printed, pulps came cheap at a time when life seemed to come even cheaper, through Prohibition and The Depression. In other words, when things were tough and expected to get tougher.

The toughest imprint of them all was Black Mask. Founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan to bankroll their ?edgling Smart Set literary magazine, Black Mask was then ?ipped for a handsome pro?t after only eight issues. But the publication really came of age in ’23, when Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” introduced us to the notion of a hard-boiled detective. A month later, Daly’s Race Williams showed it could be done in a series. That same year, by circumstance, Dashiell Hammett debuted his pulp character Continental Op, and the world’s been cracking wise ever since.

The pulpists took a lone man—and it was nearly always a man—and tossed him into what Chandler so succinctly described as “streets that [were] dark with something more than night.” So, too, were those lone protagonists dark, their troubles marrowed to a bleakness that mirrored the grinding cities where they lived: New York and Chicago with their teaming hustle of hopelessness; L.A. with its dream decidedly deferred. Even so, these wolves never succumbed either to hopelessness or deferment, of any kind. Instead they went boldly into that bad night, battling injustice with a wit and savvy most surely envied in the breadlines that snaked through the nation.

Pulp’s back-alley princes put black-and-white where all seemed before only a slate of grey. In pulp, there was good, and there was evil. If sometimes the good guy had to slither over to the side of evil, well, he did so for all the right reasons. Mostly though, he did, and—in a land where men couldn’t do much about their lot—such resolute action made him a hero.

Of all the scribblers Black Lizard initially brought back into print, the two Cains are the only names to recur in The Big Book of Pulps. There’s Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, née George Carrol Sims), whose “One, Two, Three” reads so much like a movie you can hear the narrator’s voice thick in your skull. And there’s the immortal James M. Cain, he of Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, who here spills the tale of a man undone by both the obligatory femme fatales and then by his own smart self.

Chandler and Hammett, of course, are well represented in The Big Book, with three works from each, including a previously unpublished(!) story Dashiell called “Faith.” This one’s all about a chuckler who’s seen worse, and fully expects to see worse still—even if he’s gotta bad it out himself.

Welcome, too, is the three-piece from Cornell Woolrich, as well as the trio from Erle Stanley Gardner, perhaps pulpdom’s most proli?c scribe. Gardner’s “Honest Money” features Ken Corning, precursor to the enormously successful Perry Mason (80 books, 300 million sold, a subsequent nine-year TV series that made Raymond Burr a household name).

But beyond the best-known bylines, this kickass omnibus gives us an opportunity to rediscover talents most of us never knew existed: former ?atfoot Leslie T. White (“The City of Hell!”), whose novel Harness Bull became the Edward G. Robinson star vehicle Vice Squad; Brit-born Charles G. Booth (“Stag Party”), who Oscarred for the story to The House on 92nd Street; and Steve Fisher (“You’ll Always Remember Me”), who not only big-screened with his classic I Wake Up Screaming, but went on to script such TV hits as Starsky and Hutch, McMillan & Wife, and Barnaby Jones.

In fact, the pulps—and the pulpists—have left a memorable mark on pop culture. Every one of Hammett’s novels save The Thin Man was ?rst serialized by Black Mask, and if you meet a writer of any stripe who claims not to have read—let alone seen—The Maltese Falcon, well, you’ve met yourself a liar (or worse, a truthful hack). Horace McCoy (“Frost Rides Alone”) wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, the book that became the basis for the controversial 1970 Sydney Pollack ?lm of that name. Leslie Charteris (“The Invisible Millionaire”), not only scripted the Sherlock Holmes radio series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, he also just happens to be the creator of Simon Templar, better known as The Saint.

At a penny a word, what else could these writers do but branch out as widely as possible into the public pantheon? What’s most interesting, though, is, even at such a lowly scale, the pulpists never padded their work. Sure Captain Joseph T. Shaw, the main editor behind the Black Mask boys, favored ‘economy of expression’ and ‘authenticity in character and action.’ Hell, he probably provoked it. Yet why not stretch a story into at least a living wage?

Because you can’t sugarcoat a bruise, that’s why. These lean and mean and essential scribes couldn’t have lived with themselves if they had.