Some Tarantino-Free Pulp Fiction

No disrespect to Quentin, but I like my pulp fiction on, well…pulp. Not celluloid. At 1150 pages, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps is like a crash course in the hard-boiled and sinful. It’s helpfully divided into three major archetype-sections–good guys (”The Crimefighters”), bad guys (”The Villains”) and the sexpots who love them (”The Dames”). The slang is unreal, and the character names are even better–Kid Deth? Scuttle? Storm? Marvel and DC have got nothing on the pulps.

This is the real deal, too, no latter-day imitators, so don’t expect any whitewashed tales. The writers of these stories weren’t always kind to women or anyone with an accent. It’s like an action fiction master class with a little social history piled on top. Otto Penzler poured over yellowed and cracked copies of vintage ten-cent magazines with names like Dime Detectives, Gun Molls, Black Mask Magazine, and Detective Fiction Weekly to come up with these stories and illustrations. He even managed to track down a never-published Dashiell Hammett story, which oughta mean something to anyone who was knocked out by the noir classic The Maltese Falcon.

In his introduction to the first section of the book, Harlan Coban claims, “Ninety percent of the writers out there admit they [read pulp fiction]. Ten percent lie about it.” ? This stuff is so good you’ll never lie about it. Hell, you’ll be proud of it–you’ll be bragging to all your friends that while they may be able to quote Samuel L. Jackson-as-Jules-quoting-Ezekiel 25:17, you’re tight with “The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” “The Invisible Millionaire,” and “The Devil’s Bookkeeper.”