Most of you have heard about it. Some of you own it. A few of you have already blogged about it. But I got my copy of THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS the other day, and it’s wonderful. Over 1100 double-column pages of hardboiled crime fiction from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties. I am, as we say down here in Texas, in Hog City. I plan to read a story or two from this huge volume between every novel I read, so it’ll take me a while to work my way through it, but I can practically guarantee that I’ll have a great time doing so. So far I’ve read the first two stories, “One, Two, Three” by Paul Cain and “The Creeping Siamese” by Dashiell Hammett. The Cain story, about a private eye trying to find a swindler, isn’t as terse and bleak as a lot of his work, but it’s just as complicated. It takes a full page – that’s two columns of pretty dense type – at the end of the story just to explain everything that went on in the first nine pages. Great stuff. The Hammett story is a minor Continental Op yarn, but the Hammett voice is there and entertaining as always.
Unlike some things, I can pinpoint, sort of, when I became a fan of hardboiled pulp fiction like the stories included in THE BIG BOOK OF PULPS. It was on a very foggy December evening in 1967, when I picked up a copy of the Pocket Books edition of the Ron Goulart-edited anthology THE HARDBOILED DICKS at the Book Oasis in Fort Worth’s Seminary South Shopping Center. I was there with my mother, my brother, and my sister-in-law. I was aware of pulps before that, but only Doc Savage and the Shadow. When I read Goulart’s book, which included authors such as Frederick Nebel, Norbert Davis, Raoul Whitfield, John K. Butler, and Lester Dent, the stories immediately struck a chord in me that still rings as clear and true today as it did then. I’ve read a ton of hardboiled pulp mysteries in the past forty years, and a lot of work that was influenced by those stories, and I still love ‘em.
Today’s page count: 20. And the pages that I thought were terrible when I was writing them yesterday didn’t look so bad today. In fact, they were all right. They just needed a little polishing.
