The biggest, the boldest, the most comprehensive collection of Pulp writing ever assembled.

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.



"Anthologies normally sit on the night table, handy for nibbling. But The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, which runs to 1,150 pages and screams at you with its lurid typography and cheesy cover art, looks as if it would bite back. Should you take that chance, there's guilty fun to be had in the snarling prose and vintage
illustrations of what the editor, Otto Penzler, promises are "the best crime stories" from the "golden age" of
the '20s, '30s and '40s. Most were culled from Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and (pause for genuflection) Black Mask, the cream of the 500 or so cheaply produced magazines that proliferated on newsstands before World War II."—Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times

 
Visit Otto Penzler's website

 
Otto Penzler is the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing firm Otto Penzler Books. He is a recipient of an Edgar Award for The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection and the Ellery Queen Award by the Mystery Writers of America for his many contributions to the field. He is the series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year. His other anthologies include Murder for Love, Murder for Revenge, Murder and Obsession, The 50 Greatest Mysteries of All Time, and The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. He wrote 101 Greatest Movies of Mystery & Suspense. He lives in New York City.