Maxim Jakubowski - New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

[dem bones]

Maxim Jakubowski (ed.) - The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (Constable-Robinson/ Running Press, 2014: originally published in slightly different format as The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, Robinson, 1996)

Cover design: mark-cavanagh.co.uk: cover images: Alamy:

Acknowledgements

Maxim Jakubowski - Introduction

Samuel Dashiell - The Diamond Wager *
Charles Williams - Flight to Nowhere
Paul Cain - The Tasting Machine *
John D. MacDonald - Finders Killers!
Robert Turner - The Murdering Kind! *
James M. Cain - Cigarette Girl
Gil Brewer - The Getaway
Robert Leslie Bellem - Preview of Murder
Jim Thompson - Forever After
Day Keene - The Bloody Tide
William P. McGivern - Death Comes Gift-Wrapped
Mickey Spillane - The Girl Behind the Hedge
Roger Torrey - One Escort: Missing or Dead
William Rough - Don't Burn Your Corpse Behind You *
Lawrence Block - A Candle for the Bag Lady
David Goodis - Black Pudding
Max Allan Collins - A Matter of Principal
Charles Willeford - Citizen's Arrest
Ross Macdonald - Sleeping Dog
Fredric Brown - The Wench is Dead
Howard Browne - So Dark for April
Bruno Fischer - We Are All Dead
Robert Bloch - Death is a Vampire
Frank R. Read - The Blue Steel Squirrel *
William F. Nolan - A Real Nice Guy
Bill Pronzini - Stacked Deck
John Lutz - So Young, So Fair, So Dead
B. Traven - Effective Medicine
Dan Gordon - Nicely Framed, Ready To Hang *
Joe Gores - The Second Coming
William Campbell Gault - Pale Hands I Loathed *
Shuyler G. Edsall - The Dark Goddess *
Donald E. Westlake - Ordo

* denotes "new" to this edition.

Blurb:
A truly mammoth collection of seven decades of pure, unadulterated pulp fiction, jam-packed with tough guys and femme fatales - first class entertainment and thrills. Join shady operators, voluptuous molls, ruthless big-shots, and crooked - or just occasionally honest - cops on a roller-coaster ride through the mean streets of popular literature.

Alongside the work of deservedly well-known writers of hard-boiled crime are gems from some long-forgotten authors well worth rediscovering. The collection includes what we believe to be a lost story by Dashiell Hammett, 'The Diamond Wager'. This story does not appear in any of Hammett's bibliographies, despite having been written under the somewhat see-through pseudonym of Samuel Dashiell

Another library find. I really don't know how this 814-pager could have slipped through the net. Perhaps of especial interest to our horror inclined readership, the contributions from Bruno 'Russell Gray' Fisher, sultan of the Spicies Robert Leslie Bellem, and Robert Bloch's Death Is A Vampire from the September 1944 issue of Thrilling Mystery

To best of my knowledge, the stories which appeared in the original version but have been dropped from this new edition are as follows.

Dashiell Hammet - Too Many Have Lived
Paul Cain -Black
W. T. Ballard - Murder's Mandate
Armitage Trail - Enter Scarface
Jack Ritchie - Divide and Conquer
Harlan Ellison - Killing Bernstein
William Campbell Gault - Hibiscus and Homicide
Thomas S. Roche - Hell on Wheels

Attempt at blow-by-blow account to follow .... soonish?

[dem bones]

"We are talking commercial fiction, mostly catering to the lowest common denominator.... But what makes them stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rule which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling. Every story in the pulps had a beginning and an end. sharply etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on. The mission was to keep the reader hooked, to transport him into a more interesting world of fantasy and make-believe, spiriting him away from the drab horizons of everyday life ..... This compact with the consumer might appear self-evident, and was indeed very much a continuation of the Victorian penny dreadfuls and novels written by instalments in newspapers and magazines by the likes of Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens and so many other overlooked pioneer scribes just a few decades earlier, but it is a tradition that has sadly since been lost to the trappings of Literature with a capital L and pretension. " - From Maxim Jakubowski's introduction.

Robert Bloch - Death Is A Vampire: Ace reporter Dave Kirby of the LA Leader turns detective to solve an outbreak of possibly bogus vampirism at the Petroff Mansion. Ostensibly, Kirby is in town to interview Igor Petroff about his recently deceased wife, Irene's world famous collection of art treasures, but the investigation takes on a new urgency after he slips into the house to find the reclusive Igor splayed out on the floor, his bloody neck bearing the tell-tale twin puncture marks of a vampire attack! By the time the local sheriff arrives the corpse has upped and quit the scene, leaving Kirby in a tight spot. Has the local simpleton really glimpsed a wailing, skeletal Irene Petroff wandering the family vault, and can it be that her husband/ victim has the ability to turn into a bat?

Robert Bloch just couldn't help himself sometimes, and Death Is A Vampire is another cracking story sabotaged by an allegedly humorous pay off line.

William F. Nolan - A Real Nice Guy: (Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1980). Jimmie Prescott, 31, is not only a master of disguises but 'the master of whispering death,' just one of several titles bestowed him by a salivating press. Prescott's a sniper, travelling from city to city, indiscriminately shooting down strangers for sport. By the time he arrives in Hollywood, he's scored forty-one not out. Tonight he's in the mood for sex, so before getting down to the serious business, Prescott hits on an attractive young woman and invites her out for a meal. How infuriating that all Miss Janet Lakely wants to talk about is the sniper and what a nut job he must be .....

[severance]

I've got the previous version of this - The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction - somewhere here. Really only got it for The Flight to Nowhere, a condensed version of Williams' novel Scorpion Reef. Throughout the fifties and sixties, many of Williams' novels appeared first in condensed versions usually in Cosmopolitan or Manhunt before appearing in hardback and paperback format, this being one of them.

Flight to Nowhere - Manhunt, September 1955
Scorpion Reef - hardback, MacMillan 1955
Gulf Coast Girl - paperback, Dell 1956 and 1960. Cover art by Robert McGinnis.

Dell retitled the book probably to cash in on the three best-selling 'Girl' novels that Williams produced in the early fifties - Hill Girl, Big City Girl and River Girl all published by Gold Medal in 1951. Dell also did the same with a later novel - Operator became Girl Out Back - just to confuse bibliographers everywhere!

Charles Williams - Gulf Coast Girl par severance_23, on ipernity

In my opinion Williams was probably the best thriller writer in the Gold Medal stable that included such greats as John D. MacDonald, Donald Hamilton, Stephen Marlowe, Peter Rabe, Day Keene etc. and this is no exception.

Struggling to remember much else about the anthology to be honest - loved the MacDonald, hated the Brewer (didn't get on with his recent collection Redheads Die Quickly either) - but I'd be surprised if Dem found much to be enthused about, as it's strictly crime based by and large. I'm sure he'll contradict me if I'm presuming wrongly...

[dem bones]

It's a bit of a cheek marketing the book as a Mammoth Book Of Pulp Fiction when it's really a Mammoth Book Of Pulp Crime Fiction, but I rate Mr. Jakubowski as an editor - his 'non-fiction' Mammoth Book Of Jack The Ripper , in its original format, is exceptional - and a good story is a good story, regardless of genre. Truth is, as with Zombie Apocalpypse - Endgame, this got knocked down the books-on-the-go pile when other, more manageable novels and collections came along, and have yet to give it a fair go. Jim Thompson's Forever After I know from the short-lived but brilliant Shock magazine, and I liked that well enough. It's true I'd prefer that Bellem and Fischer were represented by a selection apiece from their Spicy/ Shudder pulp repertoires, but am still grateful of an opportunity to sample their post-war work.