Pulp fiction has been looked down on as a guilty pleasure, but it offers the perfect form of entertainment: the very best storytelling filled with action, surprises, sound and fury. In short, all the exhiliration of a roller-coaster ride. The 1920s in America saw the proliferation of hundreds of dubiously named but thrillingly entertaining pulp magazines in America: Black Mask, Amazing, Astounding, Spicy Stories, Ace-High, Detective Magazine, Dare-Devil Aces. It was in these luridly-coloured publications, printed on the cheapest pulp paper, that the first gems began to appear. The one golden rule for writers of pulp fiction was to adhere to the art of storytelling. Each story had to have a...

Here is a smashing, red-blooded mystery yarn, packed with fast action. This is crime as the police in “open” towns know it; hard-boiled detectives and as tough a collection of criminals as can be found in any metropolitan line-up. Torrey sets a speedy pace and the book tears to a climax you won’t forget. Shean Connell, a private detective, sets out to clear up a divorce case in Reno, and finds that he has been framed by the man who is boss of the town’s criminals. After he views the woman in the morgue and has the tip of his ear shot away, he realizes that murder and not divorce is being plotted. Why wouldn’t Tod Wendel’s wife speak to him? Between the wealthy society woman and her...

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...