Stories that will beat you to a bloody pulp

The book thudded on my desk like a bum fighter hitting the canvas.

“The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.” That’s what it said on the cover, right above the picture of the dame.

I drained a shot of rye and got to thinking about those thrilling days between the world wars, when the hard-boiled American private eye was created. Men who beat the typewriter like a percussion instrument hacked out an entire genre of literature.

It was the golden age of pulp magazines, when 500 or more action and adventure fiction magazines flooded newsstands. They were weeklies or monthlies whose literary merit was so low they were printed on flimsy paper made from pulpwood.

The pulps covered everything from romance to westerns, but in long-defunct magazines such as Black Mask, Dime Detective or below-the-counter sleazoids like Spicy Detective, the hard-boiled American crime story and the entire noir movement were born. Their primarily blue-collar male readers understood certain truths: that bad things should happen to bad people, beautiful women are a problem, sex is dirty, violent crime can be funny and whiskey is our friend.

The gods of this mean little universe were Raymond Chandler (“The Big Sleep”) and Dashiell Hammett (“The Maltese Falcon”). Erle Stanley Gardner created Perry Mason and sold more than 300 million books. James Cain wrote staples such as “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity.”

These stories were entirely new and entirely American. Most were terribly written, misogynistic and racist (when they bothered to mention people of color), churned out by men who worked for a penny a word or less. Nearly all the pulps slid beneath the pop culture waves shortly after World War II, done in by cheap paperbacks and TV.

And yet we are delighted to report that, for the first time in ages, a large chunk of this ur-text is available in “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.” At 1,150 double-columned pages, it’s the most complete anthology of the golden age of pulp detective fiction ever assembled. It was put together by the legendary Otto Penzler, proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York.

There are 53 stories here, and every one will smack you in the mouth: “Two Murders, One Crime.” “He Got What He Asked For.” “Killer in the Rain.”

Typical are hammer-fisted beginnings like “I didn’t like his face and told him so.”

“Ninety percent of the writing was really bad,” says Penzler, who tracked down the titles for several years to include in this volume (printed, of course, on pulp paper). “But Americans tend to have that frontier mentality -- the lone gunslinger walks into town to clean up Dodge City. . . . You’re more interested in justice than the law, and these stories really resonated with readers. They sold millions of copies.”

“These guys unknowingly created art out of poverty,” bestselling crime novelist George Pelecanos says. “They weren’t trying to be artists, just to make a living. In some shape or form, a lot of them lived the lives that found their way onto the page.”

Cain, married four times, wrote about adultery and dames so desirable that men would kill to get them. Cornell Woolrich was a closeted gay man who lived in a seedy Harlem hotel with his mother and was so lonely he dedicated stories to his typewriter. Alcoholic Roger Torrey and his girlfriend wrote stories side by side with a bottle of whiskey between them; the first one to finish got to start drinking first. Other writers whose work is included in this volume hid behind pen names, and not even Penzler could discover anything about them. They are stories left behind by anonymous writers.

The best of them all, Chandler, had his own alcohol and sexual issues (women almost always kill people in his books), but he famously summed up the genre’s ethos in a 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder.” He said that Hammett was brilliant and wrote for “people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.” He said Hammett gave murder “back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons.”

The sophisticated crime stories that developed in the wake of pulps so dominate our cultural landscape now that we hardly notice their origins. Go to any bookstore and you’ll see an entire section devoted to mystery or crime. Go to the theater, turn on the television, and the pulps’ descendants are everywhere. “No Country for Old Men.” “The Sopranos.” “Gone Baby Gone.” “The Departed.” “Fargo.” “The Wire.” “L.A. Confidential.” “The Godfather.”

The hard-boiled detective story traces its official birth to the May 15, 1923, edition of Black Mask. This was the publication date of Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry.” Hammett published his first stories later the same year, and the genre took off. It was a transcendent moment for American creative arts: Hollywood was moving from silent films to talkies. Jazz was spreading from New Orleans. The Harlem Renaissance was underway.

Daly, Penzler observes, was “a hack writer devoid of literary pretension, aspiration and ability.” Hammett, on the other hand, was a genius. Both men wrote in short, muscular sentences that drove the action forward. They were writing this before the great titan of American strong-armed lit, Ernest Hemingway, published his first novel, Penzler points out.

“These stories helped change the way American narratives present real speech, in the power of these short, declarative sentences,” says Keith Alan Deutsch, publisher of Blackmask.com, the magazine’s revived, online descendant. “It’s not to say that this wasn’t there in higher art, but the pulps were certainly a force” in what a lot of people read.

Just after World War I, there was a wide audience of young, blue-collar men who could read but not too well, and they really liked the western stories printed in cheap magazines. There had been English mystery stories of the drawing room sort, and Edgar Allan Poe had written marvelous suspense stories. But Daly and Hammett took the cowboy frontier ethic and transposed it into violent stories about unpolished urban people, crime, alcohol, a tough-but-decent guy with a gun, a buxom woman in (or causing) trouble, and bad guys.

Rough eloquence

People didn’t just do things in these stories, either. They did them with outrageous, simile-laden flair.

Chandler writes that a guy looks “as guilty as if he’d just kicked his grandmother.” Cornell Woolrich’s heroine says, “The ticking of my heart sounded like a cheap alarm clock.”

Sometimes, this could be elevated to art. In Chandler’s “Red Wind,” a story in this collection, detective Philip Marlowe is wrapping up an investigation in which he’s had an intense relationship with a married woman. They meet one last time in a bar:

“I stood there a moment with a hand on the table. ‘If anybody ever bothers you,’ I said, ‘let me know.’ ”

Hard-bitten valor, a sense of loss . . . man. It’s not bad at all.

But more often, you just needed cleavage. Virtually every pulp magazine cover featured a woman, usually blond, usually with her dress ripped, being menaced by some thug.

Deep trouble

“The Girl Who Knew Too Much,” typical of the sort, opens with a desperate woman sprinting out of an alley, shirt ripped down to the waist. The hero of the story (a newspaperman!) steps out and deadpans, “What’s the matter? Something scare you?”

“Out of the alley came a flash of orange flame,” a body falls over in a heap and the story is off and running: A half-naked woman, a corpse in an alley and a tough guy with a quip -- all in the first 10 paragraphs.

Cain is in this collection with a short story called “Pastorale,” which tells of young stud Burbie, his flame, Lida, and Lida’s rich geezer of a husband. Burbie and Lida -- you can see this coming -- plot to kill the geez and pocket the bills. Burbie enlists an even tougher dude named Hutch to help him kill the old guy and cut off his head with a shovel.

Burbie throws the head off a bridge, but the river is frozen, so the head just sits there on the ice. Hutch goes to get it, falls in and dies. The unnamed narrator shows up with a bunch of other guys: “Believe me, a head laying out on thin ice is a pretty damn hard thing to get, and what we had to do was lasso it.”

The story ends with Burbie a few days away from hanging. Lida’s not far behind.

So maybe some of these stories ring true and some don’t. But the best of them get at something there in the American void, something true about late nights and lost men and bare bulbs in apartment hallways and, under it all, the taste of cigarette smoke, like regret, lingering on the tip of the tongue.