Maxim Jakubowski

Recommended for those seeking something a bit more highbrow than mainstream erotica fare.

One troubling feature here is that there seems to be no rationale for the order of the pieces, and a "nice to have" would have been short author biographies, since many of the writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, had unusual backgrounds. Clearly the bibles of older pulp mysteries are Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of the Pulps and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. However, this anthology may attract pulp fiction fans interested in more contemporary interpretations.