No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume

a book to remember... In this book you will investigate crime with such Famous Detectives as Perry Mason Nero Wolfe Ellery Queen and read stories of detection and suspense by such Famous Mystery Writers as Agatha Christie John Dickson Carr George Harmon Coxe Charlotte Armstrong Hugh Pentecost and be surprised at tales of mystery and crime by such Famous Literary Figures as W. Somerset Maugham Ben Hecht, John Van Druten A book to remember, a book to read and reread — a book to treasure and keep permanently in your library

An unstoppable anthology of crime stories culled from Black Mask magazine the legendary publication that turned a pulp phenomenon into literary mainstream. Black Mask was the apotheosis of noir. It was the magazine where the first hardboiled detective story, which was written by Carroll John Daly appeared. It was the slum in which such American literary titans like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler got their start, and it was the home of stories with titles like “Murder Is Bad Luck,” “Ten Carets of Lead,” and “Drop Dead Twice.” Collected here is best of the best, the hardest of the hardboiled, and the darkest of the dark of America’s finest crime fiction. This masterpiece collection represents a high watermark of America’s underbelly. Crime writing gets no better than this. Featuring • Deadly Diamonds • Dancing Rats • A Prize Fighter Fighting for His Life • A Parrot that Wouldn’t Talk Including • Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as it was originally published • Lester Dent’s Luck in print for the first time

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 The 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

We now live in enlightened times that reassure us that, far from being a lower form of literature, pulp fiction is the term for what the best storytelling provides — pyrotechnic thrills, shocks galore and excitement by the bucketload! From cops, both straight and crooked, to ruthless bigshots, shady operators, femmes fatales and damsels in distress. Including gangsters, drifters, common crooks, shady attorneys to molls with a heart of gold, enjoy a rollercoaster ride through popular literature’s best pulp writers. The MBO of Pulp Action includes the talents of Charles Willeford, Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Ed Gorman, Lawrence Block, John D. Macdonald, William Campbell Gault, Bruno Fischer, Mark Timlin, Joe R. Lansdale and many of the classic Black Mask magazine

Из сборника «Кровавый ветер»

«Кровавый ветер» — сборник лучших полицейских детективов, созданных «отцами» криминального чтива, жанра, расцвет которого пришелся на первую половину 20-го века, — Рэймондом Чандлером, Томасом Уолшем, Норбертом Дэвисом и др. Это — первая книга «забойных» детективов из серии «Криминальное чтиво», где в главных ролях выступают герои-одиночки, частные сыщики, борцы со злом и защитники несправедливо обиженных. Читайте также в этой серии лучшие криминальные рассказы знаменитых американских писателей о злодеях-преступниках, ворах, циничных убийцах, о женщинах-полицейских и о дамах, попавших в беду