The narrators do a good job here, but the long introduction is poorly written and the selected stories are mostly mediocre, full of long explanations at the end that explain who did what and why. The opener, by Erle Stanley Gardner, is probably the best story here. There are several other audiobooks in this series, but if this is the best they could do for the first volume, I don't expect the other ones to be better. NOT recommended. ( )

Interesting pulp magazine hard boiled detective stories from the 1920's and 30's, by some authors soon to become much more well know, many published under pseudonyms.
Character List


“Come and Get It” by Erle Stanley Gardner; read by Oliver Wyman
ED JENKINS - "The Phantom Crook," was a loner and a fugitive, a master of disguise and a con artist supreme, a self-confessed "outlaw, desperado and famous lone wolf," working both sides of the law, pitting cops against crooks, and all in the name of his personal gain.

Maude Enders - Girl with the mole on her hand, was a girl with brains, and she admired but one thing in life—brains. There was no sex appeal about her. She was merely a reasoning machine. She was a member of a gang that was out for my life

Schwartz, crook

Helen Chadwick trouble over those papers of your father’s?” that joyous little flapper
Edith Jewett Kemper, leader of the social world, head of the four hundred.
Old Icy-Eyes thin, rat-like features of the man who had accompanied her, and whom I recognized as one of the most prominent of the criminal lawyers in the city

Arson Plus
the first Continental Op story. It was published in the October 1923 issue.

Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office
Mr. Thornburgh, house burned down
Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge A niece in San Francisco

The Coonses, Thornburgh’s help,

Fall Guy” by George Harmon Coxe
Flashgun Casey - newspaper photographer is drawn into a blackmail case directed against an old friend.

“Doors in the Dark” by Frederick Nebel

Capt. Steve Macbride is hot on the scent of an old friends suicide

“Luck” by Lester Dent
the author Doc Savage wrote the Doc Savage novels under a house name

Captain Sail of the yacht Sail. round jolly brown features of a thirtyish man, a private dick assigned to locate some stuff that sank on a yacht.



( )

It's not the master collection of hardboiled stories, but it's a decent collection in any case. It starts out with an overlong and dry introduction that was clearly meant for the print version this is a subset of. Arson Plus was slightly frustrating; it tossed out monetary amounts and drew conclusions from them, which is slightly frustrating for a modern listener who can't convert 1920s cash amounts in their head. The readers were generally good, except for the one for Luck, who left noticeable unintended breathing sounds in the recording. ( )

If you enjoy classic pulp fiction, you could do worse than this anthology of tales from Black Mask magazine, the magazine that pretty much created and popularized the pulp mystery/noir genre. The first 1/8th of this anthology is devoted to an extensive introduction that provides history and context for the stories to come, which should intrigue fans as well as noobs to the genre. And the stories themselves as produced with loving care, featuring talented voice actors who do a uniformly competent job of making the characters and ambiance of the stories come to life.

The first story, "Come and Get It," a fairly pedestrian story by Erle Stanley Gardner, known more widely for his Perry Mason stories. Of all the tales in this collection, it probably comes closest to the "soiled knight errant" noir model favored by Hammett and his ilk. It features a reformed con man, Ed Jenkins, who's trying to anticipate and foil a big heist on behalf of the high society flapper who he loves but knows he can never possess.

"Arson Plus," by Dashiell Hammett (writing as Peter Collinson), is a breath of fresh air after the first tale - crisply written, unsentimental, and purposefully clever. Although you may figure out the denouement before the Continental Op does, you'll listen to the end anyway out of sheer admiration for the Hammett's craft.

I found the third tale, "Fall Guy" by George Harmon, the hardest to get through. Perhaps because I already felt like I "knew" the protagonist, Flashgun Casey (aka Casey, Crime Photographer), from the many 1940s radio plays that featured the character in the story, I found this "beta" version of the character, a newspaper photographer who keeps getting entangled in the crimes he's covering, to be a disappointment - plodding, unimaginative, and mostly unsympathetic. The story, revolving around a blackmail plot, is fairly ordinary, the characters 2-dimensional, the plot unnecessarily complex, and the denoument formulaic.

"Doors in the Dark," by Frederick Nebel, features a police captain who refuses to believe that an acquaintance of his committed suicide, despite seemingly iron-clad evidence to the contrary. Some of the plotting is a little sloppy, but there is imagination here, and some decent writing.

"Luck," the final tale in the collection, requires the most work to get through. The setting is a marina, the protagonist an aging adventurer with complex and dubious morals, the plot a tale of gangsters and sunken treasure. The author, Lester Dent, spends the first 2/3rds of the novel dropping clues and relying on the reader to piece them together, which might not appeal to some folks but which I enjoyed. Unfortunately, however, Dent then hedges his bets by explaining pretty much everything, after which the tale becomes a procedural rather than a puzzle. According to the forward, Dent extensively reworked the tail before finally publishing it as "Sail" - would be nice to think he found a way to even out the inconsistencies in this uneven but promising tale.

Wouldn't say that these are the best stories ever to appear in Black Mask magazine, but do believe they collectively represent the best and the worst of the pulp mystery/noir genre - the plots range from predictable to clever, the language ranges from pedestrian to brilliant ... but the voice is always uniquely edgy and American. ( )

An excellent audio collection of short stories from the golden age of hard boiled detective fiction. Most notable was the fascinating history of the genre in the introduction. Each story was well read by some terrific voices. I could picture them sitting at an old fashion radio mic, wearing a trenchcoat, with a tooth pick stuck in the sides of their mouths as they read. ( )