Review transcription:
Hi! 🙂 Debbi Mack here, and I don’t have the lighting quite right. My face is half in shadow, which seems appropriate given the fact that I’m going to talk about this book for a little bit. Black Mask. It’s a collection of Black Mask stories. The Greatest Crime Fiction from the Legendary Magazine. The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Wow! And let me tell you this is a big book. I have not read all of these stories. I just want to make that clear. But it really has some awesome short novels, novellas, and a whole novel, which you may have heard of, called The Maltese Falcon. And it’s just absolutely wonderful stuff. There’s one novella in particular that I found where I made a very interesting discovery. I discovered that the first work that Dashiell Hammett had published was under the name Peter Collinson. I never knew that. It was his pseudonym. He was also in the Pinkerton agency, in case you didn’t know that. In various cities, including Baltimore, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. You should read this because it’s just a fascinating description of Hammett’s life. I mean, it’s a very short one, it doesn’t go into great detail, but it’s just an aspect of his life I never knew about — that he had a pseudonym like that. And I just think this is the most awesome cover ever so, if you like hard-boiled crime fiction, which I do, in the movies and in books, definitely check out the Black Mask stories. They’re awesome. The first one in here is by Erle Stanley Gardner, who created Perry Mason. And I believe there is an introduction somewhere … or maybe this was published by Otto Penzler. It’s edited with a foreword by Otto Penzler, who is a very big name in crime fiction and it’s really cool, cool stuff. So if you want to read real pulp fiction, this is it.
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