Description:
Edited by Trent Zelazny, Dames, Booze, Guns & Gumshoes is a hard-edged anthology of classic pulp crime, noir fiction, private-eye stories, and dangerous mid-century shadows. Bringing together David Goodis, Robert Leslie Bellem, Hugh B. Cave, Julius Long, Carroll John Daly, William E. Barrett, Steve Fisher, Robert E. Howard, John D. MacDonald, Richard S. Prather, Cornell Woolrich, and other sharp voices from the crime and pulp tradition, this collection delivers the old machinery of noir at full speed: dames with secrets, booze-soaked desperation, guns in the dark, and gumshoes following trouble down streets where nobody walks away clean.
These stories belong to the world of cheap rooms, smoky bars, desperate jobs, criminal schemes, false promises, and last chances gone bad. Some lean hard-boiled, some move through private-eye territory, some descend into full noir fatalism, but all carry the velocity and pressure of classic pulp storytelling. For readers of vintage crime fiction, detective anthologies, Black Mask-style fiction, paperback noir, pulp magazines, and mid-century American suspense, Dames, Booze, Guns & Gumshoes offers a broad, brutal, entertaining survey of the writers who helped shape the darker side of popular crime fiction.
Brief description: Robert Leslie Bellem was a prolific American pulp writer best remembered as the creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, one of the most flamboyant private eyes of the pulp magazine era. Bellem's Dan Turner stories combined hard-boiled crime, Hollywood atmosphere, rapid-fire slang, comic exaggeration, and lurid detective-magazine energy, making them instantly recognisable among readers of vintage pulp fiction. His work appeared across the crime, detective, adventure, and popular-magazine fields, and his distinctive voice helped define a strain of private-eye fiction that was at once tough, sensational, and knowingly over the top. For readers interested in classic detective magazines, Hollywood crime stories, and the more colourful side of hard-boiled pulp, Bellem remains an essential name.