The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

Edited and put together by Maxim Jakubowski, The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction is ideal for all your detective, murder, mystery, and noir desires. Whilst admittedly some of the stories are a bit crap, only going for a few pages and not really setting up much in ways of plot or characters, the larger percentage of stories that make up this book are good old fashioned crime stories working in both realms of the seedy, shady, and noir, and the rich, eccentric, and sophisticatedly corrupt. I positively steam-rollered through it, bowling each story over one by one in what felt like a matter of smooth minutes. 

“33 hard-boiled stories” varying in all manner of plots from elaborate robberies, marital murder conspiring, airtight frame jobs, mysterious and accidental dead body discoveries, and all manner of mysteries from deaths, to inheritances, to adultery, to disappearances, to even vampires. 

The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction features works from Samuel Dashiell, Charles Williams, Paul Cain, John D. MacDonald, Robert Turner, James M. Cain, Gil Brewer, Robert Leslie Bellem, Jim Thompson, Day Keene, William P. McGivern, Mickey Spillane, Roger Torrey, William Rough, Lawrence Block, David Goodis, Max Allan Collins, Charles Willeford, Ross Macdonald, Frederic Brown, Howard Browne, Bruno Fischer, Robert Block, Frank R. Read, William F. Nolan, Bill Pronzini, John Lutz, B. Traven, Dan Gordon, Joe Gores, William Campbell Gault, Schuyler G. Edsall, and Donald E. Westlake, rounding out the volume with a range of not only different stories and characters, but different writing styles as well. 

Whilst it’s usually tricky to read a book that is essentially a book of short stories that all begin and end rather rapidly, the changes in registers from first to third, the narrative voices from upper class to underworld, and the sometimes non-lineal progressions of the stories funnily enough adds to the reading experience by really keeping you on your toes and thus reading in a way that is really conducive to the atmospheres amidst which each plot is set. Because the pace of the stories are quite jagged and fast to begin with, the jaggedness and brokenness that the collection of stories has sort of inspires you to distance yourself just that little bit and read everything with a heightened sense of scrutiny, like a detective novel. 

Filled with absolutely everything from sex, romance, betrayal, adultery, to murder, drama, revenge, the wrong-man scenarios, kidnapping, corruption, underworld deals, and everything in between, The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction is a fantastically captivating collection of noir stories that just suck you in right from the get-go by means of their easiness to read, fast-paced plots, and recognisable characters. Yes, it’s 33 stories and it’s over 800 pages long, but you seriously don’t notice the length or amount of text on the page because you positively power through each page with the minutes of the day being flicked away with every turn of a page!