Product Description
From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” (Booklist).
Otto Penzler selected and wrote introductions to the best of the best, the darkest of these dark, vintage stories for the collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Now that collection is available for the first time on audio.
Includes:
Otto Penzler selected and wrote introductions to the best of the best, the darkest of these dark, vintage stories for the collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Now that collection is available for the first time on audio.
Includes:
- “A Taste for Cognac” by Brett Halliday; read by Peter Ganim
- “Sauce for the Gander” by Day Keene; read by Richard Ferrone
- “A Little Different” by W. T. Ballard; read by Jeff Gurner
- “The Shrieking Skeleton” by Charles M. Green; read by David Ledoux
- “Drop Dead Twice” by Hank Searls; read by Jeff Gurner
Reviews/Praise
—The Bookwatch
“HighBridge throws a winning seven with this standout addition to its superb series. . . . The Black Mask series single-handedly may cause a pulp mystery renaissance! Even if pulp stories aren’t your normal cup, the readings by Jeff Gurner, David Ledoux, Richard Ferrone, and others will have even the most casual or nonmystery fans hanging on every word and ‘shrieking’ for more.”
—Library Journal [starred review]
“Hardboiled crime fiction was never better than in the pages of Black Mask magazine, and Black Mask has never been better than in these vibrant, exciting audio editions. Close your eyes and you can practically smell the gunfire and whiskey.”
—Charles Ardai
“The stories of Black Mask and the audio book are a love-match as inevitable and passionate and entrancing as a private eye and a femme fatale. This is a series that will make you want to get in your car in the middle of a rainy night and drive around listening.”
—Robert Olen Butler, author of The Hot Country, a Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller
“The Black Mask Audio Series from Otto Penzler is a tribute to early pulp mystery and detective fiction that was highly entertaining, exciting and terrifically written. But this collection is far more than a nostalgic salute to the past, it’s downright fun to enjoy in the present.”
—Joseph Wambaugh
“Pitch-perfect performances of stories that are as rollicking as they are artful. I drove from Delaware to Mississippi on one long Black Mask bender, and if it weren’t for the Gulf of Mexico I’d still be driving.”
—Michael Kardos, author of The Three-Day Affair
