Otto Penzler has done it again. The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories follows on the heels of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, and, like the earlier volume, clocks in at more than 1,000 pages.

This time Penzler anthologizes only stories from the classic Black Mask magazine. From 1920 to 1951, Black Mask published the best hard-boiled fiction ­- spitting gats taking out treacherous dames and gunsels alike.

The book contains more than 50 short stories and novels by writers who were making a penny a word and often writing damn well, including The Maltese Falcon as it was first published, before Dashiell Hammett did around 3,000 touch-ups for hardcover publication. The titles tell it all: Diamonds Mean Death, Murder is Bad Luck, Ten Carats of Lead, and Paul Cain’s Fast One, the best noir you’ve never read.

Besides Hammett, the writers include Raymond Chandler, Cornel Woolrich, Horace McCoy, Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, Richard Connell and many others.

Indispensable.

In the Pipeline…

Former model Carol Alt is writing a cookbook for Clarkson Potter concerning raw food. Alt has already published two cookbooks about raw food, which really should be called something other than cookbooks… Da Capo will publish Emma Pearson’s Sophie: The Incredible True Story of a Dog Overboard, about a dog who went missing on the Great Barrier Reef and found her way home months later.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

heterogamosis: a marriage in which the partners are terribly mismatched.

Quote Unquote…

"Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult – you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it."

– Fran Lebowitz