Maxim JakubowskiBesprekingen

“The Perfect Crime” is an all-original anthology of 22 crime stories “from diverse cultures around the world,” the idea being that crime fiction has largely been written by white authors featuring white characters, and this volume aims to challenge that hegemony. Fair enough, but it turns out that the “diverse cultures around the world” is almost entirely limited to the US and UK - by my count, 15 of the 22 stories here take place in those two countries, albeit with non-white characters and/or authors involved. That said, this anthology like many others is a mixed bag; some stories work well and others less well. As always with story collections, one reader’s favorites will not be the same as another’s. My particular favorites include Editor Vaseem Khan’s own entry, “Death in Darjeeling”; a lovely sort-of Bluebeard retelling, “The Beautiful Game” by Sanjida Kay; the very clever “The Yellow Line” by Ausma Zehanat Khan set in Toronto and confronting racist behavior in the subway and other public places; First Nations author Thomas King’s very funny “Chinook”; and Walter Mosley’s neo-science fiction story “Bring Me Your Pain.” I think the premise of the anthology is an excellent one, even if the execution was not all that it could be, and I plan to search out some of the other works of some of these authors, so I thank the editors for introducing me to these new voices; moderately recommended.½

4.5⭐️

The Perfect Crime is a unique selection of short stories (some longer than the others), featuring authors from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, revolving around themes of murder and mayhem, clandestine affairs, betrayals, hate crimes, corruption, blackmail and revenge.

From America to New Zealand and the UK to India, the settings for the stories are as varied as the stories themselves. We have a bouncer who discovers the identity of the person who murdered his girlfriend, the victim of hate crimes who decides to take matters into her own hands, a court reporter with a penchant for collecting buttons, a professional photographer who is roped in to take pictures of her boyfriend's child with his wife, an army veteran turned PI who discovers a human trafficking ring while driving through a “sundown town”, the mysterious death of a tutor of a prestigious school, wedding photographers who capture more than wedding photos on an assignment, a sheep farmer whose sheep are disappearing mysteriously, a young romance turned sour, a young woman dazzled by the attention of a celebrity sportsman only to find herself stranded in his home in a remote location, former bank robbers who have to hash out a mystery from their past, a prank by the graduating class of a military academy that triggers one of the administrator’s childhood phobias and trauma attached to the same and much more.

Edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Vaseem Khan this anthology features works by S.A. Cosby, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, J.P. Pomare Sulari Gentill, Nelson George, Rachel Howzell Hall, John Vercher, Sanjida Kay, Amer Anwar, Henry Chang, Nadine Matheson, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Abir Mukherjee, Sheena Kamal, Vaseem Khan, Mike Phillips, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Felicia Yap, Thomas King, Imran Mahmood, Walter Mosley and David Heska Wanbli Weiden.

Very rarely have I come across an anthology as impressive as this. I loved most of the stories and liked the rest. The narratives are crisp, well-paced and versatile in plot and characterization. While a few of them feature procedural crime-solving, others focus on the PoVs of the perpetrators or victims-turned-avengers. Not all these stories end on a tidy note , with many of them ambiguous leaving the reader guessing. My personal favorites were Ausma Zehanat Khan’s The Yellow Line, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Land of Milk and Honey, Vaseem Khan’s Death in Darjeeling, J.P.Pomare’s For Marg, Amer Anwar’s Quiet Night In and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s Jumping Ship.

The Perfect Crime is an exquisitely curated selection of stories that kept me engaged till the very end. I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved discovering many new authors whose works I hope to explore further. If you are a fan of this genre , you wouldn't want to miss this one!

As in most anthologies stories varied in interest. Some not detective fiction, strictly speaking.

This book is a collection of very dark stories - some are very dark indeed.
They are all interesting and very atmospheric mostly taking place around a less well-known side of Venice. A couple of the pieces are almost too nauseating for me - the stuff of nightmares.

I read a lot of these stories, and I found these pretty ordinary.

The mystery genre has been going through a sort of renaissance in the last five to ten years—and that "rebirth" has not only produced high-quality work, it has also significantly diversified the genre. As editors Khan and Jakubowski explain in the introduction, in the past the world of mystery writing was white-dominated and writers of color who did work in the genre often felt they had to write predominantly white characters. At that time, when a mystery was presented in a "foreign" or non-white culture, the authors were generally white and depicted such cultures through the lens of their own limited experience with the culture and their preconceived ideas about that culture.

In The Perfect Crime, Khan and Jakubowski have assembled an excellent body of mystery stories written by authors from geographically and culturally diverse backgrounds and placed in widely varying settings. As a reader of mysteries, I favor full-length works, but this collection of stories kept me engaged and left me eager to look up longer works by the authors of individual stories.

As is happening in some other genres, the world of mysteries is becoming more and more like the world we live in—global, not just local—and that makes for richer more interesting reading for all of us. Seeing the "real world" requires seeing and connecting with those who differ from us. A reality dominated by a single culture or community makes for less-than-satisfying living, just as it makes for less-than-satisfying reading.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus the opinions are my own.

A Real Nice Guy, by William F. Nolan
The Girl Behind the Hedge, by Micky Spillane

These were the only two stories, out of the whole 814 pages of this book, that I would give more than two stars for. And the Spillane story is really spoiled by being too sexist.

Pulp is what it says, and pulp is what you get; one really shouldn't expect more. But it made me a bit weary and frustrated to read over and over how women were portrayed, and unrealistic situations were written, and were there any characters who didn't smoke all the time (and never outside), and how did they all get to drink alcohol at work?

I love learning about the landscapes and the cultures of the world, and I've found that one of the best ways to do so is through the crime fiction that I choose to read. An excellent source to feed this addiction of mine has long been the extraordinary short story anthology series published by Akashic, and when I learned that this book was being published, I knew I had to read it. After all, it contained stories written by several of my favorite authors.

Consequently, I could enjoy stories by authors I knew (S.A. Cosby, Sulari Gentill, Rachel Howzell Hall, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Vaseem Khan, Walter Mosley, Abir Mukherjee, David Heska Wanbli Weiden) while finding new-to-me authors like Silvia Moreno-Garcia and John Vercher, more of whose work I want to read.

The Perfect Crime takes readers all around the globe and introduces them to many cultures. There's not a bad apple in this anthology barrel, but I have to give special shout-outs to Rachel Howzell Hall's "Clout Chaser" and Ausma Zehanat Khan's "The Yellow Line." The tastiest of them all? John Vercher's "Either Way I Lose" set in 1919 Omaha, Nebraska. This story simply blew me away with its truth, power, and visceral, deeply emotional, knockout punch. Absolutely one of the best things I've read all year.

If you're an armchair traveling sleuth, you definitely need to get your hands on a copy of The Perfect Crime. I hope readers will be treated to a second volume in the future.

(Reading copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)

This is an excellent collection of short stories -- "pulp fiction" -- originally published between the 1920s and the 1990s. The 32 items included offer a broad survey of the genre, illustrating historical changes it has undergone over a period of 7 decades. Among the most notable authors included are David Goodis, James Cain, Jim Thompson, John D. Macdonald, Lawrence Block, Ross MacDonald, Bill Pronzini, and Donald E. Westlake. Standout contributions include Black Pudding by David Goodis, The Bloody Tide by Day Keene, We Are All Dead by Bruno Fischer, and Divide and Conquer by Jack Ritchie.

No such collection can include all of the noteworthy authors of the genre. In his introduction, editor Maxim Jakubowski acknowledges that for reasons of limited space, he excluded such writers as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and Earl Stanley Gardner. These are other authors are well represented in the many other available collections of pulp fiction.

Below is a list of the contributions that are included, along with my ratings on a 5* scale

Finders Killers! by John D. Macdonald (2*)
Murder’s Mandate by W. T. Ballard (2*)
Cigarette Girl by James M. Cain (2*)
The Getaway by Gil Brewer (3*)
Preview of Murder by Robert Leslie Bellem (2*)
Forever After by Jim Thompson (3.5*)
The Bloody Tide by Day Keene (4.5*)
Death Comes Gift-Wrapped by William P. McGivern (3*)
The Girl Behind the Hedge by Mickey Spillane (3*)
Enter Scarface by Armitage Trail (3*)
A Candle for the Bag Lady by Lawrence Block (2*)
Black Pudding by David Goodis (5*)
A Matter of Principal by Max Allan Collins (5*)
Citizen’s Arrest by Charles Willeford (0.5*)
Sleeping Dog by Ross Macdonald (1*)
The Wench Is Dead by Fredric Brown (2.5*)
So Dark for April by Howard Browne (3*)
We Are All Dead by Bruno Fischer (5*)
Death is a Vampire by Robert Bloch (1*)
Divide and Conquer by Jack Ritchie (4*)
A Real Nice Guy by William F. Nolan (2*)
Stacked Deck by Bill Pronzini (3*)
So Young, So Fair, So Dead by John Lutz (3*)
Effective Medicine by B. Traven (1*)
Killing Bernstein by Harlan Ellison (3*)
The Second Coming by Joe Gores (0*)
Hibiscus and Homicide by William Campbell Gault (2*)
Hell on Wheels by Thomas S. Roche (1*)
Ordo by Donald E. Westlake (2.5*)

I recommend the review by justchris for information on several of the stories: https://www.librarything.com/work/337717/reviews/121585672

New Crimes 3 is a dubious collection of short stories, one that is wildly uneven in quality. This bleak appraisal is surprising, given that it includes a few prominent figures in the genre. Nevertheless, no more than a few stories are worthy of note. Most of the stories bear 1991 copywrite dates (one wonders if the authors wrote them earlier but were unable to publish them). The most notable exception, in date and quality, is a fine offering from John D. MacDonald, published in Black Mask in 1950.

While any collection of short stories will have “hits” and “misses”, the latter predominate in this collection. I rate stories on a five- star scale for my own benefit, and in no collection before or since have I felt compelled to award so many “ones” and “zeroes”. One major disappointment was Robert B. Parker’s 1982 Surrogate – one of just 2 short stories ever written by him, and one that did not deserve to be printed anywhere (see my review here: https://www.librarything.com/work/74081/reviews/187889104). Another is a “nameless detective” story from Bill Pronzini, a story item not up to his normal standards. And then there are the “zeroes”. Notable among them is a 1957 essay by John Dickson Carr on food and drink in the stories of Sherlock Holmes. (Its status as an unpublished item may be what attracted it to the editor, since it does not even qualify as a story). At the other extreme, I found a few stories to be of good quality: W. R. Philbrick: “Boogie Dean Men,” Gary Lovisi’s “Dry Run,” and the aforementioned story by John D. MacDonald, “Jukebox Jungle”. Overall, as noted in a Kirkus review, bookstore owner “[Maxim] Jakubowski seems to specialize in stories nobody else wants- -publishers or readers.” https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/maxim-ed-jakubowski/new-crimes-3/

Here’s the list of 21 stories and their authors, along with my rankings:

Norman Partridge: Last Kiss -- 3*
Julian Rathbone: Baz -- 0*
William Schoell: Hijack -- 1*
Jack Adrian: The Absolute and Utter Impossibility of the Facts in the Case of the Vanishing Henning Vok (a.k.a. The Amazing Blitzen (r.n. Ralph Cole) -- 0*
Gabrielle Kraft: Blast from the Past -- 1*
Margaret Lewis: Natural Powers -- 0*
W. R. Philbrick: Boogie Dead Men -- 4*
Bill Pronzini: Souls Burning -- 1*
Gary Lovisi: Dry Run -- 4*
Del Marston: Death in the Ditch -- 1*
P.C. Doherty: The Monk’s Tale -- 1*
Mark Schorr: What Goes Around…
Molly Brown: Star -- 2*
Cay Van Ash: The Persian Apothecary -- 1*
Mark Timlin: Too Late Blues -- 2*
Robert Lopresti: Until I Do -- 1*
Mike Ripley: Lord Peter and the Butter Boy -- 0*
Steve Rasnik Tem: Squeezer -- 1*
Robert B. Parker: Surrogate – 1*
John D. MacDonald: Jukebox Jungle -- 4*
John Dickson Carr: Another Glass, Watson! -- 0*½

An anthology of historical detective short stories, some by well known authors, others by authors new to me. There were a couple of stories I'd read before. None of the stories were actually bad, but of the stories by authors new to me, only one was so good that I looked her up to find more of what she'd written.

File under "mixed bag." Lots of noir from the 1950s and later (not my cup of tea, but if it's yours then look no further), as well as some interesting if not entirely effective selections from major hardboiled writers like Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain (each satirizing the genteel aristocratic crime story with "The Diamond Wager" and "The Tasting Machine," respectively). The highlights are "One Escort--Missing or Dead," a rip-roaring detective yarn by Roger Torrey (author of a lone, semi-legendary hardboiled novel, 42 Days for Murder), and Ross Macdonald's excellent "Sleeping Dog." It's a shame that Macdonald didn't give us more Archer stories; for the most part, they really were as good as the novels. Among the (relatively) more recent material, Lawrence Block's "A Candle for the Bag Lady" is good, too.

Two and a half stars.

This is a whole heap of fun and inventiveness that is indeed mammoth, but is hardly repetitive. As the editor points out in his introit, the devil has all the best lines and there is something highly attractive about a smart, devious, villain. He also points out that Moriarty is mentioned in very few of the Holmes stories, and yet he is inextricably linked with that of Holmes. In this set of short stories a range of authors have taken what is related in the Holmes stories and written a Moriarty story of their own. They are certainly varied. They have different narrators, some of them by Watson, Moriarty himself or other protagonists that appear in the Holmes canon, Irene Adler narrating one story in which things do not all go Moriarty's way... In a number of the stories they look at Moriarty's past, as a school boy or young academic, or into the future, after Richenbach, and what might happen in the next generation. Of these, it is interesting that the next generation tends to be female taking over her father's mantle. Also the one story in which Moriarty is a front, the puppet master is a puppet mistress. Intriguing, as I said.
The tales themselves have different takes on the master villain. In one he is still alive and is the master spider sitting at the heart of the world wide web, in others he has forsworn crime, in one inventive story he is forever suspended in a parallel imaginary world while falling. They are not all straight victoriana, the steam punk telling was particularly inventive (and introduced me to a genre I have read very little of) although my personal favourite is the one which sets the story in the midst of HG Wells' War of the Worlds. That was a thoroughly inventive mashup of two very different stories by placing one person in both stories. Brilliantly done.
At 20 hours, this took me almost 5 weeks to listen to, but it never got dull or boring. The single narrator did a good job of maintaining consistency of accent between people who appeared in different stories. Thoroughly recommended for Holmes fans everywhere.

Well this was a real struggle for me, the plot was good but I just couldn’t understand who was who and in the end I was non the wiser as to who the culprits were 🤫

Great short stories from masters old and new, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raoul Whitfield, Ed McBain, David Goodis and Norbert Davis. If you like pulp mysteries, you'll like this.

This is a novel about three people who are unrooted, lost, and drifting. They are connected through a contract murder and an affection for sadomasochism. The fulcrum of the triangle is a young Italian woman who dabbled with older men and kinky sex before witnessing a murder and fleeing into a hippie-type life of wandering, free love, sleeping on the beach, etc. Another part of this triangle is a stripper who does contract kills in her spare time. Sensuous, bold, without fear, and seemingly without limitations. She heads back to Europe to get a line in the missing witness and ends up a prisoner of a sex game ringmaster. The third part of this trio is an older man who once had a kinky affair with the Italian girl and is commissioned to find her. The point of the story is not a mystery but the adventures these three have. Part thriller and part eroticism, the story develops these three characters well, fleshing out who they are. It is often quite an explicit and kinky tale not for the easily offended.

This mammoth book contains about thirty pulp novels, but my favorite part is the Introduction.
Jakubowski says, “First, let’s bury the myth that pulp fiction is a lower form of art, the reverse side of literature as we know it…accredited denizens of the literary establishment relegated pulp writing to a dubious cupboard where we parked the guilty pleasures we were too ashamed to display in public.” He goes on, “what makes them [pulp fiction novels] stand out is the fact that the pulps had one golden rule …Every story in the pulps had a beginning and an end, sharply-etched economical characterization, action, emotions, plenty going on...This compact with the reader might appear self-evident, and was very much a continuation of the Victorian penny dreadfuls and novels written in installments.” Perhaps, not unlike the Sherlock Holmes stories.

The last page of the introduction (which is 15 pages long) in The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction contains this sentiment which I strongly endorse. “…pulp fiction is a state of mind, a mission to entertain, and literature would be so much poorer without it, its zest, its speed and rhythm, its unashamed verve and straightforward approach to storytelling…pulp fiction will never die.”

inégal, donné

A collection of a variety of crime related stories. Some of these were brilliant, and some not really my 'cup of tea'. A good variety.

Pulp Fiction is an anthology of 32 stories edited by Maxim Jakubowski and published by Castle Books in 2002, but originally produced by Carroll & Graf in 1996. It’s important to note the specifics as there appear to be multiple anthologies with this title, or very similar, including the same editor. The stories were originally published between 1930 and 1996: 3 from the 1930s, 4 from the 1940s, 12 from the 1950s, 5 from the 1960s, 4 from the 1970s, 3 from the 1980s, and the previously indicated one from the 1990s. That’s a pretty good normal distribution chronologically speaking. The shortest story was Charles Willeford’s “Citizen’s Arrest” at 6 pages (1966), while the longest was the novella “Flight to Nowhere” by Charles Williams at 51 pages (1955), organized into 20 chapters. All of the authors are men (or writing under a male pseudonym), as are all of the protagonists with the exception of “Forever After.” The introduction by the editor declares that “the pulps had had one golden rule which unsung editors insisted upon and good and bad writers alike religiously followed: adherence to the art of storytelling.”

The storytelling opens with Dashell Hammet’s Sam Spade in “Too Many Have Lived” (1933), hired to investigate a missing man turned into murder victim with a dubious background. The final story is “Ordo” by Donald E. Westlake (1977). I found that one the most interesting—a contrast to all that went before. It was entirely a character study centered on the eponymous character trying to understand the transformation of the girl he was briefly married to 20 years before into the movie star she became.

The stories largely featured shady characters engaged in shady activities, living in the margins of society, which I imagine is what gave so many of them pulpy appeal to the strait-laced readers of the Golden Age of the 1950s. Some of the stories feature average guys whose lives are disrupted by bad people (for example, “Flight to Nowhere,” “Cigarette Girl,” “Citizen’s Arrest,” and “So Young, So Fair, So Dead”), while others are down on their luck as alcoholics (“The Wench Is Dead” and “A Candle for the Bag Lady”) or ex-cons (“The Bloody Tide” and “Hell on Wheels”). Others feature morally ambiguous guys who deal on their own terms with bad people (see “Black,” “Divide and Conquer,” “Finders, Killers!” and “Stacked Deck”). Still others feature bad guys involved with reprehensible people (“Forever After” and “Death Comes Gift-Wrapped,” “A Real Nice Guy,” “A Matter of Principle,” and “Enter Scarface”). Some protagonists are the classic private detectives (the aforementioned Sam Spade, Sandy McKane in “Hibiscus and Homicide,” Nick Ransom in “Preview of Murder” and Paul Pine in “So Dark for April”).

The stories feature assassinations (“The Getaway,” “Forever After,” “A Real Nice” and “Hell on Wheels”), con jobs (“Murder’s Mandate,” “Death Is a Vampire”), heists (“Black,” “We Are All Dead,” “Flight to Nowhere,” and “Finders, Killers!”), organized crime (“Black,” “The Getaway,” “The Bloody Tide and “Divide and Conquer”), double crosses (“Finders, Killers!” “Black Pudding,” “So Dark Is April,” and “We Are All Dead”), revenge (“The Getaway,” “Preview of Murder,” “The Girl Behind the Hedge,” “Sleeping Dogs,” “Killing Bernstein,” “Black Pudding” and “We Are All Dead”). There are the damsels in distress (“Flight to Nowhere,” “Murder’s Mandate,” “Cigarette Girl” and “A Matter of Principle”), and the femme fatales (“Forever After” and “Hell on Wheels”). Some of the stories are hard to classify (“Second Coming” and “Effective Medicine”), and one has a science fiction punchline (“Killing Bernstein” by Harlan Ellison).

Sometimes the protagonist dies at the end, sometimes he lives happily ever after with the girl, sometimes we’re not quite sure whether he lives or dies, and sometimes he returns to the same old life or even moves into something new. While all of the protagonists (with the exception of “Enter Scarface”) and most of the villains are white, several stories feature characters who are Mexican or Chicano, and the story set in Hawaii includes Filipinos native Hawaiian, Japanese and mixed race characters. Most of the beautiful women in these stories are described as blond, but not all of them, and many of the women are not beautiful at all, particularly in “Black Pudding,” where her face is disfigured by severe scars. Most of the stories are shallow, gritty, and straightforward, no matter how many plot twists are rolled into the narrative. A few have more interesting and sensitive characterizations, more subtle storytelling. I tended to prefer those. Like most anthologies, it was a mix of styles and quality. About halfway through, I was painfully reminded of why I had made the decision to stop consuming stories about terrible people doing terrible things, but not all of the items in this collection fit that description, and those I tended to enjoy all the more for the contrast with the formulaic. I am glad that I made it to the end, because I found “Ordo” particularly rewarding.½

I downloaded the audiobook to listen to on the bus to work. I could tell it was short - initially it said 3 chapters. It turned out to be an introduction, and chapter one split into two.
I don't mind short stories, and this one being mostly in the form of letters back and forth between the two protagonists was promising. Especially since the characters are a librarian and a bookshop owner. My sort of people.
Yet I was left strangely unsatisfied. The premise held promise, but for me it failed to deliver.
Someone I follow has just posted a review of 84 Charing Cross Road, the book and the film. It sounds to me like this is the same premise - but done right. I have added 84 to my reading list. It will be an interesting comparison.

The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, is a collection of, well, mystery short stories written by British authors. This sixth edition of the long-running series contains stories published in 2007, while the book was published in 2009; many of the 39 tales come from the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and The Strand, although some original anthologies (Expletive Deleted, The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits, Paris Noir, and A Hell of a Woman to name a few) are well-represented as well. There are stories by well-known authors such as John Mortimer, Colin Dexter, Alexander McCall Smith, Anne Perry, Peter Lovesey and Christopher Fowler, and stories by authors who are new to me such as Danuta Reah, Bill James and Stella Duffy. What these and other authors in the book have in common is that they are all writing at the top of their game in these stories; although I didn't like all of the stories, I certainly could not say that any one of them was poorly written! This series is a useful compendium of short stories that would to hard to find otherwise, since few could afford to buy all of the books or magazines in which they first appeared (indeed, one of them, "Rosehip Summer" by Roz Southey, first appeared on the website of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne!) and as such, it is recommended for those who like their mystery stories served with a bit of British flavour.

There’s an image I get when people say pulp fiction (not the movie). It’s tough talking private dicks. It’s dark streets filled with potential danger. It’s tall, leggy blondes who pull gats out of their purses. There’s a tautness of language that allows you to picture exactly where the action takes places, down to the dry, desert wind or the dirty streets with danger in every doorway. As one website states, it’s “…the one-two punch of dialogue and the action…”

The two Otto Penzler Black Lizard Big Book anthologies of pulp mysteries take the best stories of the 1920s through 1950s and jam them into two 1,100 double columned paged books. These are the crème de la crème of pulp writing with top of the line authors such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Earle Stanley Gardner, Carroll John Daly and James M. Cain.

The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction, originally compiled in 1996 and recently revised and reissued contains 33 stories ranging from 1929 to 1987, with most of them written in the 1950s. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain stories from top of the line pulp authors. As a result, the stories, though most of them are interesting and fun reading, don’t have that certain something that defines it as pulp fiction. They don’t have that darkness, the grittiness of, what in my mind, is a true pulp story. Jakubowsky should really have just called the book a collection of mystery stories but that, ovbiously, doesn’t have the same impact as saying pulp mystery.

Other things lacking in the book: there are no author bios so that you can get a feeling for the lives of the authors. Many of them had quite interesting lives. (These are included in the Penzler anthologies.) Additionally, there seems to be no rational order to the stories. Not alphabetical by title or author. Not chronological by date of issue. It seems totally random which makes it difficult to see how pulp fiction might have changed over the decades.

Because I was under a review deadline, I put together an Excel spreadsheet and ordered the stories chronologically and then read one from the beginning, one from the middle and one from the end of my list, so that if I couldn’t finish reading before deadline, I’d have a sampling from each time period. To be quite honest, I’m not sure if that made a difference.

I guess, like Jakubowsky, you could make the claim that pulp mysteries never left. They’ve always been around and have changed with the times. And that may be so. If that is the case, though, based on the stories in the New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction they’ve softened over the years. There’s nothing in the language to distinguish them. It’s not hard-driving. It’s not period driven. It’s bland. There is no “…one-two punch of dialogue and … action…”

So, if you’re looking for an anthology of good mystery stories, then I’d certainly give the New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction a try. If you’re looking for great pulp mysteries, check out Otto Penzler’s anthologies.½

So far, Venice Noir is one of my very favorite of the Akashic Noir series. First, I should say that the stories in these books don’t have to be strictly noir for me to enjoy an installment in the series. Instead, I look for captivating stories that remain with me after I’ve finished the book. Venice Noir delivered that for me in spades.

There are a number of very captivating, sometimes creepy stories, which you can’t help but turn over and over in your mind long after the reading is done. Maria Tronca's Tourists for Supper is my favorite, but by no means the only one I enjoyed.

The setting in each of the stories was strongly evocative of Venice and made me feel, in almost every case, as though I was seeing everything being described. I was impressed with the fact that almost all of the authors who were represented in this book were able to make me feel that sense of place.

Of all the books I’ve read in this series, this one felt strongest to me in terms of setting, and that enhanced all of the stories as well as the overall experience. This one I will probably re-read.

What a strangely uneven collection for what is essentially a year's best. Only one story here, Phil Lovesey's "Homework", was even shortlisted for the British Crime Writers Association's Dagger award (it actually won, and is one of the better stories in the book). Perhaps 2009 was not a particularly good year for British crime fiction or, more likely, my taste is quite different from Mr. Jakubowski's.

Few of the stories are of the more traditional "sleuth discovers a crime and finds the perpetrator". Indeed, they are the very much in the minority. It seemed, though I haven't actually counted, that most of the stories were actually about criminals committing a crime. Several others were about the victim of a crime reacting to what has happened. The vast majority also seemed to be trying to be "literary" rather than embracing the genre. Many also included a twist, but alas it was almost always the exact same twist: narrator/protagonist is the criminal. A few stories are also little more than vignettes or even single scenes that do little to satisfy the reader.

Still, with one exception, the first few stories aren't bad and the last 10 or so are well worth reading. Unfortunately, there is a lot of chaff among the wheat.½