Dime Detective was the only monthly magazine that ever offered any serious competition to the much-lauded Black Mask, where the hardboiled detective story was born. This volume reprints twenty-three selections from the pages of Dime Detective (one for each year of the periodical's existence), which succeeded in luring some of its rival's most popular authors by offering them a heftier paycheck.

Like any anthology, this is a mixed bag of the high (Raymond Chandler's "The Lady in the Lake") and the low ("The Crime Machine" by Carroll John Daly). Sandwiched in between are the most enjoyable stories: violent, fast-paced tales by workmanlike authors who were never in the running for any literary awards, but knew what their readers wanted and delivered it. Sometimes the screwball humor works incredibly well, as in "Something for the Sweeper" by Norbert Davis (one of my favorite hardboiled writers of the 1930s and '40s); on other occasions it almost collapses beneath its own merrily convoluted weight, as in Merle Constiner's "Strangler's Kill". Even when things get out of control, however, these stories are fitfully entertaining. A couple of them, like C.M. Kornbluth's "A Ghoul and His Money," aren't even strictly hardboiled, but that's okay: a little variety never hurts.

If your appetite has been whetted by The Hardboiled Dicks (Goulart, ed.) and Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Pronzini & Adrian, eds.), this is the next book you should buy. Three and a half stars. ( )

Where else can you read this kind of great description but in pulp mysteries? “I was sitting at my desk, wondering about the office rent, when the door opened and in walked in the most beautiful assemblage of female parts that ever shrugged into a mink coat. She had hair the color of burnished copper and dead white skin and her eyes were as green and as hard as emeralds.” They just don’t write them like that anymore.

Hard Boiled Detectives: 23 Great Stories from Dime Detective Magazine is another wonderful anthology of pulp mysteries by the masters: Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and more. These stories range from the 1930s to the 1950s. I personally can’t get enough of this stuff.

So, if you’re looking to expand your mystery horizons and you don’t want to tackle Otto Penzler’s 1,100 page anthologies The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, then this is a good staring point. ( )