Pulp Masters — Edward Gorman / Ed Gorman

Six masters of pulp fiction at its most powerful and suspenseful best -- John MacDonald, James M. Cain, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Mickey Spillane, and Harrington Whittington -- distinguish this new anthology compiled by the award-winning editors of its two popular predecessors, American Pulp and Pure Pulp. Like them, Pulp Masters culls its tales -- in this case, six classic novelettes and one complete novel -- from the golden age of magazine fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. The writers included in this volume in time emerged as giants in the field of crime fiction, and the stories in this volume demonstrate why. Their voices fresh, their talents raw and original, with novelettes like "Ordo," "Stag Party Kill," "The Embezzler," and "Everybody's Watching Me," Westlake, Block, Cain, and Spillane both heralded and shaped the crime story as we know it today. So did "the King of the Paperback Original" -- Harrington Whittington -- represented here by the novel based on his pulp short story "So Dead, My Love."