Customer Reviews

The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action (Mammoth Books)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There are some good stories in this collection but I would recommend reading "The Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction" first. Once you have read those stories, come back to this collection. It's not as good as the other collection, but it'll help "fill the corners" in your appetite for pulp.

For those addicted to Pulp, this anthology rocks. Great Detective fiction mysteries and action. Loaded with Pulp. Gives you your quick fix. Good Read

A hit-and-miss affair with enough hits to make the whole thing worth while. The more dated and preposterous the language the better. There's much fun to be had with dialogue that unconsciously summons the voices of Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. While the audience for this kind of anthology is interested purely in the real pulp fiction of the 1930s and 40s, the collection is sprinkled with a few more modern pieces. While many of them are perfectly serviceable stories, it's a mystery as to why they're included. When the reader simply wants to experience the best that 'Black Mask' and 'Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine' had to offer, it seems odd to include such unwanted intrusions on the reader's nostalgia.

Many reviewers here take issue with the inclusion of 'The Gangsta Wore Red', a novella by Michael Guinzburg, scion of the multi-million dollar Viking Publishing Guinzburgs. Though not for the feint of heart, his writing is unquestionably in the pulp fiction style, albeit by way of 1970's style exploitation. If Golden Era writers could have gotten away with such liberties they would have done. Though his work is not as well known in America as it is in France and Britain, Guinzburg's an excellent writer. While there may be certain ethical questions about the very fact of a privileged white man writing a first-person narrative about being a poor, African-American criminal, the fact remains that the novella is very good and Guinzburg's writing far superior to that of the genuine pulp authors that bookend his work here.

Not a bad collection, but you miss the smell of cheap ink on yellowing paper.

This is a better-than-average selection of stories that greatly suffers from a horribly misplaced and needlessly violent modern selection with the word "Gangsta" in its title. Ignore that one story and it reads like a group of usually pretty good stories, something like a cluster of the best stories one could collect from six issues of Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines.

The "Gangsta" obscenity is bad enough to reduce my rating for this book by one star.

Dead in the middle of a decent collection of stories is an excessively long, vulgar,racist....even if protagonist is a black and by today's PC "standards", blacks cannot be racist/bigoted...violent and misanthropic story. Ruins the rest of the book.