One of the finest collections of stories from the pulp private eye's heyday (it's up there with Ron Goulart's slightly more specialized The Hardboiled Dicks), The Hard-Boiled Detective serves as an excellent overview of the subgenre. Herbert Ruhm's introduction is informative without being long-winded, and for the most part his selections represent the cream of the Black Mask crop: from Dashiell Hammett ("The Gutting of Couffignal," among Hammett's most action-packed Continental Op stories) to Raymond Chandler ("Goldfish," featuring the Philip Marlowe-like Carmady and one of those melancholy, reflective endings that Chandler did so well), from Erle Stanley Gardner ("Leg Man," featuring a PI named Wennick who is decidedly unlike Perry Mason) to George Harmon Coxe ("Once Around the Clock," a rough-and-tumble showcase for Coxe's newspaper photog character Flash Casey). If you're introducing a friend--or yourself--to the world of vintage hard-boiled fiction, you can't do better than this book.

Four and a half stars. ( )

More Black Mask stories. Yay! ( )