Ten stories of murder and suspense from one of the all-time masters of pulp fiction
An addled ex-boxer named Tiny Tim ambles out of the shadows and complains to a beat cop that he is being followed. The officer laughs him off; everyone knows that Tiny Tim has heard footsteps behind him for years. But a few minutes later, Tim is spotted in a pool of blood, dead at the bottom of the subway steps. After years of running, the imagined footsteps have caught up to him at last.
This brisk tale of deception and murder is but one of the stories in this collection from Hugh B. Cave, a master of pulp fiction whose career spanned seventy-five years. Along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Cave was one of the defining authors ofBlack Maskmagazine, and these stories are perfect examples of what set that pulp apart. Hard-boiled, fast-paced, and witty, the tales ofLong Live the Deadare just as captivating now as they were on the newsstand many decades ago.
From Booklist
When crime fiction aficionados refer to "pulp fiction," the publication they usually have in mind is Black Mask, which was a regular home to Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Among the other Black Mask regulars was Hugh Cave, who made his first appearance in the magazine in 1934. Amazingly, he's still going strong at 90 after 37 books. The 10 stories collected here were all published in Black Mask between 1934 and 1941. Among the highlights are "Too Many Women," in which an unscrupulous photographer and a waterfront corpse spell trouble, and "The Missing Mr. Lee," a Rashomon-like tale in which a half dozen characters offer their unique versions of the truth. In the title story, a retired, reclusive magician is framed for murder and must use all his Houdini-like skills to avoid becoming the next victim. These are uniformly entertaining tales that take readers back to a time when dames, runts, thugs, and hard cases ruled the print world. Wes Lukowsky
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