Hard Boiled : An Anthology Of American Crime Stories - ed. Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian

Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini, is a solid selection of American hard-boiled stories, accompanied by a good and informative introduction in which Pronzini emphasizes the specifically American spirit of the genre—individualism, lone wolves, mavericks, gunmen, and small-time criminals drifting through urban landscapes.

Like any large anthology, the book is uneven, but it offers enough quality stories to justify the reading. Among the highlights are works by Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, and Norbert Davis, who capture the essence of the hard-boiled style through fast pacing and sharp dialogue.

Particularly notable are “Mistral,” “Trouble Chaser,” and “Who Said I Was Dead?”, while “Black Pudding” by David Goodis brings a characteristic sense of melancholy and doom. “So Pale, So Cold, So Fair” by Leigh Brackett and “A Piece of Ground” by Helen Nielsen further broaden the range, showing how the genre can function beyond its hardest edges.

However, as the anthology moves toward more recent authors, a certain decline in quality becomes noticeable—these stories feel less focused and lack the raw energy and clarity of early hard-boiled writing.

One minor disappointment is the presentation itself: small print, plain formatting and lack of illustrations make the anthology feel somewhat sterile. Hard-boiled fiction thrives on atmosphere, and one is reminded of McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Compared to beautifully designed noir editions such as Centipede Press’s Woolrich collections, this volume often feels more archival than immersive.

Bloody Murder -From The Detective Story To The Crime Novel - Julian Symons

Bloody Murder is a useful reference book, but Julian Symons often comes across as rambling, jumping from one topic to another. What stands out most is his clear preference for puzzle novels and the classic British tradition, while writers such as Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis are largely dismissed or marginalized, and Lionel White is not even mentioned. Despite these flaws, Bloody Murder remains a useful book for more advanced students of crime fiction.

Cornell Woolrich - Speak To Me Of Death

Another writer known for his short stories aside from novels is Cornell Woolrich, a reclusive and somewhat elusive figure whose paranoid fiction helped shape the noir tradition as we know it today.

There are many collections of Cornell Woolrich’s stories, as he was a prolific writer, but I chose this particular volume from Centipede Press — a high-quality edition with striking illustrations by Mat Mahurin and an insightful introduction by Thomas C. Renzi, author of Cornell Woolrich: From Pulp Noir to Film Noir. The book contains fifteen stories, the most famous of which is Rear Window, famously adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

The introduction provides a useful entry point into Woolrich’s world, characterising his stories as “momentum narratives,” where a single mistake sets off an irreversible chain of events leading to ruin. It also highlights key aspects of his prose: a fatalistic sense of destiny from which the protagonist cannot escape, the instability of perception, and the use of ironic, double-reversal twists in the tradition of O. Henry.

Two of the stories in this collection I had already encountered in various anthologies — Dusk to Dawn and Wardrobe Trunk. Among the remaining pieces, several stand out. Rear Window is of course the most famous, later adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into a classic film. Marihuana is a striking story about a man who becomes psychologically unhinged under the influence of the drug, culminating in a strong twist ending. Post Mortem is another effective piece, while The Death of Me is an excellent identity-switch narrative in which a killer assumes the identity of a dead man.

The Night Reveals is a solid entry, and Three O’Clock is particularly strong — a tightly constructed story of a man planning to murder his wife, only to fall into a trap of his own making. Finger of Doom and The Corpse Next Door are more modest, but still engaging. The strongest story in the collection, however, is Speak to Me of Death: a hallucinatory nightmare that was later reworked into the novel Night Has a Thousand Eyes and adapted into a notable noir film.

What stands out across these stories is a distinctly pulpy style — less concerned with the detailed character work found in writers like Stanley Ellin, and more focused on momentum, situation, and suspense. Yet despite that relative lack of psychological depth, the stories remain highly engaging, tightly constructed, and often genuinely thrilling.

Overall, this is an excellent collection — though perhaps not one to be read late at night.

Stanley Ellin - The Specialty Of The House

Crime fiction is generally better suited to the novel than to the short story, which is why it’s always refreshing to come across those rare writers who built their reputation primarily on short fiction. That is certainly the case with Stanley Ellin and his collection The Specialty of the House.

I had already encountered some of his work in various anthologies — You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life, The Nine to Five Man, and The Question. The stories collected here are often quite strange. For example, The Orderly World of Mr. Appleby follows a man obsessed with his antique shop, while Broker’s Special is another standout, along with The Blessington Method, Day of the Bullet, and several others.

As H. R. F. Keating noted, Ellin’s stories are “enormously varied in plot and setting, linked first by clarity of style, and second by a fascinatingly bizarre view of the world and its people.”

But while these stories are generally well written, they seem to lack the kind of passion and obsession that reveal the writer’s soul.

The Crime Masterworks edition is well produced in hardcover, with an attractive dust jacket and an introduction written by Ellin himself.