It must be a bitter inconvenience for self-regarding literary sorts that the pulp novels they scoff at make for the best of American cinema (The Maltese Falcon, say, or, better, The Long Goodbye). The practice of putting down the crime-fiction genre is so rampant, the term "guilty pleasure" still prevails. Enough. All you posturing couch-critics leering begrudgingly at your unread copy of The Gulag Archipelago, go grab The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (Vintage, available now), a hugely ambitious and successful collection of crime fiction, and settle in for a cram session in chicks, dicks, and pistol whips.

When immersed in pulp crime fiction, it's hard to deny its charm. The gumshoe-ery, from-the-hip dialogue, and starkly lighted drama makes for anytime reading. Sure, it's a given that the wildly popular pulp magazines (from which most of this collection is drawn) of the '20s, '30s, and '40s often delivered drivel—the demand and rate of publishing guaranteed it. But The Big Book of Pulps, in the incredibly able hands of editor Otto Penzler, contains everything any one reader could ever ask of pulp.

Broken up, refreshingly, in character chapters rather than by authors—"The Crimefighters," "The Villains," "The Dames"—this beastly collection is chock full of the tight fiction now associated with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett (a previously unpublished nugget, no less), and Carroll John Daly, as well as the rich imagery that accompanied their stories. But don't be surprised when other long-buried writers time-share in their boozy back alleys. You'll be surprised by how many ways half-in-the-bag PIs, expensively dressed blondes, and seedy louts can be recast.