Black Mask 5: The Ring on the Hand of Death

And Other Crime Fiction from the Legendary Magazine

By: Otto Penzler

Narrated by: Erik Bergmann, Johnny Heller, Dan Bittner

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in the magazine helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine”.

( Booklist).

Otto Penzler selected and wrote introductions to the best of the best, the darkest of these dark, vintage stories for the collection The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories. Now that collection is available for the first time on audio.

Includes:

• “Knights of the Open Palm” by Carroll John Daly; read by Erik Bergmann
• the “Rainbow Diamonds” series of stories (“Diamonds of Dread,” “The Man in White,” “The Blind Chinese,” “Red Dawn,” “Blue Glass,” and “Diamonds of Death”) by Ramon Decolta; read by Johnny Heller
• “The Ring on the Hand of Death” by William Rollins Jr.; read by Dan Bittner

©2010 Compilation by Otto Penzler (P)2012 HighBridge Company

On the Edge of My Proverbial Seat

The centerpiece of this collection is a really fine six-chapter novella that revolves around a diamond theft in Manilla and a quiet, patient private investigator. This is bracketed by two other stories; the first a salutary reminder that Catholics were just as much a target of the Klan as any other group. The last, a tale that lends its name to the title of this recording, is narrated by a teenager who thinks of his 8,000-strong burg as a “big city” and presents a gripping situation that had this listener on the edge of my proverbial seat.

All around, a very satisfying excursion into the pulp world of a century ago, when a writer could make a living writing short fiction for a plethora of magazines catering to every taste, from rose-tinted romance to hard-bitten crime. All readers do an excellent job.

Note: I'm learning that the contents of these collections have nothing to do with the melodramatic illustrations that adorn them.

The Island Detective books make it worth the listen.

Yhe Island Detective stories were good, a bit fantastical, but that is to be expected.

I could have done without the communist's story, I was absolutely not interested in his perverse line of thinking and the narrator for that story was atrocious, but it's probably hard to get a good narrator to read that garbage.